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What Infiltrating a Boys Weekend Made Me Think About Our Expectations of Millennial Men
Or what happens when they don’t use the “Marriage, Mortgage, Munchkin” life script
They tumble into our apartment as one big, boisterous group. Men in their forties in Porto ostensibly to visit my husband and I, but really for a “boys weekend.”
They’ve left their wives, girlfriends, and children in the UK. For 48 hours, they are free to act like adolescents, as tends to happen when old school friends gather.
Have you ever noticed that?
I join for part of the weekend. These are my friends too, have been for 20+ years. And I watch how six men — all from the same socioeconomic background, all white, all from the same grammar school , all in their early-to-mid forties — have approached the life script they were given.
The script many of us have.
Get a degree and a job. Get married. Buy a house. Have children. Retire. Die.
The “Marriage, Mortgage, Munchkin” life.
20 years into adulthood, and few of them have stuck to that script. There are divorces. Single men. Men without children, by choice or circumstance.
