Once I Get Mine, You're Swine

The exhaustion of dealing with a certain class of late-20s, early-30s female.

I used to work out of a WeWork where I would periodically talk to some other guys who worked there. The guys ranged in background, industry, amount of kids, and ages of kids. One guy, former military who seemed to be mostly interested in just getting laid as much as possible, did not have kids.

When I was up at this WeWork, I was newly-married for the second time, and while a kinda sorta “fertility journey” had begun, it wasn’t a major talking point or life thing, and it wasn’t on Year 4.5 of not working, like it is currently. So I would sometimes talk to these dudes about their kids and their experiences and their lives, but it was all pretty casual. I did learn some interesting things about men trying to plan playdates, though, and feeling uncomfortable to be surrounded by all women.

Long story short, one of the guys up at WeWork had one kid biologically, and got a second kid via IVF. He had both experiences of conceiving a kid “on-timeline” and then struggling with a second kid, and seeing other people get pregnant and have their bouncing bundles of joy while you’re shooting your wife in the ass with hormones. He had seen both sides, so there’s some respect therein from me.

He used to tell me: “For a lot of people, it’s ‘Once I get mine, you’re swine.’” Is that very human being? No. A lot of people are very capable of compassion and empathy, even if they only show it periodically because their lives get busy and they hide behind that instead of being an active part of a community or something. I understand. I’ve been wondering about it all for 25 years at this point, but I mostly get it.

Now let's flash forward a couple of years from my WeWork friend.