I actually thought the article was dumb as hell. It's full of post-25 self hatred and machismo that generally annoys me on the internet.
So, what do you bring to the table? Because the Zooey Deschanel lookalike in the bookstore that you've been daydreaming about moisturizes her face for an hour every night and feels guilty when she eats anything other than salad for lunch. She's going to be a surgeon in 10 years. What do you do?
She could also be working that bookstore in ten years. This article borders on the danger of still thinking girls are special and what do you have to offer them in order to win their specialness. That's not the best approach. Realize that the 22 year old bookstore girl is as aimless and clueless as the 22 year old gamestop employee. She may have dreams of being a surgeon just as the average male has dreams of becoming something spectacular, but the world doesn't make space for everyone to be spectacular or everyone to be surgeons. He may be nowhere in ten years and she may be nowhere in ten years. The only difference is that females can still fall back on being a homemaker.
Most people split down two paths: They follow their ideals and suffer from the fact that the world would rather they not follow their ideals and instead produce something they can profit off of now, or they forego ideals and aim for financial success and hope that things like ideals won't matter or can be replaced with the recreational resources money will give them. Around 30+ and into their 40s ,they start to either miss the financial security they wish they had or miss the self-assured identity they assume pursuing their idealistic interests would have given them. Some succeed on ideals, but its rare. Most tend to gravitate in the middle of their life towards whatever they gave up earlier in life to try to repair any damage they're currently dealing with. And their romantic partners won't always stay with them through either of these struggles for they aren't at that part in their maturing or their own maturing forces them down a similar but separate path.
But that's later on in life. "Girls want to know what you have to offer the world." Is just a somewhat more aged answer to the question "What do girls want?"that normally ends in "money and power". The problem is that girls, just like the dudes, mostly don't know what they want in their 20s. Finding out who you are is often a longer process than traditional marrying age allows for, so we have shoved in generalized questions and generalized answers to make it seem like we aren't all flying blind for half our lives. This article is just more of that same old shit.
