Beta Male Read Online Free PDF

engaged and married within a year. My money was on Alan.
    â€˜What about you?’ I asked. ‘When are you going to vanish, never to be seen again?’
    Claire laughed. She looked pretty when she laughed – her round face flushing slightly, her dark blonde, now sensibly-styled hair bobbing around as she threw her head back. I still didn’t fancy her, though.
    â€˜I’m a young career woman, Sam,’ she replied. ‘Why would I want to settle down now?’
    â€˜Because you’re twenty-seven,’ I said, pouring her another glass of wine. ‘Therefore you’re a rapidly declining asset who should cash in now before gravity takes its toll, no one fancies you any more and you’re too old and barren to have any children.’
    An elderly couple at the neighbouring table looked a little shocked and motioned to the waiter to bring their bill. They didn’t know that it would take far more than this to upset Claire. She leaned closer and whispered, loudly, so that most of the restaurant had no choice but to listen: ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Sam. As a modern woman of twenty-seven, I’ll be in the prime of my life for at least the next five years. I can go out with younger, more virile men or I can enjoy being the plaything of a rich, bald and charming sugar-daddy in his fifties. Or I can simply choose to be single. Either way, I have at least another half-decade of living selfishly, dangerously, and doing exactly what I please. Only later, much later, will I start thinking about finding a suitable lifelong partner – someone kind who’s good father material; a nice beta male who won’t stray, after all the wild but unsuitable alpha types I’ve been having my fun with – and we’ll settle down and live happily ever after.’
    I patted her patronisingly on the hand. ‘Well done, my dear. Well done. You are in the vanguard of the new wave of feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir would be proud of you. Right now they’re eating chocolate in heaventogether, watching
Sex and the City
and quietly high-fiving each other’s podgy palms. You should indeed have your cake and eat it.’ I pulled her pudding towards me and took a bite. ‘Although not too much, or the rich, bald and charming sugar daddies might trade you in for a younger, slimmer model.’
    Claire pulled her pudding back. There was a brief tug-of-war, which she won. ‘You can be as patronising as you like,’ she said. ‘But if I were you, I’d worry about yourself, not me.’
    I looked at her quizzically. I rarely worried about myself for long.
    â€˜Yes,’ she continued, ‘I suppose you can be charming when you make an effort. And I admit I’ve sat opposite uglier people at the dinner table. You’ve worked your way through most of my friends, the less discreet of whom report back favourably. And I have no doubt that, on the rare occasions you are involved in a play, you have a decent chance with whichever gullible, insecure actress has just left drama school and is filling the “fit girl” slot in the cast. But what do you really have to offer any of these people long-term? You’re not a nubile twenty-one-year-old any more. You’re almost thirty. And even if you do age well, as men tend to, you won’t have that gravitas which is the main attraction of powerful, older men. You will just be a nice-looking fiftysomething with a not very good job who was once an attractive but fairly unmemorable actor. Someone
with
potential is very attractive. Someone who wasted it, well… ’ She shook her head, mock-sadly. ‘Not so much.’ She leant forward and took her opportunity to return the patronising hand-pat. ‘My dear Sam, you fall between two stools: the wild and the dependable. You are stuck in the middle. You’re going nowhere faster than you realise. And my advice to you is to