When I read Laura Nolan’s article about men in this paper I thought: how dare she! I felt stung and insulted. Nolan, a woman in her thirties, was writing about what she perceived as a man shortage. She said that women in their thirties were having trouble finding men, because thirtysomething men are so noncommittal.

She didn’t just call them noncommittal. Men in their thirties, she wrote, are selfish, mixed-up navel-gazers. They are not real men – they are “man-boys”. Males, she told us, “are like eggs. They must hatch or go bad”. Oh dear, I thought. This is dreadful stuff. How can you blame men for doing what they are genetically programmed to do? I would never go around blaming women for following their specific biological imperatives.

Men are different from women. That’s how we’ve evolved. We think differently. We have different drives. This is the result of tens of thousands of years of sexual selection. And this, in turn, benefits the species as a whole. It’s not there to make life better for individuals, whether they are men or women.

For a while, I continued in this vein. Nolan had pointed out that there appears to be a conflict of interest between single men and women in their thirties. Men, she says, just want to have fun. Women want to settle down. Men want no-strings sex. Women, listening to their ticking body clocks, want much more than sex.

This is true, I thought. I can’t argue with it. But has Nolan not considered that the relationship between men and women is unbalanced at every stage of life. Does she not realise that the balance of power is pretty much always skewed? Conflict between men and women is not a strange thing that rears its head when you turn 30. It’s the norm. And sometimes the conflict favours women.

Just ask any man to remember what it was like being a teenager. Let’s imagine a 17-year-old guy. Let’s say he’s reasonably attractive. And let’s say he has a crush on an attractive girl in his class. Most men I know can remember being in this position. And what happened? The girl didn’t even notice him. That’s because she had a huge range of guys to choose from, all vying for her attention. Not only the coolest 17-year-olds but some of the coolest 18, 19, and 20-year-olds, too. And guys in their early twenties, with cars and motorbikes, and money to buy tickets for concerts and festivals.

This situation persists for years. Until they’re in their mid-twenties, at the very least, women have a far larger pool of mates to choose from than men. Who dates the attractive 23-year-old woman as she settles into her first job? The 35-year-old who runs the company, that’s who. Not the 23-year-old guy who met her at the interview and blushes every time she passes him in the corridor. Of course not – she probably doesn’t even know the poor guy’s name. He’s just the office boy.

Isn’t there a tremendous irony here? Women in their thirties feel aggrieved that men in their thirties won’t commit to them. But aren’t these thirtysomething women the very same people who snagged the slightly older men ten years before? Not all of them, of course. But I wonder: did Laura Nolan ever go out with an older man when she was in her early twenties?

I was fuming. How can people blame men for acting like men? Nobody knocks younger women for snagging older men. Because that’s part of the reason for the man shortage. And there must be lots of teenage and twentysomething men who think that there’s a woman shortage. But you never hear them complain, do you?

I sat down and did a bit of cold, Darwinian reasoning. I thought of the primal conflict between men and women, as it has played out across the centuries. Men and women, I remembered, are both driven, by their genes, to pass on their personal characteristics down the generations.

But there is a fundamental problem. Men can achieve this most efficiently by spreading their seed far and wide. They are, at least partly, driven by promiscuous urges. Women, in contrast, can become pregnant usually only once a year. And pregnancy is a huge investment. So they must be picky and selective. In ancestral times, women needed to be very careful about who they had sex with.

In the words of Professor David Buss, of the University of Texas, possibly the highest authority on human evolutionary biology we have: “Because women in our evolutionary past risked enormous investment as a consequence of having sex, evolution favoured women who were highly selective about their mates.” So there we are, then. Young men grow up knowing one clear fact about women – that they are highly selective when it comes to sex. This is not only hard-wired into the male brain, but culturally reinforced at every turn. Women are more cautious than men when it comes to sex, and for very good reason. In evolutionary terms, they have something to lose, and men have nothing to lose. In ancestral times, fertile women guarded their chastity. They were picky. They could afford to be, because they had something men wanted.

And there’s more. If you take all of human history, the vast majority of guys have got nowhere at all with women? For most guys that have lived, ever, their sexual experience has been pretty much zilch.

Until a few thousand years ago, only a tiny proportion of the male population – the bosses and the bullies – sired virtually all the children. Most guys went through the whole of their lives without getting a single shag.

And now something has happened to change things in a fundamental way. In some parts of the Western world, the age at which humans mate has increased. In urban areas, such as London and New York, many women are still single into their thirties – in other words, they are more like Carrie from Sex and the City than Jane Austen’s heroines, who were in their very early twenties.

And this makes a huge difference. Here is a population of ordinary guys – the guys who were nothing special, the dorks who were passed over in favour of the cool, attractive guys when they were younger. And now, possibly for the first time in history, they find themselves in an unreal bubble. Women are no longer being cautious and picky – they are competing for their attentions. This is a genuine turning point in the history of gender relations. For the first time ever, geeks and bozos have pulling power. Can you blame them, after thousands of years of competing for female attention, for letting it go to their heads?

And then I thought: hang on a minute. I was one of those geeks. As I got older and less physically attractive, I found it easier and easier to talk to women. This was weird. Was it not supposed to happen the other way around? I was overweight. I had a drink problem. But women, who had seemed elusive in my teens and early twenties, were always there for me, even if I wasn’t always there for them. For years, I did not commit. Even worse than that – for years, I half-committed, in one relationship after another. I wasted years of people’s time.

But was it all light-hearted fun? Of course, some of it was. But it’s not as much fun as you’d think. It’s never good being in dysfunctional relationships. After a while, you begin to be consumed by guilt.

Sometimes you go along for the ride. Sometimes you bail out. But you’re always haunted. There is always trouble, always stress. You are never far away from overturned tables and smashed crockery. I was threatened with a knife.

On another occasion, my entire wardrobe was drenched in tomato sauce. By the end, sometimes I felt that I’d been having the same relentless argument for more than a decade.

So I guess I don’t blame you for feeling bad, Laura. Men and women, particularly single men and women as they approach middle age, have a dysfunctional relationship. But it’s nobody’s fault. It’s a demographic quirk. It’s that we’re living longer. It’s the economy. It’s our genes. It’s all of these things. Just don’t blame men.