"Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels"

Vocations can destroy the lives of those who have them. The cliché is "many are called but few are chosen" and the cliché - like most clichés - is true.

They destroy lives because they only rarely lead to wealth, success, and hence status.

They destroy men's lives far more thoroughly than they destroy women's. In modern society women can be a mother or a career woman or even both, they can seek career success and they can seek marriage and motherhood. For a woman there is no shame in being a mother and a mother alone, she will not be judged a failure in life by others even if she feels herself unfulfilled in the wider society of work. Men still find it easier to have successful careers, but a man must have some success and status  if he is to win a woman and have a family. For most men fulfilment and acceptance is founded on having the status enough to win a woman.

For a heterosexual man the important thing is status, not because he wants it - most men couldn't care less about the status of their male friends as long as they can have a laugh, talk about the match, have a kick-about, neck some beers with them, share a bit of advice or experience - but because women want men with status.

Women's hunger for dominant high-status men is so powerful that female sexual perversions are usually tied up with  it. Just as some men  are so charged with a need for feminine smallness, fine clear skin and powerlessness that they are attracted to children, some women are so attracted to dominance and status (in the form of notoriety at least) that they strike up relationships with men in jail who have murdered women, and even marry them. Watch the True Crime section at your local bookshop and see who buys the books about serial killers. Hint: it's not usually men.

Women are not generally passionate creatures - they love, but they don't often fall in love.  Every man I've known has fallen in love, but I can think of only three women I have met who have fallen in love. This isn't to say that women don't love and desire the men they are with, just that the passionate obsessional burning drive seems not to be there - that it comes later, from getting to know the man, to becoming companionate with him. And that motivation to be companionate emerges from a woman's choosing of a man who can provide for her, even if she is wealthy enough to provide for herself. An she will knowingly ignore huge incompatibilities and unhappiness to keep the sense of security that his status brings.

Men in the end are nicer than women - they are attracted to appearance, admittedly, but they are also attracted to loving, caring women, not women who are necessarily rich or powerful. Most men are attracted to the qualities of the woman as a person, not just to her ability to dominate and overcome others, not to the sort of moral vacuum whose one basic motivation is to be King of the Castle and hoard all the goodies and - if possible - all the women.

As the generation of children is dependent on the winning of women, in most societies where such careers exist, most families want their sons to have high status careers as doctors and allied medical professionals, as lawyers and similar. These careers don't lead to the greatest wealth, but they ensure that those who pursue them have the highest and most assured median income of any professional group, and they come with automatic status and respect.

Outside of being a surgeon these jobs don't need talent, they reward moderately intelligent mediocrities who are prepared to put in the study, and so are open to anyone with the good sense or good luck to know they are available.

In  the West  we delude ourselves about the importance of self-expression and self-fulfilment. This importance is illusory - fulfilment comes from family, from love, from work well done. Self-expression is best done in the interstices of a normal life - making it the whole of the point of a life usually destroys that life, and is a nonsense left over from the disastrous Romantic revolution of the late 18th Century.

To some this knowledge comes as a given, instilled by their families, but my family were the lowest of the low, from the biggest and worst slum  in Europe as Engels once called it., and they were unlikely to know the way out for themselves or me.

Nevertheless I had realised this by the age of 30 and did nothing about it. Or more precisely, I was paralysed because I knew what I must do, but not how to do it.

I have spent the subsequent twenty years in a bewilderment of anxiety and dread.

Now it's too late.

And all the women I know turn to men with the highest status they can find, even if on this council estate he's only a kitchen fitter or a dealer.

I have no status having been unable to parley cleverness into success, and will die as I have always lived.

Isolated without woman's touch and woman's love, and alone.