This is a really fun, interesting question to ponder and reflect on, given my transition from spending most of my twenties and early thirties as a profligate bachelor into a happily married man, now in my late thirties.
In its early stages, bachelorhood is a wonderful, formative experience. You learn what you're made of, and what you want out of life. As long as the life of the bachelor is relatively well appointed: decent job, reasonably articulated ambitions, nice dwelling, positive disposition, and social skills can enable a single man to optimize his experiences with professional life, hobbies, friends and women for quite some time, especially in a major metro like NYC, London, etc. where the social pressure to settle down is generally quite low, while the pressure to build up one's own personal success and experiences is quite high. This leads people in your peer group to prioritize work and social capital opportunities. You can run around town weekend in and weekend out, having adventures, pursuing your own interests, traveling, making new friends / lovers and shedding them as you like. You can pack your free time with internet dates and meet hundreds and hundreds of women. You can blow your whole paycheck on designer jeans, music festival tickets, sunglasses, sushi, and martinis. I did this, and have a lot of friends that have done this, and we all thoroughly enjoyed it, for a time.
I remember being around age 26, fresh out of a top tier business school in NYC, with an ego the size of a Mack truck, dating a girl I kind of liked, and she cajoled me into participating in her family holiday get together upstate as kind of an underhanded relationship check point. I felt really uncomfortable there, both because I didn't really gel with her family, and also because I knew I wasn't ready to get serious. I practically sprinted back to NYC, broke up with her over email, and proceeded to run out to some clubs on a drug fueled bender that lasted a solid 36 hours. The freedom to check out of that relationship with relatively negligible consequences was quite delicious.
Over time, however, one starts to realize that being responsible only to oneself is both a blessing and a curse, in that you are treading the line between healthy self reliance / personal enrichment and dysfunctional narcissism at all times. Especially as you date and experiment with serious romantic relationships, it begins to feel very selfish and hollow to keep starting new relationships and breaking things off, essentially treating love as a transient, disposable commodity. Was she
really not "the one", or are you just a fickle, indecisive, self-absorbed idiot? At a certain point you may end up in some really painful situations involving devastating heartbreak or some form of high drama that permanently ends up in your emotional baggage load. In my late twenties I became entangled with a gorgeous, breathtakingly charming girl who had some kind of Borderline Personality Disorder involving extreme, unpredictable mood swings, delusion and aggression, and I became known amongst my friends as "the guy who keeps dating the crazy chick because the sex must be wild". She liked spontaneous shopping sprees and trips to the Caribbean, and shaving fresh white truffles onto the pizza we shared while sipping champagne. Then there were some bizarre late night arguments, faked suicide attempts, imaginary terminal illness, and later, threats and stalking. That one ended with the help of a lawyer issuing a restraining order against her.
My high risk, high reward startup career hit a rough patch during the Great Recession, and I had to move home with my parents in the suburbs for a protracted period, broke and saddled with student loan debt. I would spend weekends, and increasingly, weeknights, crashing on couches, waking up with mind shattering hangovers, smelling like an ashtray, and sleeping with women who were way outside of my normal standards because my self esteem had plummeted. Good looks and fancy degrees didn't protect me from having to ride the bus into town with drifters and migrant laborers. I started to recognize how selfish I used to be, and I couldn't just prop myself up on career achievements anymore.
Some choice text messages from this era:
"I woke up hanging upside down in a cave next to a hobgoblin."
"That after party was like Jacob's Ladder."
"I looked in the mirror this morning and said 'I hate you'"
"I high-fived a vampire squid last night. He was helping the dj pick out records."
"I felt something inside me snap last night. I think it was my pancreas."
When you hit your late twenties and early thirties, your friends are all settling down at an increasing rate, and very slowly, almost imperceptibly, you start to feel an aura of negativity around your single-dom. Your parents may start giving you a hard time for showing up alone around the holidays, and someone might make some remark about your sexual orientation that really stings. Peoples' decisions to get married are like popcorn kernels in the microwave, some pop the question right away while others take more time. Eventually, you start to feel like one of the last un-popped kernels in the bag. The social consequences become more and more pronounced. You visit a happily married friend you used to party with who has a couple kids running around, and he's beaming with fatherly joy while you're furtively checking your phone to see if that not-so-awesome girl texted you back, and you feel really uncomfortable with yourself. You come to the realization that many of the remaining singles in your peer group stay single not because they choose to, but because a lot of them have serious personal issues. Your self centered pursuit of wealth or social status or whatever it is you used to think you wanted may have driven you to make and maybe lose a fortune, or at least the hopes of achieving one, and you discover that it's mostly meaningless.
You also start feeling your age. More ear hair, a little extra weight around the middle, maybe some male pattern baldness. You're not such a strapping young lad anymore. You're weary from all the weird, awkward dating scenarios you have under your belt, mystified as to why that girl didn't call you back, and your desire to go out and hunt for new relationships begins to dwindle. You've broken hearts, or had your heart broken, and slithered off into the night a few too many times. You're stuck alone in your apartment for a whole winter weekend, then another, then another, organizing and cleaning in a way that you know you're only doing it because you have nothing better to do with your time. You're just a guy sitting alone in a box. You get yourself back out there, but the sexy parties you used to frequent have less beautiful people and more washed up alcoholics, or maybe younger beautiful people looking at you like you're the washed up alcoholic. Maybe you have a health scare or some unexpected surgery, and the only person around you can designate to pick you up after anesthesia is your other miserable, irresponsible lech of a friend who lives down the street, who doesn't show up, and you have to sneak past the nurses and hail a cab yourself, still groggy from the anesthetic. You barely make it home from your minimally invasive surgery, and cry, because you feel like you almost just died alone, even though it was just a minor procedure. You call your mom, and she's worried about you, again. Bachelorhood has really started to suck.
Then, one day, a woman shows up in your life. Doesn't care about your job, or lack thereof, she just likes your smile, and witty conversation. She respects your experiences and character. You like her smile and respect her experiences and character too. She invites you over for a nice home cooked dinner, and you watch a movie, and go to sleep early. She proudly introduces you to all of her friends and family, and you feel honored. You run a marathon together (her idea). During this marathon, you start grinning. You met a woman who makes you a better person, almost in spite of yourself. She is your partner in life, who builds you up way more than she takes. You want to take care of her, and live life based on your relationship, not just your own selfish needs.
You marry her, and never look back.

Someone should please summarize for me biko

Na life as a bachelor plenty like this....B4 I read am finish sef I go don old.....