"OK, I'm going to meet my boyfriend at sixteen so we can be married by nineteen and then I'll have four kids in the next four years so I can be the world's greatest ballerina by the time I'm twenty-four and then I can start training ponies"
Full grown men aren't much wiser than 10 year old girls.
He was putting it as if it was like trying to insert your head into your... in a desperate hope of reaching some 'real' understanding. And after all those years of trying (it looked like he had been trying), he was left with empty hands. Not zen-style empty hands, just what-i-hoped-to-grasp-i-couldnt empty hands.
Its a feeling you can probably get investigating stuff like physics, math, meaning in linguistics, neuroscience or simply thinking things through as the years go by.
Maybe grand parent was relating to something like this.
People also don't like hearing that they need to get married before the age of 30 if they want to have kids at a younger age, but that doesn't make it untrue.
Hoping to strike it rich before the age of 45 is pretty much the complete opposite.
Women aren't idiots. We think about the tradeoffs.