How can I date men if I hate men?
On losing hope in the dating pool.
Shout out to Blythe Roberson’s How To Date Men If You Hate Men for this subject line—but also seriously: how? Today’s newsletter tackles a question that keeps coming up on Diem.
But first, here’s what else people are talking about on Diem:
I got a marriage proposal… and I don’t know how to feel about it.
My high school bully is now a famous influencer: what do I do?
Dating questions come up a lot on Diem. It’s one of those things that, despite thousands of years of doing it, humans may never figure out. But the questions we’ve seen recently have a similar theme: Heterosexual women wondering how they can get themselves excited to date when their experiences with men have been bad. In other words, they’re asking: How can I date men when I hate men?
A recent question cited the killing of 19-year-old Samyia Spain in Brooklyn. She died on March 17 after a 20-year-old man allegedly stabbed her in the chest for rejecting his advances.
“Then I went into a spiral about all of the terrible things the men in my family have done to their partners including my dad,” this Diemer wrote. “I don’t know how I’m expected to just marry one of these men and give them children when we’re being slaughtered like animals for something as small as not giving them my phone number.”
This feels like a follow-up to the question our CEO, Emma Bates, asked back in December: Is dating broken? In her essay, she cited this research:
Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships. He found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who met their expectations.
Expectations as crazy as “won’t attack me if I reject him” and “will do 50% of the household chores,” I imagine.
The problem is, as Emma wrote, women are thinking about this stuff, and men just aren’t:
Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added. One of the most interesting anecdotes from the survey comes in the form of a high school creative writing assignment that Cox read about, where boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise or did so resentfully. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra, and the boys do little or nothing.”
These fears only underline how important it is for women to have each other as support systems. While we can’t fix what centuries of patriarchy have done to men, we can continue what centuries of community have done for women. Have you been dealing with similar feelings? Have you managed to overcome them? Do you just need a place to vent? Let’s chat about it on Diem:
ICYMI
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I am probably out of your target demographic but I can tell you. I wish these conversations were happening when I was in my twenties and thirties.