Won’t Someone Think of the Men? We already know women hate dating them. Turns out they’re miserable too.
By E.J. Dickson, senior writer at The Cut covering culture.
“Are straight men okay?” This is the question raised in stories from the likes of The Wall Street Journaland the New York Times (and, yes, this very magazine) about how dissatisfied women are with dating right now. They want to settle down, but they just can’t find a suitable partner. In a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine, Jean Garnett writes about heterofatalism, the resigned, exhausted attitude straight women have adopted in response to what she describes as an “irreproachable male helplessness.” “I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want,” she writes. Men, these stories seem to suggest, are either red-pilled psychopaths or hapless oafs who are so emotionally unintelligent they can’t schedule a date without having an anxiety attack.
One voice, however, has been noticeably absent from the conversation: men’s. What do they have to say for themselves? To find out, I surveyed more than 100 single men age 20 and older about what dating is like for them — their thoughts on marriage, dating apps, and the “male loneliness epidemic.” I hoped to find an explanation for why their behavior is so disappointing. Is it the manosphere influencers? Is it porn? Is it the apps?
For starters, yes to the last: These guys think swiping culture bears some of the blame. Most use Hinge (64 percent) with a quarter saying they use dating apps daily. They’re deluged by what one 31-year-old Virginia man called a “perceived abundance of options.” They largely know this “illusion of choice,” as one 31-year-old Park Slope man put it, is just that. But they nonetheless ended up rejecting women for all kinds of petty and absurd reasons: because she was a picky eater, she was too into Burning Man, she didn’t like the book Nickel and Dimed, she deleted his ex’s profile from his Nintendo Switch. “Deleting it was my catharsis to have,” this 36-year-old Brooklyn man said. “If she had just asked me to do it, I would have, but it was upsetting to have that taken away from me.” One 30-year-old Fort Greene man said he got the ick on a first date because a woman sounded too much like podcaster and comedian Cat Cohen. (How, exactly, were they breaking things off? Sixty percent said they typically break up with people IRL, and 21 percent do it over text; 50 percent have ghosted someone, though many said they later regretted it.)
