DEAR DR. NERDLOVE: I’m writing to you from the other side of relationships. I’m a woman most of your clients would call “out of the league”.
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One of the emails from your blog triggered me: a guy was dating a sex worker. She moved back to her home country and had some hardships, while he was only concerned about their relationship status.
I’ve been on a dating market for a while and have to complain: guys don’t see us as real human beings with our personalities, feelings and problems. Their insecurities are blinding and fill the entire space.
Reassuring becomes my second job, without compensation though. While I should need real help or emotional support they are not there.
I speak up openly about my issues (work, family, health, finance). But most of our talks slide down to my male colleagues or my past dating life. I feel myself unseen and unimportant.
How can I be more visible as a real person?
More Than Your Fantasy
DEAR MORE THAN YOUR FANTASY: This is one of those times when the answer is going to depend on whether this is a constant thing or a “this comes up occasionally” kind of problem. It’s one thing if this is a “they’re generally well-meaning and just need a metaphorical poke to make them aware of what they’re doing”. But if it’s really the case that every guy you’ve been dating just treats you like a voice assistant with a therapy plugin, then I’ve got an answer, but I don’t think you’re going to like it:
Date better men. Even if it means being single for a while until you find them.
You know how often I’m saying “the problem you have isn’t the problem you think you have”? Well, I think I’m going to add a corollary to this: “you’re asking the wrong question.” The problem here isn’t about being more visible as a real problem – kind of – it’s that you’re asking about what you need to do to be a “real” person to the people you’re interested in dating and that’s a mistake. You’re functionally asking for instructions in how to change the minds of other people who, for whatever reason, don’t see you as a whole person and not as an extension of their desires or fantasies and don’t seem that interested in changing.
My question for you is: why are you treating this as something that you need to fix? This isn’t a “you” problem; you’re not insufficiently “real”, you’re not at fault here. You’re dealing with people who are too focused on themselves to see you. Why is this your problem to fix? Why do you need to advocate for your validity in their minds? And more to the point: why do you want to date someone whose view of you as a person requires you to break through their self-focus in order to be seen as a person with needs, desires and layers? Is that a level of effort that you’re willing to make as the price of entry for being with that particular person?
We’ll start with pre-empting the inevitable (and unnecessary) #notallmen – a classic “if this doesn’t describe you, then we’re not talking about you and you don’t need to get your special little stamp”. But here’s the thing: you’re not wrong about the number of men who behave like this or who don’t seem to realize that they’re doing this. It’s pretty well documented that women do a lot of what’s called “kinkeeping” and emotional labor in relationships. These imbalances in (straight, cis) relationships are very strongly tilted towards women, and it ties into the various comments people have made about the “man crisis” and “are straight men OK?” It ties into the ways that men, quite frankly, have been disserved by society’s rigid adherence to toxic, restrictive and isolating ideas about masculinity and men’s roles and duties in relationships. As Twitter user DaperDono put it in a famous Twitter thread: “Men now have to get women to like them and they haven’t been likable.” And he’s not wrong.
For a long time, men were encouraged to be emotionally distant, to treat emotions as inconvenient at best and an active hindrance at worst and to see women in their lives as accessories and employees. This was accepted and tolerated in no small part because women literally relied on men for survival. As Dono points out: we’re only two generations away from a time when women legally couldn’t have their own bank accounts without a man signing off on it.
As we move closer to equity and parity among genders and having a male caretaker (father or husband) isn’t a matter of survival for women, there’s still a lot of societal pressure for men to conform to these old, restrictive gender roles, regardless of the harm that it causes them. Worse, there’s really not a lot of resources or education for men from other men in breaking those roles and adapting to new ones. In many ways, the same dynamic has simply shifted; instead of just being unpaid social secretaries, women are also finding themselves dragooned into the role of therapist and emotional educator, while men continue to isolate themselves. And while many men are at least aware that something is off – a malaise that was captured most effectively 25 years ago in f--king Fight Club of all things – they haven’t fully accepted that it’s that the world has changed and they need to change accordingly. It’s the dawning realization that – as Dan Olson put it – the rewards they were promised for being men will never be delivered and certainly not in the form that they’re expecting.
It also needs to be acknowledged that there are also folks who are aware of these changes and have decided that the answer is “to stand athwart the progress of history and say ‘stop’.” J.D Vance, Andrew Tate, Tucker Carlson or the even bigger weirdos like “Bronze Age Pervert” all base their careers on trying to try to force the world to turn backwards to a mythical “golden age” (fantasy versions of the 1950s, 1850s or 450 BCE, depending on which freakazoid happen to be in ascendence at any particular moment) where “men were men and women knew their place.”
This is why I say that you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not, nor should it be, your job to try to find the magic words that will make people you’re dating see you as a holistic individual. It’s not on you to train these men up to being men instead of boys. That’s ultimately just shifting the responsibility and adding one more thing to the pile of what women are expected to do for straight men, rather than something straight men should be doing for themselves.
Yes, it’s true that there’re damn few resources out there for men and I know there’s a whole lot of discourse about how saying “be better” isn’t enough, especially when it feels like there’re few alternatives. But the idea that your personhood should be contingent on knowing the exact right way to pierce through an individual’s self-involvement is just shifting responsibility from them to you. So unless someone has already demonstrated that they’re already on the path and just needs a little encouragement or a nudge, I’d suggest that you’d do better to hold out for someone who doesn’t need you to be able to recite the magic formula before offering you the social and emotional equity people deserve from their partners.
This is why I say the answer to your problem is “date better men, even if it means being single for longer than you’d prefer.” Otherwise you’re going to end up having variations of this problem until you luck out and find someone who’s already doing the work on their own.
It’s frustrating to be sure and absolutely not ideal. But sometimes the best encouragement for men to step up and start fixing things for themselves is to stop automatically expecting women to do it for them. You don’t need – or want – a fixer-upper. Find someone who’s already prepared to date a person and not an accessory with nifty features, even if it means that you’ll be looking for a while longer. It’s better to be lonely because you’re alone than to be lonely because you’re with someone who doesn’t see you as a person.
Good luck.
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Please send your questions to Dr. NerdLove at his website (www.doctornerdlove.com/contact); or to his email, doc@doctornerdlove.com