Won’t Someone Think of the Men?

“Are straight men okay?” This is the question raised in stories from the likes of The Wall Street Journal and 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?

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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.)

These men aren’t looking for a tradwife; when asked if they wanted their future spouse to stay home, 50 percent said “no” and 45 percent said they “don’t care.” And it’s not that they want to be single forever. The vast majority of men we surveyed (72 percent) said they are looking for a relationship, while more than half said they want to get married one day. But breaking up with someone for wearing a pair of dirty Air Force 1’s to dinner, as one 34-year-old Brooklyn man did, seems antithetical to that goal. Everyone is “mentally Frankensteining their ideal person in their heads,” a 38-year-old Manhattanite told me, “convincing themselves she exists and living life as if they’re going to meet her.” (For what it’s worth, though, he once broke up with a woman because of her laugh: “I know, I know. Jerry Seinfeld would be proud.”)

Indeed, the apps seem to have turned everyone into little Seinfelds, puttering around in their one-bedrooms while nixing romantic options for having man hands or eating peas one at a time. “Since there is no scarcity, if this person is not good enough, you don’t necessarily want to put in the effort of trying to improve together,” a 27-year-old Barcelona man told me. “You just go to someone else who doesn’t have that bad personal quality.”

Jared Freid, a 40-year-old stand-up comic and co-host of the dating podcast U Up?, has a more generous interpretation. He doesn’t think men are becoming pickier. He thinks much of the time, they’re simply creating reasons to break things off with women — either because they’re not emotionally intelligent enough to identify the real reason or because they’re afraid of disappointing their partners in the future. “There’s not really a safe space for them to talk about the anxiety that’s holding them back from the next step or the fear of not being a good husband or father,” he says. (In that vein, a very slight majority — 29 percent — said they are not interested in having kids in the future; 28 percent said they are, while 26 percent said “maybe.”) I was skeptical of this theory until I asked a Virginia man if there was any good reason why a man in his 40s might want to opt out of a romantic commitment. What if, he reasoned, this hypothetical man were a Navy SEAL and had to delay marriage because of his dangerous lifestyle? (This man was not a Navy SEAL.)

But while the single men I spoke to are haunted by the specter of choice, they seem to be primarily motivated by fear — the fear of being embarrassed or the fear of being exposed. Though they loathe the apps, 46 percent said they will only “very occasionally” approach a woman in a public space. They acknowledge these fears are not as immediate as the very real threats of physical and sexual violence that hang over women’s heads every day, but they also don’t think it does anyone any favors to dismiss men’s concerns outright. Many guys, for instance, shared anxiety about the possibility of going on a date and being excoriated on social media; two pointed to the story of “West Elm Caleb,” a furniture designer who went viral for “love bombing” and “ghosting,” as one such cautionary tale. “I am terrified of becoming the next viral TikTok,” a 28-year-old New York man said.

Some of the men I spoke with said they operate under the assumption their texts are a matter of public record: “All your responses are likely being circulated in a group chat,” a 26-year-old Texas man said. “When prying eyes get ahold of your private correspondence with a loved one or someone you’re trying to, quote-unquote, rizz, it never looks cool,” Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and leftist commentator, added. “I’ve never seen a person who hasn’t been clowned if their messages are released.”

“I definitely stay away from the podcasters,” a 39-year-old from Bushwick told me. “I don’t want to be grist for the mill.”

Tony Polcari is a 26-year-old TikToker in Washington, D.C. Being a little corny is part of his brand — he posts himself dancing to Tom Jones and trying on cream-colored slacks. Still, it stung to go out with a woman who subsequently posted on Reddit that he was awkward and “kind of cringe” on their date. “I’ve always had that insecurity,” he said. Broadcasting one’s intentions? Being honest about your desires? That’s beta shit. “Nobody wants to see a dating profile that’s like, ‘I’m looking for love,’” a 30-year-old Fort Greene man told me. “What are you, a normie fucking bot?”

Does all of this leave the guys feeling isolated? Thirty-five percent said the male loneliness epidemic is real, while 23 percent said it’s overblown. (Several suggested that “it’s real but self-inflicted” or that “it’s real, but a bunch of men use it as an excuse.” “Developing friendships and hobbies is work,” added another, “but blaming women is easy.”) No one directly faulted porn, but it obviously has an impact: 52 percent said they have choked a woman during sex. “Everything I have ever tried in the bedroom I saw in porn first,” a 37-year-old Scottish man said.

The Texas man told me he has something called “the Bicycle Test,” in which he goes biking with a date and if she doesn’t look back at him at least once to make sure everything’s okay, he knows it’s not going to work out. When I asked Bicycle Test guy why he couldn’t just tell women what he was looking for, instead of judging them based on secret criteria, he demurred. “I think that would ruin my market value, if I’m being honest,” he said. He doesn’t want to risk being rejected for caring too much. “I’d rather be rejected because of my looks or where I went to school or my job.”

Like most of the men I spoke with, the Bicycle Test dude seemed like a great guy: kind, smart, and thoughtful. Yet he approaches dating with the same assumption the others do: that women inherently believe all men want to hurt and embarrass them.

“Women are always looking for some sign that things might go wrong in order to get themselves out before it’s too late, which is understandable,” the 39-year-old Bushwick man told me. “As a man, you have to accept this and not be a piece-of-shit dude. But we’re always coming up with these new pathologies of manhood, and when your social feed and mind are full of that, it’s difficult to just approach a person like they’re a person.” Even though men and women essentially want the same things — marriage, companionship, someone to ride bikes with — the atmosphere of heterofatalism has effectively poisoned the well. “Disrespectful men are overrepresented,” a 26-year-old Michigan man said. “Women have to assume the worst.” The result is a hostile dynamic in which everyone treats one another with suspicion to avoid getting hurt — even though, when it comes to this particular game, getting hurt is inevitable.

There is, of course, little reason for women to assume the best of men, and no one knows this better than men themselves. Still, it’s perhaps worth a reminder: Yes, sometimes a guy is single because he’s a red-pilled asshole; sometimes he’s single because he gets anxiety attacks when he schedules dates. But every once in a while, it’s because he’s a Navy SEAL who was undercover on a dangerous mission for 20 years.

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