The Difficulty In Dating Good Men

my contribution to the low birthrate

(This isn’t a “true story”, but rather a collection of tiny true details from lots of different interactions, strung together for a vibe)

I’m supposed to find someone who makes me happy. I’m 33, I’m weird, and I’ve got some eggs frozen. Let’s go.

Despite the internet’s conservative confidence, I’m not too worried about the poly slut thing. I live in SF and in the cultures willing to invite me to their parties, it’s normal to casually overhear someone referring to their boyfriend and their husband in the same sentence. Every other person I meet is poly, and I know many decades-long married-with-kids poly relationships. When someone asks me “what do you do” and I say “sex work”, they say “cool my girlfriend’s a sex worker, you two should talk.” In my world, this is normal.

So, a cousin recommends a guy. She says "He's perfect for you." He looks good enough on paper, so I sit down for dinner. He’s a little older, and shorter than me, but I don’t mind. I watch him carefully. He tells me about his life, and I imagine what it’s like to be him. A part of my brain is running a low-fi model of his emotions, and lights up with curiosity when the model runs into a place it can’t predict. I say something like:

“Wait, you just said you got fired and then moved countries? Do you think if you hadn’t had such a sudden impetus, you would have moved at all? Like, would it have eventually snuck up on you anyway?”

He answers smoothly, comfortably, like he’s relaxing into a great armchair I’ve dusted off and wheeled over to him. He partially answers the question in the first twenty seconds and then continues to talk for another four minutes.

I want to understand him fast. I am paying close attention, looking for novel words to toss at him. It feels playful for me, like wrestling, or leaning into tension. I want to see the green under his bark, the places where he’s unpracticed. I slip in fast, arrowhead questions, ones that carry intensity or exploration. “Are you smarter than your coworkers” or “When your ex broke up with you, did you deserve it?” or “So when your mom died, did you feel bad about it?”

He answers all of these with surprise, like he is a child riding on the back of my hay wagon. I’m a bit sad that he seems surprised. I would have felt safer if he seemed at home among awkward questions.

As time passes, it becomes rapidly clear that he is not paying much attention to me. I decide to count the amount of questions he asks me, and I eventually realize with growing disappointment that he just… isn’t asking any questions at all.

But I figure if I want something from the conversation - him to know about me - I shouldn’t sulk and be mad that he’s not giving it to me; I shouldn’t just expect him to read my mind, I should be an adult and reach for what I want. So after he finishes talking, I try to volunteer information. I force myself to ramble a bit. I tell him “yeah, my own biggest change was this time when I was nineteen in Idaho and decided to move by myself to Australia. It was real scary.”

I’m vaguely uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m aware he didn’t ask me, and I’m not sure he wants to know. But I say it anyway. When I’m done, he replies by telling me he went to Australia once, and he liked the surfing. He tells me about the fight he had with his boss during a surfing trip. He tells me about the importance of speaking up for yourself.

We get the check, and I offer to split but he pays. I give him a hug and leave. He seems like a perfectly nice person. No part of me feels a desire to see him again. Maybe he feels that way about me too, maybe I’m the weird question girl.

I’m discouraged. But I figure if I don’t go on dates with anyone, then I’ll never end up dating anyone. And I would like to get married + kids at some point, that seems cool. Happily married people seem like they’re having a great time, and I’d like to join their ranks.

The next guy wasn’t a date, he ended up in a uber in hour-long SF traffic with me ride sharing back from a party. I suspect he might be interested in me, because of the way he moves his hands and eyes and the quickness of his laughter. So I Investigate.

I ask him many questions - less aggressively than I did to my date last week, because I’m tired - but still ones that are gently trying to build a model of him, his desires, ambitions, insecurities.

I like him. He is funny, and seems smart. But after many minutes I notice that, much like my last date, he has asked me no questions. I imagine his factory’s figure-out-the-gaps-in-models-of-other-people gears are rusted and covered in cobwebs. I’m sad about this as a pattern. I don’t know why this is happening. This time, instead of forcibly talking about myself, I tell him that I’m sad he’s asked me no questions.

He says “Oh, I’m sorry” and seems awkward. As our conversation continues, he starts deliberately inserting questions.

“So, uh, what do you like doing for hobbies?”

I’m glad he’s at least trying, but his questions seem performative, like he’s searched for a premade question script and is reading down them, like I could be swapped out with any other woman and it wouldn’t change much. There is no locus of hot itching curiosity shining from behind his eyes, or at least not one that I can find here in this uber. I realize he’s not deeply trying to understand me. He's unattuned. I find my body does not trust him. I think I want a relationship where we can sink in together, touch souls or something. I imagine if I tried to date him, it'd be a lot of work to get him to understand me, like I'd have to force feed him myself. I'd rather have someone who's hungry.

Or maybe there’s something wrong with me. Have I been misled by some romance-movie ideal of becoming As One, where two people deeply understand each other down to their cores, where the fibers of their minds get woven together? I sort of think that’s what love is. But maybe this idea just comes from porn, a fantasy meant to get women off but is not a realistic idea of men’s wants or needs. Am I the girl equivalent of a gooner who locked on hard to the notion he deserves a perfect fucktoy and won’t settle until he has it?

Not sure. I gently watch this theory out of the corner of my eye.

At social events, I keep lowkey evaluating lots of men I have faint brushes with. I notice signs of coolness - competence or bravery or something - and any time a whiff of it floats by I follow it to chat with them at parties.

But my body does not like them. One man talks about his failures in a tone that implies he's uncomfortable with himself, like somewhere deep down a part of him believes he's a bad person, and it seems that many of his bids for social approval are attempts to be reassured that he is in fact okay.

I get it, humans - me included - are like this sometimes, and I have a great deal of compassion for it, but I do not want to be in a relationship with someone who's straining against themselves. Judgment is never isolated; if I become one with them, their inward violence will slam up against me, too. I don't want to be put in a position where my affection is the thing they use to prove to themselves that they are worthy. I want to be an equal, not a crutch.

Another guy… I’m not sure what his problem is exactly, but he seems to warp around me. He agrees with what I say a little too fast. He laughs at my jokes immediately. His hands twitch with nervous energy. He seems nice enough, but he seems afraid of me, and like he’s putting in a huge amount of effort to make himself seem not afraid of me. His body tension reminds me of the way I feel when I’ve appeared on high-pressure public shows and I don’t want people to know that I’m really scared right now. I feel as though my presence towers above him, and I have to be delicate with him, like if I speak too honestly he'll crumble in my hands.

My next date reassures me. I offhandedly mention something bad that happened to me, and he pauses me and goes "that is so terrible, I'm sorry that happened to you." It's nice of him, but he does this a little too often, and something in his tone and much of our following conversation makes me feel defensive. I feel like my own grief is a pool that I swim in often and easily, but it seems like he’s come in and begun building important Walls of Protection around the shores, and I’m like - wait, hey, I am okay here, I don’t need you do all this - but he somehow can’t hear me. I realize probably he has really huge Walls of Protection around his own pool. He is an expert Walls of Protection builder, his mind just automatically lays them out upon his own landscape in the same motion he uses to look at the landscape. He has not come to terms with his own suffering.

It seems like there’s a whole swathe of human experience he can’t see clearly. I think the part of me that is intertwined with pain will feel forever alone with him. I imagine for him, coming into contact with the darkest part of me will be like touching a hot stove.

This is.... pervasive. Most people with whom I sit down and dig show devastating cracks in their psyche. They are not whole.

It’s not that these men aren’t good people. They seem very disproportionately good. They have learned that the goodest thing to do is to reassure people when they hurt, to demonstrate self-flagellation upon failure, to say a lot of interesting things for many consecutive minutes when a woman asks them a question. Pain is bad, ew, grrr. Nice things are good, yay! They are top tier, A+ at being Good People.

While I might be assessing them for a marriage I’d be happy in, I rarely feel judgment towards them. It makes a whole lot of sense to be a primate with ancient hardware that’s learned from thousands of generations of violence that social ostracization means death, that showing vulnerability will not pass on your genes, that you had better know your place in the hierarchy or else. It’s probably very hard to be a man, who by default are thrust into the sea and told ‘swim or die.’ I don’t fault them for it. If I were born them, I would be uttering the exact same words and flinching away from the exact same mind-pieces as they are. I would be, very reasonably, attempting to be the Goodest Person too. Perhaps this is a strategy that’s already worked well for them and they have no reason to try anything else.

But next to them, I feel like a sprawling seeping hunk of organic flesh with tendrils that uncurl into horror as readily as they do loveliness. I am uncultivated.

Maybe in their eyes, I’m a girl with a weird digging compulsion. Maybe they very much enjoy casual, lighthearted questions, and conversations where both people ramble over each other, where their idea of love is something like sitting next to each other on a beach in old age, existing comfortably adjacent to someone whose insides you don’t need to know, because whatever they are is good to you and leads to a beautiful life, and that’s what matters.

Probably my desires are arcane. Dating men who are curious and self-accepting doesn’t mean the relationship works out, and of course there’s lots of things on top that are important too, like being really kind and competent and compatible with me in general lifestyle and values. And it’s true that people with huge cracks in their psyche go on to live happy lives with long, fulfilling relationships.

So maybe my desire is luxurious. Maybe I should lower my standards? But this is a clean, sleek thought, which is sensible to look at and interacts with nothing else. The physical wariness creeps into my muscles without me asking for it. I’m a slave to my own desire.

And then maybe once in a while, I find someone who does seem whole, mostly, who has all their nerve endings pointed in my direction. But usually then they're already married with kids, or they're monogamous, or they're very sexually submissive, or they're poor in a way I’m not financially prepared to support in a world where I want children.

So I keep looking, and sifting, with increasing confusion that this problem is so hard.

People blame lots of things for the low birthrate - housing prices, gender culture, tax incentives - but (besides birth control) I think probably it’s simple. Back then, life was hard, and kids were hard. Tech made life easy, but couldn’t make kids easy. Now life is easy and kids are hard. Switching down from easy-life to hard-kids is a much more unpleasant move than sideways from hard-life to hard-kids.

Maybe something like this is happening for me. Maybe my own genes and exposure to fortunate cultural memes have made existing in my own mind much easier. In comparison, using lower tech on a blunter relationship feels comparatively unpleasant. It feels pretty good to be alone. Maybe if I didn’t feel so good, I’d be less alone.

---

I have a $100,000 bounty on my marriage. If you introduce me to someone who I end up marrying, I’ll pay you $100k upon marriage*.

There’s some details here:

1. They’re shouldn’t already on my radar as someone I might be interested in

2. You must make the intro explicitly in the context of ‘this is for your bounty.’ If I casually meet them at a party you threw this doesn’t count.

3. Send me a small blurb of why you picked them and why you think we’d get along

4. You have to be the first person to make the recommendation.

If things hit this partway (like maybe it's a grey area on how much of an acquaintance that person was to me before, or if I'd already had the intention of asking them out), then I'll give a portion of the bounty that feels equivalent to degree you increased my odds. I can confirm the fraction it feels equivalent to me after you make the recommendation but before I meet the person or we go on our first date or whatever.

It also counts if you get them to fill out my Date Me survey, just make sure they list your name in the ‘who recommended you’ question.