I believe in love and humanity ♥️
A friend called me recently to tell me about a great date she had and I could tell in her voice she was hopeful. And sure that's not all there is to life but come on that's a great reason we must not give up on love. Because certainly we can all live without a romantic connection but it makes our lives so much sweeter if we can experience that joy!
In the last few years, since Covid, I had begun my own search for my next love and it's been rough. I have matched and at a minimum texted with over 200 men. And let me share that it has been to say the least: underwhelming. When my dating adventures began I would share the dates with my friend Vickie and she would say: oh you must keep a journal of these stories - they're too good! I didn't know what I would do with this information but then I decided she was right, let me put on my curiosity cap 🕵️♀️ and see if I could figure out what's happening in this new world I was exploring.
Cookie Theory 🍪
First let me share the theory I have on how we as a society got to the point where men and women are not connecting like we yearn for. It starts with cookies...
When I was in my 20's and thrilled to be working at a job I loved I remember making cookies a few times a year as goodies to bring into the office. I'd make my cookies and put them in a decorative tin and then be delighted if they went before I came to collect it. Now things were different back then- only the women in the office brought in snacks and we would set them up then clean up the mess when the day was done. The men would be the first in line and some would voice appreciation for the buffet of deliciousness in front of them but that was about it.
I hadn't thought about this for a long time until recently when I was trying to explain how I never really knew how ingrained the patriarchy was until I got it on the cookie level. See most women love to nurture people in their lives. And lots of women around my age and older won't even get why the above story is related to dating. But today it is a subtle but real example of how women treat* men but haven't had the reciprocal-replenishment we need to keep that going.
* (pun intended)
Picking A Path
Now as I see it we have two paths into our new awakening of mens' roles in our world.
We can shame them for not being evolved, "woke" or feminist-supporting-enough ... or...
we can share with them the recipe of how to create that for themselves and those they engage with and then reward and rejoice in the ones who get things cooking 🔥
Yes, of course not all men are stuck in the good ol' days but a not-small percentage of single ones are or a new version of it; look at the work of NYU professor Scott Galloway and his warnings of the crisis of isolated young men. And sure some still won't meet up with the times but I'd like to at least invite them all to join in.
Afterall, we as a collective society trained men to show up and grab cookies and we would be happy to make more and of course clean up after them. Women made things comfy and now we expect them to catch up and pick up on all the nuance and clues in social and dating situations and shame them when they don’t. Not at all our fault per se, but we (their mothers, sisters, coworkers and friends) did contribute to feeding into that dynamic.
Keys and Porn
This is in addition to other big changes in the last few decades- we went from latchkey kids to helicopter parenting. Participation trophies and micro-parenting took over. I assure you my Dad had no idea who my teacher was or even where my schools were located. Nor did most dads make doctors appointments or keep track of fieldtrip slips. There was a reason Mr. Mom was such a hysterical and timely movie when it came out.
Fast forward to today and we went from modest homes to McMansions, to curated childhoods shown off on social media. Don't do without because we have easy-put-it-on-credit-lifestyles. Teens now are bombarded with images of filtered perfection on their phone of their own classmates, where we would have to wait to see models in the monthly copy of Seventeen magazine to judge ourselves. Needless to say we've ALL had a spin-y change in expectations and societal pressures.
And that's before we even get to the most monumental transformation in dating and mating:
online-on-demand porn!
Sure they had nudie magazines years ago and if you were an adult you could go behind the velevet curtain at the video store and rent a porno. But most teens saw a first glimpse of it through the squiggly scrambled lines of cable's naughty channels. There was not porn coming into our home without our approval and a high price tag.
Today porn is free and not just flowing into young people's pockets but it's the most diverse graphic degrading porn there has ever been. Seeing a pair of boobs in Playboy was enough of a thrill but now many men have so numbed themselves that.. well you know how far it's gotten. In the olden days of 800-lines you would at least still need to use your imagination but now you can Only-fans your way into a woman performing fantasies in front of your very eyes.
Men don't need to get to the gym, go meet people, ask women out and shine their shoes to go on actual dates. They can get pseudo-gratification 24-hours a day from their La-Z-boys with no limit on what they can search for.
It's not good! It's made a big chunk of men unmotivated and apathetic to dating let alone proper romantic courting. It's made them turn to porn instead of real life women. That and their exes and bad experiences have often wounded and hurt them making them give up on the search for true intimacy at all.
If you're a male who has lived through #MeToo, a woman boss, and hopefully the first female president*, you've experienced the most dramatic male expectations transformation ever!
GAME PLAN
This all leads back to my project. I had gotten so annoyed with the poor app profiles and ghosting and sucky communication with possible matches and just in general the apathy coming at me daily that I was disheartened! Then a wave of empathy hit me and I realized men have whiplash 🫨 They went from being handed cookies to being expected to evolve into a new non-toxic-masculinity way of being without much guidance or many role-models.
So I could either continue to be deeply disappointed or I could share what I thought might help. This is my attempt at a solution with what I know and mapped out (you know that's my gift) before sex-robots are readily available and we stop getting together as a species at all 😜
With deep sincerity I leave this as an offering because I love men and I still have hope that LOVE & JOY finds us all 🥰
