the gender wars don’t need you

there are two resources in dating that are desperately undervalued. the first is morale. (i talked, in a roundabout way, about why this matters and how to maintain it in this post.)

the second is empathy.

if you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ll have noticed a pattern where there are precisely two sides in any conflict. if you ever dare suggest that my side could be making better choices, or that the enemy side is sometimes just responding to their incentives (some of which we’ve created for them!), well. you might as well have just lobbed a grenade into my trench.

this is bad enough when it’s restricted to things like politics, where it’s at least possible that the two major sides have fundamentally incompatible goals. it’s absolutely farcical when applied to heterosexual dating, where both “sides” have the same goal. which requires working together.

with affection, this is what you look like when you’re out there trying to date a gender who, on the whole, you do not like and do not trust:

i get it. if you only date the opposite sex, your own gender will never have the opportunity to hurt you in the specific ways that they can. you’re incentivized to protect yourself from these harms. you have no reason to consider the ways your opposites have suffered at the hands of your own sex. knowing that there’s a reason behind some behavior of theirs that actively makes it harder for you to find love doesn’t actually help you protect yourself, so why should you care?

this all makes a lot of sense if self-preservation is the goal. but if self-preservation is the goal, finding love emphatically isn’t. relationships are built on trust, and it’s much harder to get there when your posture is adversarial. if you want to be in a relationship you have to give other people the opportunity to hurt you.

yeah, you shouldn’t exchange pin numbers on a first date. but if you’re inclined to approach every potential partner as though you’re expecting them to do you harm, and as though it’s their job to prove you wrong before you display any real interest in them, consider:

are you willing to take on the burden of overcoming their conviction that you’ll hurt them?

my guess is “no,” because this just isn’t something it’s possible to do from a defensive posture. one of you is going to have to crack first if you’re going to get anywhere, and you’re the only person you have any control over. but why would you want to go to all the effort of trying to overcome their defenses in the first place? that’s a great question. why would anyone bother trying to overcome yours?

> you won’t risk letting them get to know you until you know they’re worth taking the risk

> you can’t figure out whether they’re worth taking the risk of letting them get to know you until you get to know them

this is weird. this is asymmetric. this is now how people get to know each other.

right, so a bunch of what i’ve written here so far is about trying to imagine the other person’s perspective, which i expect isn’t hard to do if you’re picturing someone very much like you, but “someone very much like you” isn’t usually how people describe a prospective partner when they’re staring down the barrel of a first date with a total stranger.

empathy is a weird thing. it seems to be really, really important to most people that they withhold it from anyone who could plausibly hurt them. some people just have a really hard time disentangling the idea of “feeling charitably towards a person” and “permitting that person to plow right through your boundaries.”

i think this boils down to lack of self-trust. when you don’t trust a group of people, this is cope for not trusting yourself to make, and act on, accurate assessments of individuals.

lack of trust in yourself is a solvable problem. which is unfortunate, if your goal is self-preservation rather than finding a long-term relationship. what we want is intractable problems, like “that entire gender sucks,” so we can justify continuing to take the path of least resistance.

you’ll have noticed this post is annoyingly non-specific. this is because as soon as anyone brings up a particular fear one gender tends to have about the other, everyone gets mad, including me. (i’ll get more into the weeds in later posts where i can dedicate a ton of text to hedging.) but here’s the point:

fear and loathing of the opposite sex is not a rare phenomenon. brainwormed denizens of the internet present extreme cases, but afaict this is a phase just about everyone goes through and has gone through for literal centuries.

“ew, boys/girls have cooties!” is usually where it starts, and rarely where it ends. what i’m getting at here is:

they’re just as afraid of you as you are of them.

they always have been. everyone is nervous, everyone is scared of being hurt. you’re trying to find a partner, they’re trying to find a partner. you’ve been hurt by their gender, they’ve been hurt by yours.

you’re on. the same. team. stop going on dates acting like you’re a goddamned POW.

if any of this hits close to home, i have two suggestions:

first: blaming the other gender or even the general state of dating naturally relieves you of any sense of agency. try to notice when you do this and see if you can claw some of that agency back.3

second: there’s a palpable difference between the following attitudes towards a potential partner:

• this person i’m about to interact with can try to prove themselves to me if they want to

• this person i’m about to interact with might be the love of my life, and i intend to find out whether they are

the first attitude puts you into that loop i mentioned earlier, where your curiosity is conditional on their already having proven themselves worth your curiosity, or safe enough to express curiosity towards. in the second case, you lead with curiosity, which is more likely to put the other person enough at ease that they can show you the best side of themselves, which in turn is more likely to put you at ease, and so on.

the gender war may be raging all around you, but you don’t have to be a combatant. even enemy soldiers in literal war have been known to set aside their differences: see WWI’s Christmas truce.

We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in front. The funny thing is it only seems to exist in this part of the battle line – on our right and left we can all hear them firing away as cheerfully as ever.

- Captain Robert Miles

lay down your arms. out here, we don’t shoot deserters.

thanks to hath and to my extremely offline anon boyfriend for sanity-checking this post!

check out my website if u’d like to book a matchmaking or dating troubleshooting meeting