I did a stint on Tinder once, a bit like the way you do a stint in A&E - necessary and grim but you come out the other side with a story. There were, it has to be said, plenty of good looking men on there. The issue arrived the moment you actually started talking to them and realised within about four messages that you were knocking on a very nice door attached to an entirely empty house.
That was the worst of it, 10 years ago. Brain dead. Nothing behind the eyes. A tragedy, but a fairly simple one.
Dating now appears to have evolved into something closer to a game of Avoid The Alpha.
Behold, a thread I saw on Reddit a few months back of messages between a man and a woman - the kind of exchange that reads like he's working from a Red Pill dating coach manual, possibly with a highlighter.
If you listen closely enough, you can almost hear the podcast this man's been bingeing in the background. She's shit-testing you, bro. Hesitation isn't a no, it's an invitation. The moment you back off, you've lost. Push through. That's what separates the alphas from the betas.
I have to feel a bit sorry for these men. Not a lot. Not, like, sustainedly. But a bit. In the same way I feel sorry for someone who's been given catastrophically bad directions and is now confidently, furiously lost. Lukewarm sorry for them, if you will, because they have been told that this is what women want.
There are reels, podcasts, books, forums, and a whole content economy built on telling men that women want a man who makes her feel, at any given moment, that she could lose him. They want a man other men are intimidated by, one who never shows doubt, never shows need, never adjusts his plans because of how she feels - because adjusting is weakness, and weakness is the one thing a woman can smell on a man the same way you can smell, the second you walk into an office, that someone's microwaved fish.
They want a man who leads, never follows, and treats her emotions not as something to listen to but as something to push through. A man who does not check in, does not show vulnerability, and absolutely does not ask permission to do anything because all of that is beta behaviour and beta behaviour is, they will tell you, the single fastest way to end up alone.
Which is an awkward theory to be touting at the exact moment several million women have simultaneously lost their fucking minds over a fictional hockey player who asked a woman if she was open to hearing a suggestion before he’d even made one.
If you have somehow avoided the current internet obsession with fictional hockey players, congratulations. I assume you have been outside, speaking to real people, living a balanced and healthy life. The rest of us have not been doing that. The rest of us have been watching (and rewatching) Off Campus, a Prime Video series about a college hockey team that isn’t really about college hockey at all - a bit like how Love Island is supposedly about love but is actually about wanna-be influencers saying “my type on paper” - and we have all collectively lost the plot.
For those who do know what I’m talking about - don’t pretend you’re annoyed at the recap. You’ve watched that scene four times this week. I’ve seen your search history. It’s the same as mine.
Anyway, I was roped into this new lifestyle by Kiya Taylor who recommended the series without so much as an utterance of horn, which I now understand to have been a significant act of restraint on her part. I watched the first episode mostly to be polite and I have not been the same since.
What you can miss when you’re on the outside of this looking in is the sheer scale of what’s happening. My mother who’s in her 60s watched the entire thing before I did. I found this out the way you find out anything from your mother, which is mid conversation about something else entirely and at the time, having not yet seen it myself, I thought almost nothing of it. Sounds like a nice little show… Lovely… Good for her. I now understand this to be one of the funniest and most damning pieces of evidence in the entire case and tells you everything about the scale of what one made up man is doing to women - even women who are old enough to be his grandmother.
That man, for the uninitiated, is Garrett Graham. Captain of the hockey team. Male lead of the show. Ruiner of millennial mothers lives having done nothing whatsoever to deserve that title beyond not actually existing, and not being an option for women who are, in fairness, married with kids and not exactly available themselves.
Since I watched, my Instagram discover page has become almost entirely Garrett Graham. Not as one of several interests alongside my actual hobbies. Oh no. Wall to wall Garrett Graham. I open the app to look up something completely unrelated and I am instead shown 12 consecutive clips of a fictional 20 something hockey player saying “show me”.
My partner walked in on me mid rewatch the other night and asked, not unreasonably, why I was watching it again. I told him it was for something I was writing, which was technically true - you’re reading this aren’t you? But it was also not remotely why I was watching it in that exact moment and we both knew it and neither of us said anything further because most relationships survive on precisely this kind of tact.
Anyway. The point I'm trying to make, in amongst all of that, is that women the world over are frothing at the bit for this man and this show, and I can assure you that not one bit of the frothing has anything to do with what the ‘alpha’ males are selling.
So, are these men just confused?
I saw a clip recently of a man whose wife is, like most of the country, completely deep in it being asked to explain who Garrett Graham is. He thought about it for a second and said “I don't know, he's some ice hockey jock.”
If you don't know what you're looking for, I suppose that makes sense. He is, on the outside, a hockey jock. Captain of the team, athletic, confident and wanted by more than one woman before the plot's even worked out who's with who. But ask any woman who has watched this show to describe Garrett Graham, and I would bet everything I own that “hockey jock” is the last thing out of her mouth. His position on the team would not come up. His athletic ability would not come up. The fact that he is exceptionally, almost aggressively, hot would come up - yes, fine, we're only human - but that's not it either. It's not the six pack or the curly locks. It's not even the height, though God knows it doesn't hurt!
If you asked her to explain who Garrett Graham is she would talk about him showing up at Hannah’s workplace and helping her set tables just because she was doing it and he was there. She would talk about the moment early on when they're setting up their deal and he says “this is perfect - you're not interested in me, and I'm not interested in a relationship” instead of “you're not interested in me and I'm not interested in you” because from a woman’s perspective the latter would feel like a sting.
She would talk about the fact that he heard Hannah singing through the tunnels during a game, followed her voice, and watched her grinning before telling her about it later because keeping things from her wasn't something he was particularly interested in doing. She would talk about the fact that at some point, while still technically helping her pursue another man entirely - he went away and listened to The Beaches, a band she'd mentioned once in passing because he wanted to understand what she liked.
She would talk about the sealed can of drink handed over at a party without comment, because he'd noticed without being told that an open cup wasn't something she could trust.
She would talk about the karaoke night - the pinacoladas, the guarding her drinks with his life, the blanket put over her sleeping friend before he followed a trail of clothes up the stairs, picked every one of them up, said no to the thing she was offering because she'd had too much to drink in a way that didn’t shame her whatsoever, and LEFT HER CLOTHES FOLDED on the bedside table for the morning.
She would talk about him going to a friend to ask for advice on how to make it good for Hannah - because of course he did - and his position, when informed that she might not come, being - that’s simply not an option.
She would talk about that scene. The moment he said they should stop so she didn’t have to. She would talk about Hannah saying she's broken, and him saying she isn't and genuinely meaning it. She would talk about him asking - before he'd even made the suggestion - whether she'd be open to hearing one. She would talk about the fact that the suggestion was ultimately that they'd be vulnerable together. Equally.
She would talk about him finding out who had assaulted her, dealing with it at great personal cost to himself and his season, and then when asked why he did it not telling a single person because that story wasn’t his to tell.
…
Annnnnnd breathe. Fuck, that sounded a lot like a love letter didn't it? I told you we’re ruined.
The point is that not one woman talking about this show is talking about his status, his confidence, or his rank in the team. They are talking about the fact that he is emotionally intelligent, that he respects and genuinely likes Hannah - not because of what he wants from her, but because of her. He does all of these things because he wants to know her. To understand her. And he does this not as a strategy to get in her pants and not as a route to something else but because he genuinely enjoys her as a person.
You see, women are very good at working out when care is a shag strategy. We’ve been field-testing this our whole lives and this is not that. You can tell, and that’s the whole point - you can tell because he does it when there’s nothing to gain, when she’s not watching, when it costs him something, and when the only audience is a band he’s listening to alone because she mentioned them once.
The scene women cannot stop talking about is built around a man who, at the moment every dating coach on the internet would tell him to take charge, handed it back to her instead. His entire approach to Hannah’s pleasure - to her comfort, her safety, her experience of being with him - is that it is non negotiable. It’s not an afterthought or something she should have to ask for. It is, as far as he’s concerned, the whole point.
I’d like to contrast this attitude with the man who went on a podcast to explain that the female orgasm is low ROI, and note that one of these men is currently being edited into love declarations by several million women, and the other one is, urm, not.
And it isn’t just Garrett. He lives in a house full of them. Four hot men who are, without exception, also this. Tucker makes his friends home cooked meals - HE MADE GARRETT SMOKED SALMON TO HELP HIM STUDY. Dean - who I initially wrote off as the love child of Ryan Gosling’s Ken and Ellen DeGeneres - is big on consent and trust. And Logan, the friend of the century, who appears to pine for his best friends girl without ever making it anyone else’s problem. The show portrays masculinity absolutely wonderfully. And this is why women are losing their shit.
Should one of these ‘alpha’ men clock Garrett Graham, he may for a moment feel vindicated. He’d be reaching for his ring light before the opening credits finished. This, he’d say, leaning into the camera, is exactly what I’ve been telling you. High value. Men want to be him and women want to be with him. But they'd be misdiagnosing it. We have seen plenty of shows about good looking jocks. We have watched confident, dominant, “high value men” on our screens for decades and guess what? Nobody was baking cakes about them.
These are men who have built whole businesses around the idea that a man loses value the moment he becomes too available, too accommodating, too willing to care. That the single most catastrophic thing a man can do - the thing that will tank his value, lose him the girl, expose him as a beta - is respecting women in the way you respect them because you actually like them. A man who knows his own sexual market value, they say, refuses to let it depreciate by doing something as ruinous as that.
But Garrett Graham has done nothing but that, from the first episode to the last. And several million women cannot stop thinking about him.
So to answer my own question - are these men just confused?
Maybe. Or maybe it’s simply easier to tell men that women want dominance and scarcity than it is to admit that what women actually want is something no course and no ring light is going to give you if you were never taught to notice whether someone wants the cup open or closed.
I’ll leave you with this… They say women want a man who knows his value. But women are losing their shit about a man who noticed hers.
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