What Makes a Man Actually Commit to You

It’s 11pm on a Saturday night, and I’m doomscrolling in my bed.

Scratch that — I’m not just doomscrolling. I’m lying butt-naked, in my bed, eating a Perfect Bar, as my eyes are glued to my phone. I swipe through video-after-video, being sure to send the dumbest, raunchiest, most debaucherous ones to my best friend. She happens to be online as well, and we communicate in the best way that we know how: through no-context DMs of endless videos on our feed, in the hours where our body really wants to be asleep.

It’s a disgusting habit, I know, and it’s one that I wish to break. But as a 20-something, it has (unfortunately) become synonymous with the way that my body desires to unwind. Well, let’s scratch that again, for I can think of plenty of other ways that my body desires to unwind after a long day. But seeing as I live alone, in a tiny San Francisco apartment, where the neighbor across from me keeps his windows open and watches sports on Roku into the wee hours of the night, perhaps this is the default; we consume, endlessly, when our body years for someone to energetically consume. When we desire to get lost in the presence of another, only for the other side of our bed to remain cold, we channel that energy into a wayward justification for our late-night scrolling habits. I like to think of this as the “Secret Single Behavior” that Carrie Bradshaw talked about:

But my scroll becomes less sympathetic towards my need to dissociate from my desires, as my feed is flooded with some of the worst relationship advice known to man — or shall I say, woman. It’s advice that is the metaphorical equivalent of AI slop, only instead of being a poorly-rendered picture of dogs drinking beer, or an Instagram model on a baseball jumbotron, it’s another upper-class white woman, waving around a ring on her finger, giving advice tailored to single women on what makes a man actually commit to them.

Don’t text him too often — allow him to wonder what you’re doing.

Be aloof and don’t spill all of your feelings.

Men want a heaven, they don’t want to be dragged down by your emotions.

Act like the prize, demand money — if he doesn’t pay, another man will.

Sprinkle, sprinkle.

Each of the videos has hundreds of thousands of likes and shares — namely, all from women — who eat it up because it satisfies their egoic desires in love. Women love to sit around and talk about all of the areas in which men could be doing better, or rather, the ways in which men are so subject to their own flesh. It’s the way that a man (who has not yet learned to harness his own sexual energy) may become privy to scoping out hot women at the grocery store, flirting with someone in their DMs, or boast about how he wants a woman who “brings something to the table.” As women, we are quick to chastise a man who engages in any of these things. Yet when it comes to our fellow women, we love to turn a blind eye when we’re doing the same things.

A woman who plays the field because she wants a man for money, fame, status, power, or a Birkin bag is no better than a man who dumps his longtime girlfriend for an Instagram model. It’s a provocative statement, I know, but it’s also true. One is not any better than the other. And when you follow the advice of so-called “relationship gurus” who teach you how to achieve the former, then you cannot be surprised when the men that you attract in also begin to mirror the latter.

I’m not saying this to say that their advice is inherently wrong — it’s right, in fact, if that’s the level of relationship that you desire to achieve. If your desires in relationships come down solely to a fat rock on your finger, a house in your new name, and a weekly allowance to get your beauty treatments done, then that is precisely the advice to follow. Let me be very clear: as someone who has been offered a ring many times (and has turned them down, for they were from the wrong men), getting a man to want to marry you is easy. Getting a man to commit to you, on a mind, body, spirit, and soul level, is an entirely different ball game.

You have to ask yourself which one you really desire to choose.