Dating shouldn't have a fail condition

Everyone knows there's a loneliness epidemic among young men. This is, naturally, because of the patriarchy and Queen Victoria. Kind of. In the Victorian era when sodomy laws began to be prosecuted it became dangerous for men to appear to be too intimate, even in entirely platonic relationships. This was the dawning of no homo and now we are all worried about straight men. It appears they barely even know how to be friends with each other.

We have built a society where boys and men are actively deprived of the tools they need to form healthy friendships. Because of this, they rely heavily on women for emotional support – mostly girlfriends and wives because they also don't know it's possible to have friends who are women.

So if straight men rely entirely on their wives and girlfriends for the emotional support we all need but they can't get wives and girlfriends then they are lonely and that's something we all need to be concerned with.

This is one of those frustrating things about the current stage of feminist endeavour. It feels like, at this point in history, men should just know how to do better. But undoing decades of conditioning is almost impossible, we know this! Women of my generation especially know this; we're all in an ongoing battle to learn to accept our own fucking bodies, after living through the age of heroin chic, and hardly any of us are winning.

It's easy to laugh at people who say shit like real men don't eat soup but that kind of nonsense represents deeply held anxieties around masculinity. And those come into play when people try to date.