"I once had a friend whose boyfriend told her to wake him up every morning, so that he could get to work on time. Not asked, mind you. Told. She was why he kept being late for work, and it was her responsibility to wake him up on time.
I made the mistake of living with this couple for a month. Turns out, my friend was waking her boyfriend up in time for work—or she was trying to. But every time she tried, he'd just call her a bitch, roll over, and fall back asleep.
I don't mean to imply that this is every single relationship I've seen a woman I'm friends with have with a man. It's not! Some men are extraordinarily lovely. However, this is easily 90% of all the relationships I've witnessed between a woman and a man. And at some point, I realized that this gets to a lot of women's heads.
I'm only slightly exaggerating when I say that all but approximately four of the women who I have met, ever, were convinced at some point that they were Just Too Much. They were convinced by this because their boyfriend and/or husband of ten years—or because their last six boyfriends and/or husbands—seemed emotionally shattered by the terrible burden of being their partner. Time and time again, some man in their life told them: "It is absolutely ridiculous how much you demand out of me." And they, these poor women, believed those men, for reasons as simple and stupid as "being in love" or "having children together."
I have had women apologize for talking to me for two minutes about the very recent deaths of family members. They told me, with a straight face, that they felt terrible for how much of my day they were wasting. This is an exaggeration too, but not in the direction you're expecting: in total honesty, I have known more women than I can count whose instinct would have been to apologize for using a sentence like "I feel kind of sad today." Because those women had known men who, at some point, yelled at and berated them for daring to put an emotion in a sentence.
An analogy that I like to use is this:
Imagine that you know somebody, love them, live with them, for some amount of years. Let's say that, every so often, you ask them for a quarter—just 25¢. They never give you this quarter, no matter how desperately you need that money: for change at a supermarket, for a taxicab home in the pouring rain, for a payphone so you can call your kidnapped brother. At the same time, they keep track of how often you've asked them for those 25¢. And for some reason, they keep adding your requests up, as if their refusal to give you 25¢ on eight separate occasions means you actually owe them $2. As time goes on, they increasingly blow up over your various requests, until they're insisting with a straight face that you've just asked them for $75 on a whim. And you haven't! You're still asking for the first goddamn quarter.
But the analogy isn't entirely complete! Because, in every one of these circumstances, the person you keep asking for that quarter from consistently asks you if you can spot them five bucks. And most of the time, you give them those $5, cheerily and without complaint, because it really is not that much money—though you certainly lose hope of asking for your money back at some point. So while they're kvetching about just how many times you've asked them for that quarter, asking you how hard is it to understand that they just don't want to give you 25¢, they also pause every now and then to go "Hey, have you got five bucks on you?"
This, in my experience, describes a distressing amount of men. And it helps to explain why so many otherwise-reasonable-and-intelligent women wind up believing, absurdly, that they're some kind of unbelievable emotional toll on the men in their lives. At some point, you just start wondering whether your $5 is just worth less than their 25¢. Or whether their money matters more to them than yours does to you. Or, or, or...
Look, it's really dumb, I feel dumb just saying this, but: most men are just not taught how to do basic emotional support. They're not even taught that emotional support is a thing. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of incredibly common tasks—ranging from "chores and errands" to "listening" to "giving someone a quick hand"—that they simply never encounter. They reach adulthood without ever realizing what it takes to keep a room clean, what it takes to maintain a social calendar, or what it means to show someone attention, let alone actual affection. They're literally illiterate. They do not know that most of these things exist, even in the abstract.
This is true, not of bad men, but of most men. This is true of extremely feminist men. It's true of deeply sensitive men. It is a broad enough cultural phenomenon that, in many cases, it simply affects men, full-stop.
(Not all men tho.)
What's more, there's a conspicuous exception to this rule, and it fucks with women's perception. A lot of men have learned to do these various flavors of emotional duty during courtship, when they're still in the phase of showing off to a new woman. Men will buy flowers; men will listen to you talk about your day; men will remember that thing you said you liked. But on some level, they really do think of it as showing off. It's not something they do out of any sense of decency, or to show affection, or to make someone feel valued. If anybody's value is at play, it's theirs. The courtship is just their way of saying, "Look! Look how valuable I am!"
Depending on the man in question, this courtship can last all the way up till the honeymoon, or it can taper out over the first three to nine months, or it lasts exactly as long as it takes for the two of you to fuck. I have known the kind of man who stops putting in an effort immediately after he gets laid. Oftentimes, he doesn't realize that he's doing anything wrong: "We figured out that we like each other and want to fuck! Now we can just do the sex part and skip all the pussyfooting around! I don't see what the big deal is, really." (This is the most harmless variant. It can get much worse.)
It's been said that men don't want girlfriends—they want moms. That's only partly true. Men don't want moms. They don't consciously think about women cooking and cleaning for them, holding them while they cry, or buying them tasty treats. That would require them to notice all these things. But men don't notice any of this. Many men will happily let dirty plates pile up in the sink, pausing only to scrape off the most conspicuous bits of mold when reusing them. You're horrified to hear of men who yell at their wives to clean up their kitchens or refill the refrigerator, but the more-horrifying truth is that, for a man to notice his surroundings enough to complain, he has already placed well ahead of quite a lot of other men.
Men don't go looking for girlfriend-mothers, in other words. Their girlfriends just wind up becoming their mothers. First, they do bare-minimum work to establish some baseline notion of decency and tolerable living. Then, they do that work again and again, forever, none of which ever gets noticed.
This is a perfect complement to the other phenomenon I'm describing here, which goes a little something like this:
Someone notices that her relationship no longer has the spark, the commitment, the energy that it used to. She does what, to her, seems like the most obvious solution: she puts in more of an effort. She tries to show affection in whichever ways she knows how. She tries to pay her partner special attention. She does nice little things here and there. She tries to figure out new things they can do together. She goes out of her way to offer emotional availability, comfort, support, encouragement, whatever seems necessary.
None of this gets noticed. So she tries harder, and harder still. At some point, she accidentally expresses some sign of dissatisfaction: I wish you noticed what I was doing for you, I wish I mattered more to you, is it really that hard to pay attention to me, or something similar. Her partner immediately responds with a litany of minor complaints he's just invented, and accuses her of being a nag to boot.
If she's both levelheaded and lucky, she realizes that this sucks ass, leaves him, and moves on. But it can be trickier to do that than you realize, because most people would rather try and be fair. They don't want to unilaterally accuse their partner of being the problem. That's what... y'know... a nag would do. So they try to compromise internally. They devise a narrative in which, sure, their partner's not perfect, but he means well. He's a decent guy. And she can probably come up with some ways in which she could be better too.
And the thing is, on some level, by some definitions, the man in question is decent. He doesn't necessarily commit crimes. He'd rather be nice to people than be mean to them. He doesn't want to hurt anybody else, technically. He's probably sweet sometimes, and funny other times, and does that one thing that your heart can't help but floop around over. But he doesn't understand this category of human existence, so if you expect the two of you to be operating from the same playbook, you're going to get screwed over and over and over and over again.
You will find yourself wondering how on earth you're at your wits end, when you're asking for so damn little. You will start asking yourself what's wrong with you, what your problem is, why you're so hard to deal with. And you'll be asking the entirely wrong question, because that whole line of thinking presumes a level of awareness that some men, for reasons that aren't entirely their fault, literally do not have. They have atrophied a muscle that we don't think to call a muscle, because those of us who have it assume that everybody has it and exercises it and works on it. It is not there. And while it is possible for people to learn these things and work on these things and improve, we're talking about work that happens on a scale of multiple years, if not outright decades.
It sucks that men don't get taught this shit. It is absolutely horrible for everyone! It's horrible for men, it's horrible for non-men, it's horrible for all the regressive bullshit politics that people try to push on the world in order to avoid having to confront this embarrassing, awful fact. I am a man, I was raised by two parents who were hellbent on my not growing up to be this kind of ignorant, and I still hit a point, in my young adulthood, where I realized that I was hideously bad at this kind of thing and would need to actively try and do better. I hate that. And I hate it for the men who I know and sometimes even love, the men who are unfathomably worse at this than I am, the men who mean well but, and I say this tenderly, wouldn't know how to show genuine affection for the love of their life if their marriage depended on this. Which, oftentimes, it has.
I'm not saying that men are like this to slander men. I'm not saying it because I think there is some genetic or biological deficiency in men that makes them bad at this. The problem with men is the problem with how we raise men, which is to say, that we don't really raise them. A lot of men are abandoned in their emotional infancy, left to fend for themselves. In a better world, we would not have this problem. We just happen to live in this world instead.
But I'm ultimately not writing this for men—although I'd love if a man or two caught a horrifying glimpse of himself in this. No: this is for the women who insist on loving men despite the many reasons why they probably should not. More specifically, this is for women who, after repeated failed attempts to love men, have come away thinking that they are somehow to blame, that they are "too much" or "too unreasonable" or whatever far-more-vicious thing they call themselves in their own heads. This is for the many, many women I've had this conversation with, each of whom was convinced that something was wrong with them, that no other women faced this problem, that their inability to find love and romance or just a stable goddamn relationship meant that they were broken in some way.
It's not you. It's really not you. It's us. In an overwhelming majority of cases, it's us."
