Last week I wrote a piece about wanting to be loved. I think acknowledging the desire to be loved is useful to me, and it’s not something I’ve always been able to do. It feels shameful, somehow, to yearn for love. Like if I want it too much then I’m desperate, needy, incomplete without the validation of a romantic partner. But having thought about this a lot recently, I’ve realised that acknowledging this desire has been a net positive. Good for self-acceptance, and perhaps even for my self-worth too. Because being up front about how much I want to be loved means I also have to face the important caveat that comes hand-in-hand with that desire: I do not want to be loved at any cost.
This one’s long, waffly, and incredibly gendered. Sorry about that.
Recently someone left a snide comment on a blog post I wrote about dating, saying:
“You are still single and 40+. A fine one to talk.”
I found it fascinating. This person is assuming that my failure state, when it comes to dating, is just ‘being single’. As if the most important thing for me is finding a partner, and any other outcome should leave me miserable and embarrassed.
Here, I think, is the problem at the heart of a lot of the dating conversations I have here on the blog. Men see me talking about my frustrations with not finding love and assume that I’m sad because I haven’t found someone. That I cannot ‘get’ someone.
Actually, I am sad because I haven’t yet found someone who is right.
My failure state is not ‘singledom’, it’s ‘unhappiness’.
I am not unhappy because no one wants to date me, I’m unhappy because the people who want to date me are either unwilling or unable to fulfil my needs in a romantic partnership.
I want to be loved, but not at any cost. If the person I’m with can’t communicate with me fairly and kindly, be honest and open, playful and funny and fun… then I will be unhappy. If I find someone who doesn’t view love in the same way I do – something precious and worth working on and building – then I will be unhappy. If I find someone who ticks all these boxes but turns out to be cruel or manipulative beneath the surface, who was putting on an act in order to ‘get’ me in the first place? Unhappy.
I want to be loved, but ‘unhappiness’ is not a price I’m willing to pay in exchange for that. I have met men who are more than happy to love me in their own ways, but those ways require me to become smaller and weaker than I am when I’m at my best. They need me to be quiet, or temper my ambition. Tolerate frightening or selfish behaviour. Forgive the unforgivable.
Cute date nights and splitting the gas bill and regular sex are all well and good, but they are not enough to justify that price tag. Being in a relationship has plenty of lovely benefits, but a mere ‘relationship’ is not what I’m after – I want to be loved.
My relationships didn’t end because I wasn’t good enough or fun enough or sexy enough or whatever, which I think is what the commenter above was trying to imply: the big ones ended because men treated me in ways that were not acceptable to me, so I left.
Being single is better than being treated badly! It’s just so much fucking better! Infinitely so!
I am happy alone, and I would like to be with someone
It’s not contradictory to tell you that I’m very happy on my own, and that I would also like a partner. Acknowledging my desire to have a partner really brings into focus all the caveats that sit behind that particular want.
I want a partner… but only if they are honest with me.
I want a partner… but only if they support my work and celebrate my wins.
I want a partner… but not one who shouts at me or belittles me or manipulates me.
I want to be loved, and love should not come at the cost of my well-being and sanity and peace and self-worth.
See what I’m saying?
When I write about dating here on the blog, I often find myself talking at cross purposes with men who are also looking for love. They sometimes tell me that, because I’m a woman who dates men, I should acknowledge my dating ‘privilege’. Because after all, if I wanted to get a man I could head out and get one this very evening… right?
I mean… maybe.
But I don’t just want ‘a man’, I want to be loved. We are talking about very different things here, my dudes! Usually when I engage in these discussions I acknowledge the ways in which dating (by which I mean ‘getting responses on apps and meeting up with people’) might be easier for me. I don’t want to call it ‘privilege’ (that’s reserved for the fact that I’m white, able-bodied, cisgender, etc), but I do acknowledge that it must be exhausting and morale-destroying to be a man on a dating app. I concede that the imbalance in dating app users, combined with a culture that puts pressure on guys to make the first move, means that straight men have it tough when it comes to getting attention from women. I write reams of dating advice from a perspective that I try to keep gentle and helpful, in which I acknowledge that my problems as a woman are different to theirs in the desperate hope that if I can see things from their perspective, they’ll do their best to come over and see things from mine.
But they rarely do that. If they did, they’d see the boring truth pretty easily: this deluge of attention isn’t a privilege at all. If you just wanted ‘a partner’, sure, it’d be great to have loads available, but if you actually want to be loved this scattergun dating spam is a hindrance.
Being loved requires specifics
I have a pretty good idea of the kind of person who might be able to love me the way I want to be loved. The broad brushstrokes don’t matter – I don’t care if you’re tall, short, rich, poor, ambitious or chill, creative or technical, introvert or extrovert – all have their benefits. What I want is someone who is fun, kind, playful, funny, and willing to get stuck in to a loving, sexy relationship like it’s a cool project we can work on together. I have a solid idea of who I am as a person, and the kind of partners who might be compatible with that: I’ll do better with someone who likes to get out of the house than one who wants to spend all our evenings watching Netflix, for example. I’m definitely more drawn to optimists than pessimists. Hedonists to the front of the queue. I don’t need someone who’s infinitely kinky, but they do need to place ‘sex’ pretty high on their list of life’s priorities. They understand how to share – chores, woes, compromises, responsibilities, etc. They are emotionally articulate and interested in constantly improving on that. Good listener. Passionate about something, be that their career, a hobby, or a topic they just like getting deeply stuck into learning about. And so on and so on. I could reel off a list of stuff like this, and explain in detail why it would make a person compatible with me.
Personally, I think this is a kind of privilege for the men I could potentially date. To know – in a heartbeat – whether you might have the qualities that fit the bill! To realise that you won’t be asked to waste your time with a woman who turns out to be unsuitable. To know, moreover, that I have been explicit and direct in explaining exactly how to capture my attention (ask questions, be honest, treat me with care and kindness). Above all (my GOD! I want this so much!) to understand that if I choose you it’s a choice that holds the weight of experience, consideration and genuine desire. I’m not just ‘settling‘ because you happened to show up, I’m actively telling you that you are who I want! That is a key difference between hunting down ‘a partner’ versus satisfying a desire to love and be loved.
Conversely, when angry dudes in my comments complain that they can’t get someone, they rarely (perhaps never?) talk about the specific qualities of the women they’re hoping to attract. They discuss dating in terms of achieving a particular end goal – getting a match, a date, a girlfriend – but rarely the kind of match/date/girlfriend they’d like to find.
Wanting ‘a partner’ versus wanting ‘this partner’
There’s a fantastic example of this in a recent Doctor Nerdlove column. A man writes in explaining that he has tried everything to meet women and failed. Have a little look at that letter before you come back here. Now answer the following question:
What kind of woman is this man hoping to meet?
You don’t know, do you? Because neither does he. He’s listed off a bunch of different things he’s done to try and get a partner, and he’s explained some of the approaches he’s taken – approaches which include ‘asking his sister to set him up with any of her friends’ [emphasis mine] – but he doesn’t at any point tell us what qualities he’s actually looking for. Does he want someone ambitious? Pretty? Kind? Funny? Someone who shares his love of baking or World of Warcraft? No idea. This man is so focused on getting ‘a woman’ that he’s obsessed over it for years, honing his strategy for meeting women and even writing in to an advice columnist. Yet at no point does he appear to have sat and daydreamed about the kind of woman he wants to spend his life with. I find that so bizarre, not to mention powerfully sad.
This resonates with what I’m hearing in some comments on the blog, and on social media too. It rings a bell with the way that men approach me on dating sites – uncurious about who I am as a person, interested only in whether I’ll escalate to the next stage – messaging, drinks, a shag, a relationship. And when women like me, who are looking to find a partner who is genuinely interested in the unique things we bring to the table, say ‘no thank you’, these men often get upset. ‘You want a boyfriend?? But I’m here!! Why not me??’. As if ‘boyfriends’ are interchangeable, and the only thing one really needs to be is ‘present and willing’. The man who wrote the letter above talks about finding a girlfriend, but the only qualities he seems to be assessing in women is whether they’re available and interested. That strikes me as very odd – like going shopping for shoes and caring only that they’re in stock, rather than also considering size, colour, price, comfort, and whether they make you feel good.
When men like this discuss their dating problems, usually those ‘problems’ are not about the ways in which women they’ve met are unsuitable. Most often they come down to the fact that the women they’ve met so far don’t want to take things further. They aren’t assessing our compatibility, just complaining that we frustrate their pursuit of the end goals. We don’t chat to them after we’ve matched. We don’t agree to a second date. We decide not to continue a relationship after a few dates or so. To put it bluntly: we say ‘no’.
If you listened purely to these guys, you could end up believing the most common character flaw in women is that we simply don’t give men a chance.
The price of loving me
Maybe there’s truth in that, at least these days. The chances I was willing to give men ten or twenty years ago have begun to dry up, as time and time again offering a guy a ‘chance’ has caused me misery. Whether that’s an evening spent exchanging rounds with someone who doesn’t care enough to ask me any questions, casual sex offered to men who treat me with contempt for it or lie to me because they think that will get them into my knickers, months of my life spent with someone who has been consistently manipulating me, or even years spent with someone who couldn’t deal with his own insecurities and ended up spitting them out onto me in ways that irreparably damaged my self-worth.
Apologies.
I wanted to write this with as little bitterness as possible, but it keeps creeping in as I draft and redraft and pick over each section. I guess it’s inevitable, to be honest: we all grow and change over time, and my obsession with finding someone who can love me the way I want to be loved is bound to have had an effect on the person I am today. The damage caused by repeated knocks has had an impact too. But interestingly, I think the outcome is that I’m pulled in a different direction to the one implied by the commenter who sneered at me for being ‘single and 40+’.
We are not on the same page. We’re reading completely different books.
That guy is making an error that’s common in many men I have met while dating, and while talking about dating here on the blog. He’s assuming that I’m running round in a panic, desperate to grab the last man in the shop before he gets snagged by someone else. In fact, there are plenty of willing partners in stock, I just know that if I want to be happy I shouldn’t grab any old thing on the shelf. I need to weed out those who are just there to score ‘a woman’, and instead look for someone who is interested in me, specifically and individually. I don’t want ‘a partner’, I want ‘to be loved’.
If I met the letter-writer in the example above, I would run a mile. Not because he doesn’t have his shit together (he does) or because he doesn’t seem earnest in his desires (he seems pretty serious), but because he seems to have no idea what kind of person he might match with. And if he doesn’t know, or can’t articulate it, then how the hell can I be sure that he wants me?
‘Getting matches’ is not ‘being loved’
If you do find yourself in the position of frantically discarding criteria in order to get any attention whatsoever on dating apps, I understand that the advice I’m about to give will sound counterintuitive. But please, step back and give it a go: stop trying to get ‘a partner’, and instead ask yourself what kind of partner would be right for you. Recognise that ‘being in a relationship’ is not the same as ‘being loved’, and try to work out what the latter actually looks like in your world. Introspect about who you are, what you want, and what you can offer. How do you express love? What does it mean to you to feel loved? Understanding these specifics is probably going to be more successful for you in the long run than blanket-approaching every person who might seem vaguely available – apart from anything else it demonstrates emotional intelligence which I hear is quite an attractive quality.
I know a few straight men who are successful on dating sites, and this is exactly what they do. They are specific. Targeted. Not as a ‘strategy’, but because that’s just who they are. They’re looking not for ‘a woman’, but a very specific kind of woman, with whom they think they’d have a good time. So they spend time reading profiles, only matching with ones they genuinely like. They send messages that are carefully tailored to this individual, because they’re curious about her and want to know more. Alternatively they just fill out their profile with tonnes of useful detail, and wait for women to message them first. When chatting, they ask questions to understand whether there might be a connection. If and only if they find one do they offer a date. No, they do not get tonnes of matches or have dates every night of the week. But they don’t care about that because it’s quality, not quantity: they have significant success when it comes to meeting and dating a select few awesome women who they might want to see a second time.
This advice probably sounds frustrating if you can’t get a date, and I sympathise. Can you sympathise with me in return, when I tell you how frustrating it is to encounter man after man who doesn’t do any of these things, and the list of what I’m told I should do just consists of:
Give them a chance
?
This advice would be all well and good if my goal was really to be loved no matter by whom, and no matter how well. But remember the main point? I don’t want love at any cost. The chances I have given men so far have cost me far too much. They have crushed me, sometimes in ways that I think might be irreparable. I’m working on it, but I’m tired. And I’m wary of building myself back up only to let a new man start the next round of demolition. Just as I wouldn’t have been able to write part one of this post (“I want to be loved”) ten years ago, so I also don’t think I’d have written something like this back then either. It feels bitter, and belies a lack of trust and hope. Those things didn’t just magically disappear – they were eroded over time.
So what’s the answer?
For me the answer is obvious in theory but extremely hard in practice. The place I have fallen down, I think, is that although I have honed my criteria and become more comfortable articulating what I want and what kinds of behaviour I won’t tolerate (don’t fucking shout at me, don’t belittle me, don’t lie to me, don’t tell me mean things about my body, etc), I have still often been guilty of failing to acknowledge and call these things out when they happen. Just as I spend so much time during a dating blog posts acknowledging men’s challenges before I deign to offer a perspective of my own, so in relationships I’ll also put my own needs second in favour of trying to see things from the perspective of the person I’m with. Because I need him – so, so much – to be able to step over this particular bar. I want him to do the right thing, and that want leads to a lot of self-deception. I’ll look at him through rose-tinted glasses, ignore certain comments or behaviours, give him a leg-up over that low bar as if that counts, make pre-emptive excuses for him because I can’t believe he’d have done this thing to hurt me on purpose.
In short: I have loved these men so much better than they’ve ever loved me.
Worse, I have loved them better than I’ve loved myself. I’ve excused behaviour from romantic partners that I would never dream of tolerating in my own actions. Listened to them say appalling things about me that it would never have occurred to me to think about someone else, let alone say aloud. The forgiveness I’ve extended to partners for unconscionable mistakes is so much greater than the kindness I’ve given myself – even if my own fuck-up has been relatively small.
I am much better at articulating my needs while dating, but once I think I’ve found someone I shut my eyes good and tight then plough forward with a hopeful heart: reckless, blind and foolish. Is it any wonder I’ve run into so much trouble?
I’ve played with this post so many times – editing and re-editing because I’m worried it comes across as harsh or isn’t as persuasive as I’d like. It’s only now, two days’ before publication, after five months of fucking about with my conclusions, that I recognise I’m doing the exact same thing here as I do when I’m heading out to date. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, trying to see things from their perspective, using that to nudge them into performing behaviour that I would do as standard. Just as in a relationship, when a man shouts in my face or interrogates me as if I’m a liar, I’ll try and work out what I could do better next time to prevent him from doing this again. How can I show him that there are better ways of resolving conflict or raising issues? How can I set an example? Actually what I should have done is just handed the responsibility back: say ‘this is unacceptable, and you need to stop.’ I gave chance after chance to men who I hoped might be better, when I could instead have given myself peace.
In trying to explain the impact of men’s weird choices and behaviours in dating, here I am again framing it in terms of how it harms their interests.
“You shouldn’t just scattergun approach every woman on a dating site… because it will hurt your chances of finding one who’s willing.”
“You should introspect and understand your needs… because emotional intelligence is an attractive quality.”
Why am I so desperate to frame things in terms of their needs? In truth, I want them to stop doing these things because they harm people like me.
Fuck it
I love being alone, and I enjoy the time I spend with myself and my friends and family. I also really want to be loved. So while I will always be that hopeful girl who’s ready to hand her heart over if someone approaches me with the right playful energy, I have to keep reminding myself that the hope I have needs reigning in a little. I can’t keep giving chances to men who treat me badly, or looking through my rose-tinted glasses so I only see the pretty things: the hot sex, fun dates and playful in-jokes that should be standard in any fun relationship. I have to acknowledge that love comes at a cost, and see that cost with clear eyed understanding.
The understanding that I’m circling these days is that there are far too many men who would date me, fuck me, and tell me they loved me even if they’d do and say the same to almost any woman who showed up. They want a girlfriend/partner/wife, but haven’t actually considered whether I am the right person for the job, or whether they can fulfil the things I need in a partnership in return. So my approach when it comes to dating will never just rest on ‘is this person willing?’, as so many men seem to think it should, but rather on ‘is this person genuinely excited about me?’.
When I talk to guys in my comments who express desires for ‘a date’ or ‘a relationship’ or ‘a girlfriend’, I want to sigh and hurl my laptop in frustration. Because I know so many funny, smart, beautiful women who are ready and eager for those things, but only if the love is genuine. Specific, not generic. Love that supports and plays with and uplifts and celebrates the unique person it orbits. You’re not buying a pair of shoes, you’re choosing a partner. And for what it’s worth I think this ‘anyone will do’ attitude is doing people far more harm than good.
Apart from anything else, it’s preventing you from dating me. And I am fucking exceptional.
Perhaps the love I want is not possible, or at least not possible for me. And that’s OK. Just as I wouldn’t expect the angry men in my comments to get a ‘yes’ on sex just because they want it enough, so I don’t think that I should be handed the kind of love I want just because of how deeply I yearn for it. I have to make peace with my yearning to be loved: allow myself to acknowledge it, but stop seeing it as a goal I can and should work towards. Perhaps it’s more like a principle that requires active work to defend. Maybe it’s more akin to a fantasy – something I can enjoy in the comfort of my own daydreams, but pack away when I step out into the world. I can keep my hope alive, and stay alert for someone who might fit my criteria, but ultimately focus on pouring the love I have onto other people in my life: friends, family, fuckbuddies… and my own foolish self.