Girl on the Net

One of the things I often hear guys complain about when it comes to dating is that they got rejected (or sometimes ghosted) without understanding why. They wouldn’t mind a ‘no’ if there was some obvious incompatibility, but as far as they’re concerned they didn’t do anything ‘wrong’. Bear with me here dudes, because you might not like my answer, but if you’re earnestly asking this question then I have a few explanations you could consider.

As with all of my posts, this one is heavily influenced by my experience – I am mainly into men so my perspective comes from there. I also want to acknowledge that one of the reasons I struggled when dating recently was because my heart wasn’t in it. This was in large part down to personal shit, which I addressed a little in this post – it’s not you, it’s me. So the following piece doesn’t tell the full story of why I struggled to connect with anyone, and you should weigh it accordingly. I almost didn’t publish it at all, but in the end I decided that it still covers some useful ground that addresses a complaint I’ve heard a fair bit from guys in the comment section, and my response might be useful to those of you who are asking in earnest. Equally (or perhaps more) importantly, I hope it will be reassuring to women who repeatedly come up against the same problems I do.

Note: not everyone gets a straight-up ‘rejection’

During my most recent bout of dating, I tried to be kinder to myself when it came to ending interactions. Although I felt pretty guilty about it, because I am nothing if not led by the comments on this blog and conversations I have with men on social media, I bit the bullet and allowed myself to simply unmatch when I wasn’t feeling something, rather than taking on the responsibility of letting a guy down explicitly.

Why? Firstly because dating men, as a woman, is inherently a giant pile of admin and I don’t have the time to send individual, personally-crafted rejection messages to men who haven’t bothered to write much more than ‘hey!’. Secondly and more importantly, I don’t believe I have the right to inflict negative feedback on someone unless they’ve asked for it. It’s mean.

If it came to an in-person date, I do think I owe guys a little more. So although I would prefer to yank my own teeth out than give someone straightforward (but critical-sounding) feedback, if a guy were to ask me directly ‘why aren’t you up for a second date?’ then I’d try to articulate the reason as best I could. This is a risky strategy, as many women will know. Once a man I dated but did not have sex with emailed to ask why I’d said ‘no’ to the shag at the last minute. To this day I kick myself for taking time to send a thoughtful, diplomatic but honest answer because he responded with very bad grace. I should have just told him ‘no is a complete sentence’ and had done with it. Lesson learned.

Boring preamble, sorry, but I do think it’s important to show you my credentials before I launch into this: I aim to approach dating in a very considered and hopefully kind way. You might disagree with the conclusions I come to about what I do and don’t owe to men, but you can’t accuse me of not thinking (or overthinking) about the way I behave. I genuinely care about treating people fairly and kindly on dating sites. I try not to be rude or disrespectful to the people I meet, because they’re taking courage in hand to put themselves out there and that deserves basic decency in return. Nor am I someone who enters into dating chat when I have no intention of meeting anybody in person. If I’m dating, I’m in it for the win: I want to meet someone good, in person, and ideally build a connection that leads to a shit-hot relationship.

In order to do this, I have to reject (and, yes, sometimes ‘ghost’) a lot of men. Here are the top three reasons why I do that:

1. You were rude/frightening.

It absolutely boils my piss that I have to write this, but I think it’s important. It had been a while since I used dating apps and although I expected a bunch of spam and a hell of a lot of suitors who didn’t ask questions, I was extremely shocked by how many men appear to have grown quite rude and/or frightening. Maybe dudes just give less of a fuck as they get older, but here are a few genuine interactions I had on The Apps during my last ‘adventure’ on them:

• A guy whose first message involved him rating me out of 10. He told me I was a ‘solid 9 on paper’ and that we should chat to see if I could maintain that score on a date. Call me old fashioned, but even if you’re sticking me in the top percentile I actually don’t want to be rated, ever!
• A guy to whom I sent a playful, flirty first message relating to something fun he had on his profile, who responded by telling me ‘you can do better than that’ (!!). When I ignored that message (because it’s rude) he sent a follow-up at 2 in the morning scolding me for ‘ghosting’ him because I hadn’t continued the conversation.
• A guy with whom I had what I thought was a lovely chat, where we swapped fun recommendations for bands and comedy, had some nice playful banter, and seemed to enjoy many things in common. I can’t stress enough how excited I was about this guy. We seemed to have a genuine connection and he was exactly My Kind Of Hot (beautifully tattooed and scruffy as all fuck). I had every intention of inviting him on a date the next time we spoke… until I woke up one morning to no fewer than SIXTEEN messages in my inbox, of an increasingly, aggressive sexual nature, almost certainly written while drunk or on drugs, over a period of THREE FULL HOURS in the middle of the night. My alarm bells rang so hard they fell off the walls, and once I’d unmatched him I avoided the site for a full week because opening it made me feel physically sick with fear.

2. You dropped the conversation

Me: That’s a cool festival pic – where was it taken? Do you do many festivals?

Him: Yeah that’s 2000 Trees, I love festivals. I do Glastonbury each year as well!

Me: Ah amazing, who’s the best act you’ve seen at one? I love Trees too – who’s on your ‘must see’ list this year?

Him: Really excited about [Band], and you should totally check out [other band] if you haven’t already.

If we’ve had a few back-and-forth messages during which I’ve asked you relevant things about stuff you put in your profile, and you have not asked me anything, then I’ll stop asking more and simply wait to see if you send me a question. If you don’t? Done. You dropped that, not me, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

3. A reason that is obvious to me but mysterious to you

This gets to the heart of what I want to write today, and I’m so sorry for bringing it screeching back to the number one problem I have when dating men, but it’s the number one problem for a reason: they do not ask me any questions.

I don’t mean ‘not asking questions’ is why any individual man got rejected (though it may well be), I mean that ‘not asking questions’ probably speaks directly to your confusion as to why you got rejected. If you’re upset that you keep getting rejected for seemingly no reason, ask yourself if it’s possible that the reason is screamingly obvious to your date, but not to you. The solution to this mystery might be there, just waiting for you to uncover, but if you haven’t asked your date anything about herself – her wants, her needs, her life, her past, her passions – it’s unsurprising that you can’t magically intuit the reason she’s decided you don’t match.

I ask a lot of questions on a first date, aiming to get a feel for what this person is like, what they want out of life, what brings them joy and how they might be when they’re in a relationship, and I hope it won’t surprise you to learn that the reasons I reject them usually spring from these enquiries. I already know what you look like, after all: I’ve seen your dating site pictures. I know we have some stuff in common: we’ve chatted interests before we meet in the pub. That meeting is there for me to apply a new layer of filtering: is this person self-aware? Are they kind? Do they reciprocate and match my energy when we’re chatting? Can they make me laugh? Do they have a compatible outlook when it comes to life, love, sex, etc? All that stuff. It’s through these questions that I work out whether you’re a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

But if those conversations are one-sided, then I am working with an extraordinary amount of information where you have practically nothing besides: ‘this woman makes me feel wanted and interesting.’

Of course you’re not going to reject me! I’ve basically been interviewing you, and who doesn’t love being asked insightful things about their life and opinions?! You have no idea which aspects of me might trigger you to say ‘no thanks’, because you have not been actively looking for them. The answer as to why you and I are incompatible is right there for the taking, you just need to pick it up: throw the questions back to me!

Incidentally, there’s a fantastic episode of The Dildorks podcast which tackles this ‘asking questions’ thing, and I found it very validating to hear that it isn’t just men in the UK who suck at asking them.

Informational imbalance

By the end of most of my dates, the information balance is extremely skewed. I know lots about you, and everything about me. You know everything about you but almost nothing about me. It’s understandable that you wouldn’t have some magical insight into our incompatibilities because you can’t read minds, and you haven’t asked for the information that you’d need to get to a useful answer.

This is best explained by example:

Me: So, talk me through your ideal Friday night. You’ve got money in your pocket, no work tomorrow, all the people you like are free to hang out if you want them to… what do you do?

Him: Oh! Well I’m actually big into movies and TV so honestly my ideal Friday night would be a Netflix-and-chill kind of deal… [this usually leads into him recommending me some films/TV box sets and telling me I absolutely must watch this one or that].

I’m trying so hard not to write that in a mean or sarcastic way, but allow me a sidebar eyeroll of frustration here please: I could live happily for the rest of my life if I never again had to sit through someone telling me I ‘must’ watch something. So many men have wasted time during dates boring on about how shocking it is that I’ve not seen Succession, or Always Sunny (that’s the one I get most often these days. It used to be Arrested Development, then Rick and Morty, then that cartoon about the man who is also a horse). It doesn’t matter that, early in the conversation, I tell them I don’t have a Disney+ subscription. Doesn’t matter that I tell them I prefer the occasional trash reality TV, Taskmaster, Lego Masters Australia, or silly Jason Statham movie. They continue to bore on at me anyway because this recommendation – THEIR recommendation – is surely the one that’s going to convert me into being a sofa-loving TV buff, where all the others have failed.*

ANYWAY. Ignoring my personal bugbear with TV recommendations, look at the conversation in italics above and ask yourself whether, when I reject this guy, he’ll instinctively realise it’s because our ideal Friday nights don’t match up. Would he know? Probably not. If he’d thrown the question back to me, he’d have learned that my ideal Friday starts in the pub with a group of friends, then moves on to a fun bouncy gig or perhaps a comedy night, ends with us having an afterparty at my flat (or somebody else’s), then ideally a bout of powerful, frantic sex when bedtime rolls round. Bosh.

Quite a different tone to his ideal Friday, and reason enough for him to reject me, never mind vice versa. If you want a partner to get stuck into box sets with, I am absolutely Not The One. I wouldn’t reject someone purely for this, of course, but I would use it as a basis to ask further questions – exploring whether he also enjoys gigs and parties or whether he’s naturally quite a homebody. No shade to homebodies, by the way: you do you. Just don’t expect me to do it with you all the time, because I’m me.

“Would you like to know mine?”

The interaction that really hammered this home to me was ironically one with a genuinely lovely guy who did ask me a lot of questions. We had a fantastic first date during which we talked a lot and laughed a lot and I got my hopes up that this connection might continue. So we planned a second date, and I turned up eager to get stuck in to the topics we’d not yet got round to discussing. Most notably: relationship history and attitudes towards sex.

I don’t put a tonne of sex stuff on my dating profiles, to be honest. I hint at kink but I keep it vague and mild, and I don’t tell people I am GOTN (obviously). I actually hate this, and I would love to be far more up front, but the problem is if you go too up front you just attract a bunch of men who want to choke you and spit in your mouth without caring that you have a personality. I mention my love of sex, because I need to meet someone who’s down with that, but it’s not the headline. So with this guy, I needed to find out where he was at sex-and-relationship wise.

I asked a couple of questions to open up a discussion about this: so, tell me what you’re looking for from dating. What’s your story so far? Can you give me a potted history of your relationships? His answer was vague and awkward, which is fine: discussing these topics isn’t easy for all of us, and I appreciate that I am quite direct. But coupled with my directness is a genuine need to be with someone who’s willing to talk fucking. To identify their relationship needs and share them with emotional honesty. I can help someone through this, if they aren’t used to doing it, but I am too old now to submit to giving guys the 101 basics of relationship comms. That’s partly why I ask the question. It turned out this guy had very little experience of relationships (which is, again, fine, and actually if I’m honest quite exciting to me) but something gave me pause. It wasn’t that he couldn’t answer my questions, it’s that the act of asking caused him to shut down. Where before he’d been curious about every aspect of my life, in this huge, significant-to-me area it was almost like he didn’t want to know. He didn’t ask me anything about my past in return, and when I prompted him (“Would you like to hear my potted history?”) he told me I didn’t need to disclose that if I didn’t want to. Which is true and fair but… I wanted to! He didn’t want to hear it though, so fair enough. I didn’t push.

That’s why he was a ‘no’ though. Because our relationship history was so wildly different, and rather than exploring this as an interesting point of difference and seeing if we could connect by sharing alternate perspectives, instead he wanted to shut the conversation down. Fair play, no shade to him. There are other people who’ll approach sex and relationships in similar ways, and I hope he finds one he likes – he really is a very lovely dude. He’s just not for me.

How to avoid rejection limbo

In conclusion, if you’re wondering why you get rejected during so many dating interactions, you might want to consider that even though it may be mysterious to you, the answer is obvious to your date/match. I am aware that we don’t all have the same conversational style, and that ‘asking questions/showing curiosity/examining the way the person sitting opposite you thinks and feels’ does not come naturally to everyone. Often when I write posts like this, I get criticism along the lines of ‘but I am neurodivergent in X, Y, Z way, and that means it is impossible for me to have conversations like this!’. Fair play. I think this is a skill that people learn, rather than one we’re innately born with, but I’m not going to argue the point because I don’t know enough about your individual challenges and perspective. If that’s you, that’s you, and I’m not going to deny your lived experience of what you find difficult when dating. But I’m trying to very honestly respond to a concern that a fair few guys have thrown at me in comments here or on social media, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I posted bullshit rather than my earnest opinion.

Most of the times I’ve rejected (or ghosted, or unmatched, or just stopped messaging) men, I personally think the reason is extremely obvious. They:

• were rude or threatening
• dropped the conversation or
• were incompatible with me in a way that became apparent when I started asking questions.

Options 1 and 2 you can solve pretty easily: show your last messages to a friend and ask if they think you might have fallen into either of those categories. Assess the conversation and see if you think both you and your match were showing equal interest in each other. Examine your language and tone and consider whether – even if your intentions were lighthearted – you could have come across to a complete stranger as rude or threatening.

For option three? I am so sorry my loves, truly I am, but we’re going to have to return, once more, to the topic that will literally never go away until all men in London start approaching dates with curiosity…

ASK QUESTIONS!

I’ve had this post in draft for a while but not really worked out how to finish it off until yesterday, when I read this frankly terrifying story in Cosmo by Vera Papisova, about dating right-wing men to see if she could better understand them. She sat down with some appalling individuals and asked for their perspectives on dating, relationships and life in general. The piece ends on this beautifully-made point:

On our last date, we were walking through a park when I told him we couldn’t keep seeing each other, that I disagreed with most of his beliefs and didn’t align with the future he wanted. Confused, he replied that from his point of view, we actually agreed on most things.

No, I said, we didn’t, which he would know if he’d asked me any questions about myself. He still leaned in and tried to kiss me. We never saw each other again.

So there you have it. Ask questions! Be curious about the other person! Not because they might be a journalist secretly gathering material for a Cosmo story (though that’d be fun, I’d love to date a secret journalist), but because it’s more than possible the answer to ‘why aren’t we compatible’ is flashing bright neon signs that you just aren’t actually looking at. This particular dude went on at least two dates with a left-leaning journalist then spent so much time monologuing about his own right-wing opinions he was completely blindsided when she revealed that hers were different. It’s an extreme example, but it neatly illustrates a problem that I suspect is quite common, one you might want to think about if you repeatedly find yourself baffled as to why your matches aren’t working out.

Perhaps framing the boring advice to ‘ask questions’ in this way might help where my other attempts to hammer the message home have failed. Asking questions doesn’t just allow you to find out more about your date, it may also save you heartache and confusion down the line. Somewhere buried in your date’s responses there is probably a plausible answer to the question ‘why aren’t we compatible?’.

If you can’t bring yourself to ask questions out of curiosity, ask so you have a better understanding of why your date might say ‘no’ to seeing you again.

Postscript: TV show recommendations

*More on the ‘recommending me TV shows’ thing. Having pondered this a little, I actually think my issue with guys who do this comes down – again – to a lack of questions/curiosity. Too often these recommendations are framed in such a way that implies this guy knows me, even though he has not asked about my likes or listened to what I’ve said. If someone listened carefully when I talked about the sorts of things I enjoy (‘Oh, you like Taskmaster? Have you seen [other similar show where comedians Do A Thing]?’ I’d be very receptive. I have recently been reading a bunch of awesome books off the back of some gushing enthusiasm from a guy I’m banging. And they’re great, I love them. I love them because he hasn’t just recommended every single thing he loves, he has carefully selected recommendations based on things I’ve said I enjoy. Unfortunately, what tends to happen more often is that a guy raves about his favourite TV show then tells me ‘you HAVE to watch it, I think you’d LOVE it!’.

Well… why do you think that? What is it about what I have told you that makes this recommendation specific to my tastes? Usually the answer is ‘nothing’ – he doesn’t know anything about my tastes because he hasn’t asked or listened, he’s just telling me about something he loves and assuming I’ll feel the same way. And ‘projecting your opinions onto me, like I’m a blank slate on which you’re writing’ is not the same as connecting with the person I actually am.

It’s OK for you to love something that I don’t – in fact, it’s very common! And it can be fun to swap stories about the things we love, so each of us can bask in the joy the other person feels about Their Thing (as long as you give equal time to MY things too, of course). But when you assume I’ll love stuff just because you do, you’re telling me something significant about how you view me (and maybe women in general): that I am not an independent person with my own thoughts and opinions, I am valuable if and only if I am the same as you, or am willing to become so. Miss me with that.