Rise! Rise! Riiiiiiiiiiise!

While I have been taking a bit of a break from dissecting my dating life in order to work on a few other projects, an article came across my feeds this week that I could not ignore. I'm sure many of you have seen it as it is one of these pop-psychology pieces that people love to get themselves into a tizzy over. I am going to take this article as fact without running my own studies for several reasons one of which is that my entire life is a twisted psychological study and another being that I have a very hard time doing work I don't get paid for. I also have a hard time doing work I get paid for. That's all a part of the twisted psychological experiment.

The article by Greg Matos can be found here and it examines the phenomena of younger and middle aged men finding themselves alone. It qualifies that this applies only to heterosexual men which it doesn't really need to point out because we all recognize garbage when we smell it.

It breaks down the reasons into three categories:

-dating apps that are over populated by men

-skills deficits

-relationship standards.

Oh my gosh you guys I'm going to have so much fun writing this one that I'm getting that feeling when you get out of your car at Six Flags and you hear someone screaming in the distance.

I've only ever been on one dating app and in that case there were more men then there were women. I understand from this article that this is not the case on the Tindrs and Bumbles of the world, which makes sense when you consider the following two reasons.

But first, a history lesson.

Disclaimer: I did not fact check this and I don't claim to be expert. I just spent all of my formative years reading historical fiction.

Starting with the development of 'the common era' in about 1 CE until around 1500 CE women needed men. Men hunted and gathered and farmed and fought for the food. No man= no food. And you needed that food to survive until tomorrow and the next day and until you were eighteen and you died of an ear infection and your town through a parade to honor you for being the oldest living member of the country in history. Women are also 99% more rapeable then men are and also needed the protection of men from other men. So, no one was very choosy. You saw a man. He brought you a piece of chicken. You thought, "Well, I really need the protein" so you got married. And, in the long term it didn't really matter because thanks to childbed fever most marriages lasted a shorter time than high school. Remember that teacher you despised in high school and how little you think about them now? That's your husband in the year 700 on wife #3.

Then around 1500ish things got a little easier. People began living in big cities and developing food supply chains. You didn't necessarily need a man who could catch a rabbit with his hands and bite its head off-now you might want someone who works in the King's court and is served rabbit with the head long gone. Money and land ownership were the ways of the time and the farther you could get from the people who were actually producing the food, the better. Therefore you looked for someone with status. Could you earn status? Of course not, you're a disgusting woman with a tiny brain who is controlled by her hysterical body parts. Ok but could my husband earn status? Probably not. God gives out status at birth to certain people who finagled their way into royalty at one time or another, married their cousins and made more royalty. God loves people who marry their cousins, thats why he blesses those babies with two heads, five eyes, and one big leg. So now the formula is you see a man. He has some form of status. You try to get him to want you. He wants you. You get that status. You are married for eight happy years until the plague gets you both.

Industrial Revolution. We are making new things and we are making them fast. We also keep losing our workers to these massive wars where we send boys to die so *deep breath* we are going to hire some women. Not good women! Just the trash immigrant ones or ones who are super poor. And we are going to pay them 5 cents a year because women have no idea how to manage their money. People with status will still marry each other but it's getting easier to get status-for example you can knock the foreman of your factory into one of the machines and let him get crushed to death and take over the factory and make a lot of money and buy your way into status. And now women are looking for men who make more than they do and can manage their money and free them from having to work by chaining them to a kitchen in the suburbs. Also, due to the constant wars, there is a shortage of men with all of their limbs, so you take what you can get, even if he does finish an entire bottle of whiskey every night and sob about the trenches.

But a few women worked really hard or asked their dads to promote them and they have real jobs with enough money to live. They can get their own apartments and pay for their own food. They can buy guns to stop people from raping them. Men saw this happening and realized that they had one last to trick women into being with them: job status. Most companies were still run by men and had men in upper management so, to make sure they could still have women, many of those men required women to perform acts outside of their job descriptions in order to gain any status. A lot of times those women ended up marrying those men because the unhealthy power dynamic was already there and that can take years to develop in a marriage.

And then the woke Millennials and Gen Z'ers arrived and were like "we do not like this" and they started their movements and revolts and the world changed a little more.

So today we don't need men to get food, women can work at almost any job and buy themselves food. We don't need men for protection because they apparently sell guns everywhere to literally anyone who wants one, and we don't need men for status because being a woman is a status all its own. Companies want to have women in high positions so that they can print fancy brochures telling other companies that they have women in high positions. Some of them even make up positions like "Supreme Leader" or "Darth Sith Lord" so that they can promote even more women.

And now we get to today and to the women who were raised in a world where they could do anything by themselves.

And Psychology today tells us that there is a "skill deficit" between men and women.

From the article:For men, this means a relationship skills gap that, if not addressed, will likely lead to fewer dating opportunities, less patience for poor communication skills, and longer periods of being single. The problem for men is that emotional connection is the lifeblood of healthy, long-term love. Emotional connection requires all the skills that families are still not consistently teaching their young boys.

Excuse me, I had to go change underwear because I peed myself laughing. Twice.

The skill deficit is not the one that women had where they physically could not hunt the dinner. No this one is that men have no relationship skills. They are discovering that you need emotional connection to be in a relationship where one person isn't completely dependent on the other and they have absolutely no clue how to provide that emotional connection.

It's funny and very very sad. It's why I have so many articles about guys treating me like an afterthought. They literally don't know how to treat people well. It's why in the last week I've gotten sent three different guys who, while they may be sweet, still have the maturity and emotional sensibility of eight year olds. I jump between the brash angry commitment-phobes who think the problem is the girls and even when the man in the spooky mask stabs them still won't believe that the call was coming from inside the house-and the adorable mommy's boys who can't handle any bumps in the road because they've frozen their development at a time when it was fine for someone else to take care of them.

But Psychology Today gives us more. They also say that the problem is with relationship standards: With so many options, it’s not surprising that women are increasingly selective. I [speak] with hundreds of audience members every week; I hear recurring dating themes from women between the ages of 25 and 45: They prefer men who are emotionally available, good communicators, and share similar values.

Ok women this one is on you. How dare you. How dare you want more? How dare you steal that car Ronald Weasley? How DARE you want a guy so perfect that he can communicate. This is not Cinderella ladies! This is the real world and you need to lower your expectations from Ryan Gosling down. Don't expect your partner to be emotionally available or share your values, just be grateful that he is doing his best at....

...being a man?

having a penis?

What exactly else are they bringing to the table at that point?

I can work and make a good living where I can occasionally eat steak and go on vacation. I can rent my own apartment and even buy a house (though that's a pipe dream in this housing economy.) I can call up a doctor who will work with me to get the sugar, butter, and flour needed to make a baby by myself. I could then raise the baby by myself and, with all the daddy issues out there, the baby might even be better off.

So, since we all don't really need men anymore we've raised our standards to the impossibly high things that we used to just dream about. Like basic human communication.

And then in shidduchim I'm told that I'm too picky. That I don't really know what I want. That I must have done something to make him not want me. That I turn down too many resumes. That I should give more guys a chance. That real life guys aren't going to be Edward Cullen.

I have shocking news for all of you: I'm a pretty smart person. I guess the twist in movies long before it happens (except in Frozen that one really got me,) I read highbrow books, I was a national merit scholar finalist and I finally figured out how to get the child safety lock off of the Advil. So when I make a decision about my dating life I'm almost always right. I do have seven and a half years of experience here-more than a lot of people will ever have.

And I recognize that wanting communication, shared values, and emotional availability is NOT searching for Prince Charming. It is the very least of what I deserve.