Last week, The New York Times published an article from Jean Garnett titled “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” which was designed to provoke heated discussion. As Garnett recounts her ending an open marriage, her adventures in dating, and her struggles with male behavior, the heated discussion erupted. Some were taken with how aggravating she finds dating men, how she throws around a term called “heterofatalism” to describe such aggravation, and how she supposedly sizes up men’s faults to a T. Others—particularly online men—slammed her article for being whiny, unfair, and leaden with academic prose that supposedly reveals she deserves to be lonely.
In my mind, both The New York Times’ framing of this piece and the chatter about it are misguided. This doesn’t mean the article’s good, just that people aren’t grappling with what it’s actually doing. Garnett isn’t really arguing that men or even desiring men are her troubles. Rather, she’s working through why dating’s so hard. Part of her trouble comes from men, but she also seems aware that part of trouble comes from herself—that no one sex is responsible for the romantic struggles of both sexes. For evidence, I’d point to the end of her piece, where she explains that she showed a draft of her article to a male friend who told her he feels she’s simplifying men and women into easy villains and heroes. Garnett doesn’t significantly push back against this critique, which she would if her sole purpose was to demonize all men.
However, just because people are uncharitable to an author’s aims doesn’t mean the author pulls those aims off. And that’s my issue with Garnett’s work. While she tries to understand how men and women both approach contemporary romance in unsatisfying and unappealing ways, she’s more clear-eyed about how the men contribute to this problem. She’s very perceptive, for example, about how anxiety has become an excuse for some men to get out of dates or how a certain guy only cares about consent to avoid being MeToo’d.
Sadly, Garnett lacks the same crystal, soul-piercing clarity about herself and her fellow women. Look at how she treats her female friend handling a male lawyer choosing to end things because she asked him to text back more often:
“It was rly nice,” a close friend texted me recently, reporting on her third date with a lawyer. “He’s really really sweet and nice to me and good at sex. No doubt something humiliating and nightmarish will occur soon.” On more than one occasion, when my friend checked in with the lawyer to confirm tentative plans, he did not respond to her for many hours, or even a day. Granted, he worked a punishing schedule, but, my friend reasoned, it takes 90 seconds to send a quick reply. The dissonance between his caring and attentive in-person behavior and these silences confused her, and she mentioned this to him. The lawyer was sorry he had kept her waiting — he hadn’t meant to — but, he said, her complaint had got him thinking: He unfortunately wasn’t able to escalate whatever was happening between them into a “relationship.” My friend clarified that she had not been asking to escalate anything, merely expressing a need for clarity about plans. He understood that, he said, but their “communication skills” were obviously too different for them to continue dating.
The humiliating and nightmarish part, she explained to me, was not so much the rejection as being cast against her will as “woman eager for relationship.” In her memoir, “Fierce Attachments,” Vivian Gornick describes the anguish of being ignored by a lover to her female friend: “What I couldn’t absorb,” she writes, “was his plunging us back into the cruelty of old-fashioned man-woman stuff, turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call that never comes and himself into the man who must avoid the woman who is waiting.”
What I find absorbing here is how easily Garnett buys her friend’s claim that what’s “humiliating” and “nightmarish” about the lawyer breaking up with her is some abstract notion about outdated stereotypes. Garnett sees through men but decides not to see that her friend hurts because someone she found “nice,” “sweet,” and “good at sex” rejected her. She chooses to believe that her friend’s only problem with this man’s communication is that he apparently gives her reasons to worry he will flake despite going on three successful dates with her. And finally, Garnett accepts that it was “humiliating” and “nightmarish” for this sexy and good-natured guy to assume love would be why her friend asks for more communication, interest, and time.
Garnett so commits to her friend’s point-of-view that she immediately turns towards how it reveals some vague abstraction about patriarchy. That turn towards abstraction continues later when Garnett cites philosopher Ellie Anderson to explain that her friend performed “hermeneutic labor,” labor unique to women who must “interpret mystifying male cues.” I know saying “men go through that too” is tired. But men do seriously go through hermeneutic labor too.
Speaking of men going through the same things as Garnett’s friend, the reason I feel I know what she went through is because I’ve been in her position and responded the same way. I’ve been the man asking a girl to clarify plans, realizing that she has no romantic interest, and yelling to myself about how “the real issue is the lack of communication.” I’ve done that a lot since joining dating apps over a year ago. And it’s true, of course. Poor communication sucks and makes rejection worse. But here’s the thing: promptly communicated rejection sucks too. I had to accept that when a girl told me she wasn’t interested right after a date a few months ago. It’s the rejection that creates misery and pain, humiliation and nightmares even though it rationally shouldn’t.
Garnett and her friend are committing the same ego-driven mistake I did when it came to rejection, the same ego-driven mistake I probably still make in other aspects of romance, the same ego-driven mistake that defines so much of our current dating discourse. That mistake? So many of us think we’re above the shallow, old-fashioned, and basic emotions that come with romance, that we can’t possibly hurt for the same reasons everyone else failing to find love hurts. No, we are so complex that our romantic struggles must be complicated.
So we tell ourselves things like: we’re not lonely; we’re just looking for a partner in a world where capitalism has turned even these interactions transactional. Men aren’t afraid to make a move; they’re merely unsure what romantic gestures are permitted in the post-MeToo era. Women aren’t ever eager for a relationship; they just can’t decipher if you’re going to blow them off for a date when you haven’t before. And don’t put in the paper that we men and women can be heartbroken by rejection; we’re merely heterofatalistic—rejection is fine, just fine.
These grand ideas about social issues around dating aren’t necessarily false. But they don’t justify how our modern dating discourse elevates head-scratching social issues as the cause of our romantic misery when it’s actually the “small” aspects outlined above: loneliness, fear, and rejection. These social issues can’t mask the hollowness of our dating conversations, how they try to convince us we’re above caring for the very things we search for, like acceptance and love.
That’s the crucial problem with “The Trouble with Wanting Men.” It’s the problem that Garnett as the woman who wrote the piece and her friend face, that all women who agree with the article in relation to men deal with, that all men who have an essay like this about women wrestle with, that all gays, lesbians, and anyone else who could compose a similar piece are confronted by. Everyone thinks they can transcend feelings like loneliness, heartbreak, anxiety, heat, passion, and love when most can’t.
We do experience these emotions and it’s better to accept that. Doing so allows us to understand why dating’s so hard, complicated, and fraught when it should be straightforward: because we have vivid and immense stakes in romance, stakes like love for so many or heat for those hooking up. Accepting this is good because it gives us power to overcome heartbreak, sexual frustration, loneliness, and anger in dating by focusing on what desires drive us towards romance—like heat, passion, and love—and leaning on those hopes.
People who don’t accept this miss such benefits. A good example is when Garnett addresses the previously mentioned criticism from her male friend. He too singles out as naïve her rush to accept her female friend’s characterization of the lawyer. Garnett takes her male friend’s criticism seriously for a moment, even discussing how the essay’s abstraction might be hiding plain reality from her. But then, unwilling to wield a scalpel on any woman’s mind or heart as she does with men, she catalogues more abstractions to explain what romantically plagues her, her friend, and other women.
So heterofatalism returns. We also hear that straight romances are anachronistic, bad queer romances are freeing, and the existence of a vague solution to all this called the “intersubjective third”—which I doubt will replace “happily ever after” as a catchphrase anytime soon. Garnett doesn’t burrow into women’s psyches or souls to humbly discover how the “small misfortunes” in romance upset them and the “small benefits” excite them, then. Her writing’s maddening and...ultimately forgivable. Many of us are also too proud to admit that we believe in love and suffer because we can’t grasp it; we’d all rather be heterofatalistic.