My dating history...in 16 years of no-shows

We might start a series here, in an attempt to help me/everyone understand WTF is going on

I’ve been toying with doing an occasional series of my observations on dating for some time. Not the scintillating stuff. And not a big moan, per se. But something that contributes sociological relevance. And that might help all the lonely people.

Now. Brace yourselves:

I’ve been actively single for 16 years, which is to say I’ve been on all the apps - from the celebrity one to the sex one (not as risque as it says on the packet; more TK) and most in-between. And I’ve given the sad sport an unrelenting red-hot go with men spanning four generations and from all around the world. So I feel I’m qualified to make a few such observations.

Today I’ve decided to finally dive in. I’m going to start with this broad, introductory piece that will dangle some ideas. I thought you lot could perhaps steer me on what you’d like fleshed out further in the comments.

One of the reasons I’ve hesitated in writing the series is that I couldn’t find a way to do it that would not see me accused of “man bashing”. For, invariably, my experience as a heterosexual woman is a profound disappointment in the courtship behaviour of (single, CIS) men. And female disappointment tends to get written up as anything but what it actually is. I’m aware that the state of dating is bad for most involved and that these sorts of things take two tango-ers. However, I feel male dating behaviour, in particular, is both a symptom and symptomatic of bigger and more concerning themes that need to be discussed¹.

I may still be accused of “man bashing”, of course. And, admittedly, this first post does get off to a bit of a dark start. But it also reflects where things are at, tragically. Going forward I will try to report fairly (and present “both sides” where I can), to monitor any bias that stems from sheer hurt and dismay (of which I have a shit-tonne), and I absolutely invite you all to call me out where appropriate (and appropriately), and challenge my takes.

That said, I have also arrived at an age and in an era where I no longer have the tolerance and time, nor do I think it’s good for humanity, to continue to tip-toe around any kind of regressive, destructive behaviour from men. Like most women, I have done this all my life. I have apologised for feeling strongly (often in response to truly fucked things some men have done), watered down and heavily couched feminist (or just basic decency) truths, and at all turns accommodated and taken responsibility for the emotional responses of the men in my life (whether they’ve demanded it or not). I realise this does not help anyone. Too many freedoms are being lost, too many humans (including, and possibly especially, men) are suffering, and too many dangerous implications are at play. I now feel it’s my responsibility to speak straight, especially given the large number of women in their 30s and 40s who read this newsletter.

As I say, I’ll keep this post broad with open-ended ideas that can prompt questions. I will collate your feedback and see if there is a series in this.

For anyone new here, you might like to catch up on these previous gender conversations I’ve had, such as this post and these podcasts:

OK…shall we try this?

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I was in Barcelona on the weekend staying with an old friend and her husband. At lunch, she asked me, “Sarah, where does your pissed-offness with men come from?”.

We’d been talking about how I was, for many of my female friends, one of the only women in their circle who had not been raped or sexually abused. This for the men who are reading here, is something women do in fact, discuss. And in these terms. I had a conversation just last week with someone whose friend was “grateful” she’d been raped for the first time at 40 (she was more emotionally equipped to move on from it than if she’d been 20), as though it was an inevitability.

My friend also pointed to my healthy relationships with my four brothers (I refer to them regularly as “my best friends”), the robust - albeit, at times too-heated - dynamic with my Dad, and the fact I have a lot of male friends. Indeed, more than half of my closest friends are men. She wanted to know, then, what was the intimate injury that drove my frustration/disillusionment/disdain.

Dating, I said.

Dating, I feel, is ground zero for some very grim behaviours from blokes. I mean, online comments sections are dastardly and dangerous. And the continued rise in partner violence, gendered violence broadly, and the various world events right now speak for themselves. But dating is where the fears and psychological perversions that inform these crimes are lived out in an everyday, insidious and very gaslight-able way for many women. Which is not new. The most potent and polarising aspects of the human experience have always surfaced in the interplay between the two sexes (which is not to disregard the various gender and sex identities that exist between and beyond these).

To emphasise, my experience growing up with boys was healthy. Or, simply a non-issue. I went to a co-ed public school in a non-affluent area. The boys at my school took up oxygen by being relentlessly naughty. Flipside, they were super funny. They were not malicious nor misogynistic, IME. I don’t recall being teased or taunted by them; we partnered just fine with Bunsen burner projects and bush dancing (on sports days, in the hall, when it was raining), and we all hung out together on the oval at lunch.

What dating could look like if we got ourselves sorted Pricilla DuPreez.

My first real experiences with male power abuse were in late high school when I met boys from the private, single-sex schools on the communal buses into “town” and at parties. And, again, when I went to university. Law school was dominated by young men with privileged schooling who I found to make snide remarks, physically threaten me and had a rep for raping or assaulting women².

As I got older, and up to the present day, I’ve marvelled at how the collective behaviour of male public figures, and men in positions of power in general, has descended. There is much to say on this, which we might get to in this context, but as I said to a guy I met on the train on my way to Barcelona the other day, “If aliens came down from outer space today, I reckon they’d go, ‘What’s with these ‘men humans’? They seem to have everything their way, yet are hellbent on fucking everything up…for everyone’”.

The aliens might have observed, for instance, the stabbing of five women in a mall in Sydney last week (the crime was confirmed by police as gender-targeted); the media and online response to the Bruce Lehrmann rape case, also in Australia; America’s fast-regressing abortion laws; Putin; Trump; Netanyahu; Musk; Zuckerberg; and the bloody rest.

But most men are actually not having everything their way. And this is the problem.

Which brings us back to dating.

I explained to my friend and her very kind and open-minded husband at lunch on the weekend that my experiences trying to connect with men in a romantic sense have left me feeling betrayed, hurt and disrespected to an extent I struggle to fathom. And I feel it’s related to the fact that men are feeling that they are no longer having things their way. The world is changing in a way that is affecting the male stereotype seismically and blokes have not had role modelling for the required adjustment. Which is seeing men drop out of school, turn right-wing, fall down conspiracy holes, withdraw from the world and into gaming and blame women and feminism for most of it, stuff we’ve covered here before.

As a 58-year-old man yelled at me on a date about a year ago, banging his fist on the cafe table and after telling me feminists were ruining everything (a standout topic for a first date), “I. Just. Don’t. Like. It.”.

OK. Got. It.

Obviously, the dating world captures the behaviour of single men only (I’d argue, however, that dating dynamics have seeped out into other relationships). I also acknowledge dating now largely happens online, which sees the whole picture manipulated by algorithmic imperatives and the pecuniary interests of the apps’ shareholders. Broadly, online anything brings out the worst of human nature. Mostly it enables and encourages what I call in This One Wild and Precious Life, “small human” behaviour - avoidance (of discomfort, responsibility and, well, life), lack of respect for difference, and blaming others when the smallness, and avoidance, in oneself becomes apparent. When it comes to dating, this is dialled up, inverted and clusterfucked even further. The avoidance piece, and what accompanies it (anger and blame, eventually), is particularly potent, destructive and disappointing with men.

OK, so it is here I’m going to put this down on record:

Before moving to Paris I had 21 no-shows from men in a row. A true and ridiculous story!

Avoidance truly is the theme that arises for me in the space. Over and over again. In all kinds of lame flavours.

Twenty-one! Questions beg, right? Here are some answers.

Some of these men simply didn’t show up at the organised (mostly by me) time and place. Yep, I’d be sitting there on my own, without a call or text, or a human, or an explanation. Others cancelled at the last minute (as in, five minutes before), by text. Some would ghost after an initial topline agreement to meet. A kind of blancmange no-show that went like this: I might suggest we meet Tuesday; Tuesday afternoon would come around and I, again, the sole agent in this non-burgeoning relationship, would check in to see if we were still meeting that evening. I’d get no reply. Perhaps two weeks later I might get a random text, “Hey! Was really hectic at work…some heavy stuff going down…what’s up?” Things are often “hectic” and “heavy” in the lives of online dating men.

I could and probably should take it as a prompt to have a good hard look at myself and my faults - I am the common denominator, afterall. Except for the fact these blokes haven’t actually met me!

I will also, while I’m being granular, flag that I can count on two hands at most (in 16 years) the number of times a man has set the concrete time and place for a date³. I will sometimes get a, “Hey! We should have a drink somewhere sometime.” To which I really really want to reply, “Somewhere and sometime sounds great”⁴. But invariably I have to suck up the non-action and do the risky leg work myself (putting something concrete on the line exposes you to rejection). Because if I don’t, nothing happens. And I hate nothing. Plus, I’m busy and don’t have time for dumb, awkward games.

Of course, paradoxically and spleen-twistingly, this is likely to see men, sigh, ghost me (not answer, or come back a week later with the hectic/heavy vibes). Because, I’m told⁵, my concreteness threatens them.

(PS. I’m sharing these details for all of you who’s experienced the same, so you can feel less alone in your flailing esteem.)

You might want to ask me why I keep trying and going back into the pit. Many of my friends do.

From speaking to the few men who have shown up on dates with me, women are also behaving avoidantly in the dating world. But I would say this: Cautiousness is somewhat the evolutionary prerogative of women. For a bunch of survival-based reasons, women have needed to sit back to assess the mettle of a man before spending vulnerable one-on-one time with him. She has more to lose and still does. She runs the risk of being left pregnant or being physically overpowered. A ticking biological clock also means she has to make the right choices in narrow windows. Men from previous generations understood this and accepted the job of courting, of doing a bit of a peacock dance before the woman, so that she could make a safe decision for herself and the procreative impulse. Obviously, there is a lot more that can be said on this point. Or you might like to just shoot me down for essentialising…

The main sociological theme that arises from all of the above, however, is this idea of avoidance. And, as I have touched on only briefly, the idea of the world having changed in such a way that it’s making a lot of men feel like they are losing, missing out and need to reclaim territory. These are very valid fears and feelings that need to be addressed, of course.

As I say, all parties doing the dating dance are often behaving sub-optimally and the online-ness of it all has a big part to play in drawing out the bad behaviour. No one is to blame; blame will get us nowhere. But we do need to do better, to rise out of the avoidance. It’s seeing us all miss out on life. And miss out on love FFS!!! I feel men in particular need to find a way to better cope with the situation, specifically when they’re called out, which, I find, generally results in further avoidance, refusal to communiate, gaslighting, blame and aggression. Which stops anything from going anywhere.

To add to the grab-bag of ideas I’ve planted here:

• One of the subgroups to be most detrimentally affected by contemporary dating culture is educated, successful women. This can be explained by the sociological phenomenon of hypergamy, which we can cover down the track…

• Very relatedly, The Atlantic this week referred to a theme paralleling male avoidance that’s being demonstrated in “TV’s New Wave of Difficult Men”, including Netflix’s Tom Ripley in the Ripley series (which I’m finding chilling; I’m halfway through; not sure if I’ll make it all the way).

  “The current state of masculinity on TV is one of alienation. These shows…offer up heroes who feel resolutely other, isolated and disconnected and driven to acts of baroque violence that they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy.

• Also very relatedly, Ken won’t die. As in, Barbie’s Ken. Ken who became bigger than Barbie, ironically for his role as other. Ken who doesn’t know who he is and copes by trying to dominate and blame women and, when this fails, turns to Barbie to fix him. I find this telling as a trope.

• The news from last week of a (another) wave of young women being punched in the face by random men in New York. (What would the aliens think?)

• Another wave (that I’ve noticed) of women speaking out on refusing to adhere to “good girl” behaviour, resulting in unhinged abuse from men.

  Aubrey Hirsch
  wrote about the abuse she copped after the founder of the Proud Boys did a YouTube video abusing her for a feminist comic she drew. Michelle Albanes-Davis at
  Stir the Pot
  wrote about the implications of her recent dropping of her “good girl” persona.
  Elise Loehnen
  writes about this too.

• Andrew Huberman, one of the most powerful male role models on the planet, lands in trouble for his avoidant and gaslighting behaviour… and mostly avoids it all. (There is much commentary online about how he and his fans are pretending it didn’t happen.)

Amid all this, we are learning that dating apps are on the decline - going through “platform decay”. Which makes me wonder, what is to come next? I’m hoping for better.

Again, I own the fact that this post dumps a lot of slightly spicy - and unfinished - takes on the page. I also own the fact that it has turned out to be a bit of a moan, even though I pledged at the top to avoid this (which is not unrelated to the fact I was stood up twice in 24 hours on the weekend; I’m the mug - both times were by men who’d done it to me before). I’d like to also stress that the focus here is not my personal situation…I tell my stories to get discussion going. I care more about, as I say, the sociological observations to be had. I also want to test where the interest lies and will hone in more sensitively and productively (and positively) on themes that attract your interest down the track.

Sarah xx

1. Plus, I feel I’ve read and heard so much about the male perspective on dating via conservative commentators and incel apologists such as Jordan Peterson and to some extent

Rob Henderson

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2. I was the women’s officer at the Australian National University in my second year and ran a year-long campaign targeting rape on campus, particularly in the residential colleges where students from private, single-sex schools tended to reside. Chanel Contos’ Teach Me Consent campaign has also identified these privileged backgrounds as the most problematic.

3. And most of these *actually* proactive invites have come from European men.

4. I did once. Never heard back from the dude.

5. I have, over the years, been able to revisit some of my ghosts and ask them outright.