Men Are Afraid To Date. Is Manliness To Blame?

A decade ago, the world of dating seemed effervescent. People moved from the humidity of chatrooms, covert, fertile and throbbing to a fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned environment of dating apps. It apparently opened the doors of desire and people could now freely admit to wanting sex and wanting to play. Women could speak with less hesitation of being sexual beings too.Rather than the elaborate stalking, repressed hints, years-long waiting that had passed for romance, amorous intentions could be stated clearly and people could either swipe right or left. How airy that all seemed and how everyone thought it surely signalled a sexual revolution.Cut to 2025 and all around us we are all being asked to discuss the crisis in masculinity. Its dark edge is the manosphere, with its cellarful of incels. On the lightest side is one of the most hilarious TikToks in recent times by a French user called @gettothepointbro who broke down why dating a girl who’s been single for some time is not romance, it’s an extreme sport for your self-esteem.Among his many points of hilariously good analysis were, “You are not competing with other guys, you’re competing with her weighted blanket, her peace, her cat named Chairman Meeow” and “Are you ok? She’s fine, she’s just booked a solo trip to Iceland while you were still composing your good morning text.”Ask a man if men are anxious about dating and they won’t hesitate a minute before they say yes. Why? #MeToo will come the reply. “Earlier you didn’t get outed for your behaviour” said 45-year-old N to me. “You didn’t get caught so to speak. Now you will. So you are constantly fearful of making a mistake.”Like dating apps #MeToo brought sex out of the closet but in a very different way. If one thing revealed the extent of everyone’s desires, the other revealed the seamy side of sexism within the world of sex. Things people routinely got away with in private were now discussed with a deadly granularity in public.For a long time, women put up with relationships that were mediocre to abusive, because the idea of being single or unattached was so stigmatised. A single man was a man about town, refusing to be tied down. Single women were merely un-chosen. A lot has happened to change that.Women also form bonds with other people and have emotionally sustaining lives without romance — and this allows them to choose the lightness of being single over the heaviness of a bad relationship more easily.The fact that men seem paralysed by this, is partly on men. That they cannot find a way to be more vulnerable and curious on dates instead of holding forth, is a frequent complaint. In fact it’s also an occasional complaint from men about other men. So, at times the discussion about masculine anxiety can start to sound like a tiresome excuse for not changing.But men’s dating anxieties also hint at a context beyond gender. It is the larger context of how dating apps have formatted all of intimate culture, instead of merely being the door to adventure. M, a good-looking young writer, told me, “I’m the kind of guy who easily gets matches on dating apps” — because he was tall and girls really like that. M went on many dates but ennui set in once he knew he could always win and winning meant that the night ended in sex.“Isn’t it possible to just meet each other for no reason than the pleasure of the other’s company?” I asked him. “It may be, but the date always goes a certain way — it’s like you are expected to make a move, otherwise the woman feels you don’t like her. So, you feel pressured to express the desire for a hook-up.”A lot of dating culture today has become a form of one up-manship, a race to not fall in love, to not be soft, not to be seen as needing and hence to risk being rejected.Online determines so much of how we think of life offline. The analysis of red flags and green flags has been valuable to undoing the insufficiencies of the past. But as the only conversation we have about intimacy, can it really lead us to any kind of pleasure and joy?Talking to men about their dating app experiences does reveal that a parallel conversation on what is expected from men in romance by women has not quite happened. V, a quintessential sweet guy, said, “Women I meet want me to be a good guy, but they also want me to be that guy who pays for things, makes the first move, and impresses her friends. But I get it, they have had so many bad experiences and so much trauma from horrible male behaviour that now they feel like fine, I’m not going to take men too seriously. But it doesn’t feel good. And you keep thinking, am I undateable?”Romance is about pleasure. Love is about uncertainty, a sweet sharpness. An algorithmic world drilling our psyches with stories of success, makes us adversaries, not lovers. Finding a way out, might be the adventure quest of our times.The writer is founder, Agents of Ishq