The Modern Man Mismatch: Why Successful Women Keep Picking the Wrong Men

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I ordered a man in the mail.

The request letter read: Caring, reliable, and loving. Not dashing, but just handsome enough to show significant improvement after a makeover. Deep voice, humorous and intelligent (at least a pinch of each).

A week later, a package arrived at the doorstep of my classroom.

The label read “n/hot for you”, which didn’t surprise me, because my name is often misspelled. Inside the box, I found disrespect, social anxiety, and the ability to use his lack of time management as an excuse for narcissism. Finally, a mediocre look, blurred by an irresistible pair of leather shoes and a white shirt.

Though I didn’t like that the “on” button had obviously been pressed by nail-polished fingers before, I loved how broken he looked. Fashionable, with just enough passion to look stern and the potential to reveal a truly fucked up past. And then there was that, almost-never-there smile and the deep voice. Dang, he really was perfect!

But the moment I turned him on, he didn’t move an inch. I had to ask him to do anything at all, and soon I realized that I had mistaken his passion for leaving likes on videos of cute dogs and panda-bears, for care and love. Oppsie, my mistake.

And so, as I view the scam that I have been eyeing for too long, I can’t help but ask: Who DID order this? Was it really me? Or someone else? Oh, please, let it be someone else for god’s sake.

That was when I embarked on a journey to find who this idiot belonged to. And more importantly, why he had ended up in my classroom, only to live in my head rent-free.

Attraction or care-syndrome?

Over a generous cup of strawberry juice, my friend recently murmured:

“I really don’t get why we (women) find men attractive. Not even their balls are, I mean, they are gross at best. And those are really all that makes them special afterall.”

I, having seriously grieved my toxic heterosexuality, could not agree more.

Soon after, I received a reel saying: If sexuality is a choice, why do heterosexual women still choose men? And it seriously got me thinking: Why the heck do we?

Online, most answers are simple and sexist: Women are hormonally primed to look for the providers of the “best genes”. We see a tall man with muscles and hands that could strangle a bear, and our ovaries start vibrating like your phone in the middle of a meeting.

And yet some women seem to sign out of this system. Without gynocological surgery. They argue that most of it is social conditioning, which I can only agree with. From early childhood, we readily ingest the flood of societal standards thrown at our feet, and as I have already previously stated, this conditioning determines that women have more evolutionary worth and yet risk than men.

I recently reviewed my dreadful mis-delivery with an international friend. After a long time of hearing stories about the contents of my package, she had finally, coincidentally, met the guy in question.

To no one’s surprise, she thought he was boring. She felt the same wall of self-protection during her conversations, paired with a high level of ego and low ability to empathise. Lastly, her conversation yielded no further insights but a vague interpretation of star-signs and a fact I already knew: That he was very convinced men and women should be friends.

The misunderstanding here is, however, that he is not particularly interested in me, and I was not particularly interested in being friends with him. I was dead set on being either everything or nothing, and for a good reason, if I might add. The reason being that no matter of him trying to hide it would obscure how obviously broken he was.

A true case of fixer-upper with lots of loose screws, but at least the walls and doors seemed reusable. Had he, for a split second, taken the time to not cover the holes, he might have noticed that luck (or the devil, both are equally possible) had sent him to the doorstep of a literal therapist.

And what did he do? Run.

The best learning from this talk with my best friend, who had admittedly always warned me of this package (just like everyone I know, ironically), was that she firmly kept delivering evidence for her favorite statement:

“It is funny how you like this guy, when he is literally everything you don’t want”.

Joke’s on her, because besides him being clever and driven (which is a comment often made by documentary narrators about pigs and monkeys), nothing I had ordered matched his description.

One might thus argue that there was nothing for me to be attracted to. He is not tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular, and thus not a good choice in terms of genes. He is clever, but just enough to make himself seem intelligent, which can usually be traced to a lack of self-esteem. He didn’t seem to be more loving or caring than a peanut, BUT the devil is in the details after all:

It turns out, my requests must have ended up in the “I am” column rather than the “I am looking for” category. And thus, instead of ordering a guy who was loving, caring, and reliable, I ordered the opposite. One that needed love, care, and a reliable person to start a long process of mending broken pieces.

To summarize my metaphors, here is the baseline of what I am trying to point out: I think in a modern world of GenZ women who have choices far beyond the Ford Model T’s we have access to, we are no longer slaves to our hormones. Our ovaries don’t dictate our perception, and we can unlearn social conditioning.

What fucks with us in today’s society is that we provide to ourselves what men used to provide in previous generations. Instead of looking for a “safe haven,” we are one for ourselves and attract those men who look for a stable woman.

And don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this, as long as women don’t start victimizing their standards for partners in favor of being “the bigger person” or acting like a distorted image of a feminist. To be a feminist woman doesn’t mean to sacrifice your standards and provide for a man. This is just another, more creative way of serving the man at your side.

A hefty sum for returns

Now I have established the following points:

The package was delivered correctly, and it was, though mistakenly, ordered by me. Fortunately for me, the content, if not tended to, tries to evade by itself and is generally very unaware of me. So seriously, how hard could it be to send the damn thing back? Let’s not forget, he is one in several billion anyway.

Turns out, it is HARD, if said guy has cloned himself into a better version living rent-free in your brain.

Here are some interesting outcomes of research that lay the foundation for why forgetting your favorite case of a broken man might be hard. Firstly, hormonally, love in men is known to be more reliant on vasopressin, a hormone that is effective after a long time of frequent exposure, mostly multiple weeks or months. Thus, men might take some time to actually “love” a woman. Whatever that means anyway.

For women, oxytocin plays an important role in falling in love, and it is triggered by physical touch, with a strong prevalence in sex and orgasm. This is notably less time-consuming. At the same time, while studies suggest that women might be using more neural networks in generating ideas, men have been rated as more creative in self-reported scales, especially when rating their own creativity. *cough, narcissists, cough*

This higher mental engagement in imaginary settings might also be related to why women have a better ability to recall emotional events and are able to retrieve more vivid memories. It is thus clear that the underlying processes in creativity in both genders differ, with women being more reliant on their emotional pathways.

This might also explain why most cases of Takatsubo cardiomyopathy, also known as “broken heart syndrome,” are to be found in women. Most cases of this disease occur in elderly women who experience a sudden weakening of the heart muscle, particularly in the left ventricle, which is induced by emotional or physical stress. Such a condition can, in severe cases, even lead to cardiac arrest and thus death.

Interestingly, most elderly women whose symptoms are usually induced by emotional stress, such as the death of a loved one, have a very low likelihood of dying of Takatsubo cardiomyopathy. Yet though far fewer men are affected, once they experience “broken heart syndrome,” they are at a far higher risk of death. Eventhough most men who are diagnosed are much younger, they are at a significantly higher risk of cardiac arrest.

Why, you might ask? Well, that is because while elderly women develop Takatsubo cardiomyopathy due to emotional stress, younger men usually develop it due to an unforeseen illness or otherwise induced stress that is directly related to their own health and well-being.

In short: If men suffer from a broken heart, they might actually die. But don’t worry, you’re not at risk of actually breaking a man’s heart unless you disable him. In which case, he will grieve for the life he never had and not you. In either case, it never was and never will be about you.

So, because of my neurological ability to vividly and emotionally remember moments, which my “packaged delivery” might have never deemed important, I CAN’T SEND HIM BACK. He might not think or even remember half of our conversations, but I do.

Finally, women also have a heightened ability to remember the contents of their dreams. If you wake up different women in the middle of a dream, 95% will be able to retell the story, whereas only 80% of men can.

Thus, I am absolutely positive the man in my package, who walked in through my emotional memories, got stuck in my vivid imagination and built a house in my unforgettable dreams, is not paying any rent. He didn’t buy a ticket for the ride and yet sits in the fucking passenger seat. Front row, with ample legspace. God damn it…

The extinction of the “handyman”

And so, since the package was for me after all and I cannot return it, all I can do is try to hide the box (like a dead body) to throw it in the trash later, or give it to a friend. I mean, in today’s day and age, it would be unethical to throw away a perfectly new product. Save the turtles, right?

But that means I need to order another model, because I am not one to give up easily. Especially since not all my past deliveries have been trash. Some actually turned into friends, and though that is not what I ordered, at least it is a sort of recycling?!

But the more I look at the catalogue, the more I realize that the selection of men has shrunk. Like, hopefully most women, I have one man in my life who seems like a somewhat reliable blueprint of what I want and don’t want in a man, and that is: My dad.

Hold your horses. Yes, I love my dad. Yes, I am a daddy’s girl, and yes, I am proud of that.

No, I would not want to be with a man “just like” my dad (sorry, old pal). No, I don’t find older men attractive. No, I won’t excuse myself for having the mildest standards in my choice of men based on a man who showed me actual love and care. Sorry, not sorry.

So what I mean when I say I want a model that is similar to my dad is that I want a man who actually gives a shit about me. One who sees me as his priority and would buy me my favorite food or listen to me without judgment. Isn’t that all kinda basic? Isn’t it sad that the only male reference I have for this is either my dad or gay friends?

This is not an article about toxic masculinity, but it clearly plays a role here. And while men in the past would at least silently provide by building houses, fixing miscellaneous objects, and crafting anniversary gifts with their bare hands, modern-day men are losing these skills.

How many Gen Z handymen do you know, and how many can you count on that are GenX or even Baby Boomers?

My observation is that the tribe of the handyman, who will be of practical use to a woman even when he is not emotionally available, is slowly drifting into extinction. The handiest men in GenZ that I know are engineers operating a 3D printer for Christmas, creating cookie cutters and planters out of layers of plastic.

Cute and also a gesture of love, but somehow a very different type of gift. Especially, because someone has to pay for the printer, and something about telling a robot to do things feels a lot more like “copy-pasting” rather than “hand-made with love”. No offense, dear 3D-printer fans, I love the cookie cutters, but how about you fix my leaking faucet or paint my walls?

It seems that the deal between men and women in our parents’ generation was far simpler: Women fix the emotional unavailability of their husbands by admiring them while they fix the broken legs of the chair. And è voila! A happy family and a securely built house.

And so today, men are less handy and seem to be in need of being more brainy. However, those men who are born into the younger generations and still rely on the idea of the handyman and provider, while not being able to deliver precisely those traits, are lost. While many women became handy enough to handle their lives, men forgot to pick up the social skills, which is often the result of a wall of toxic masculinity.

So now there they are, utterly naked, a little dreadful, waiting to be picked up by a woman who will care for them enough to make them grow.

And that is how I got my package in the mail.

That is how many women get their men, and it is ok, as long as you are stable and able and willing to give, which, let’s face it, most women are.

But the truth is that, probably, a therapist is a better investment for the modern-day woman than a man. That is what my friends said I should do: Get a therapist so I can learn to spot the green flags in an ocean of red. Attract the right ones instead of the wrong. Tick the box “healthy and mature” in the delivery form with confidence, rather than smirking as I cross “just a little broken is fine” with dreams in my eyes.

How about you? What will you order next? Careful, life is stingier with returns than Amazon.

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