How to Date When You Hate People

When someone is called a misogynist, that’s a damning label. When someone is called a misandrist, my word processor puts a red line underneath the term because it’s rarely ever talked about. But when someone is called a misanthrope, people tend to welcome the label.

Hell, some people proudly call themselves misanthropes. Why? Because as far as they’re concerned, there isn’t much to praise the human race for. People are awful!

Humans start wars that kill thousands, if not millions. Humans act as if they’re righteous when they’re anything but. Humans judge and criticize each other despite the fact that humans hate to be judged and criticized.

If they’re not killing the planet, they are complicit in its destruction. Sometimes humans will torment an animal for their own sick pleasure. Sometimes they’ll torment a fellow human being too.

Humans refuse to learn from history and elicit the same old stupid tropes from the past, only to narrowly escape utter destruction either due to their own errors or their own ineptitude.

So overall, humans suck. Hard to debate otherwise, right?

And yet, the misanthrope is also human, which means they not only have the same lineage of the people they detest, but they also have human urges. Sexual urges.

There’s three ways the misanthrope can deal with this. Firstly, one can continue to stay away from people. Secondly, one can forget their hatred long enough to find the one person who isn’t all that bad.

However, neither option will work. In the first instance, you are denying yourself of something that you want. Last time I heard of someone doing that their religious organization had to pay $3 billion to victims in the United States alone.

The second option ends up with you revealing that you too are human and can be pretty crummy as well. With that realization, you either bombard yourself with guilt or you hypocritically excuse your behavior.

A few will see the third option which is that the people who make the world a nightmare are people who fail to love people, and that the misanthrope is quite literally guilty of this.

They will acknowledge that people are messed up, but will also acknowledge that there are some people who, while flawed, actually try to advance the welfare of the human race or for a marginalized group of people.

They will realize that righteous indignation at the many faults of mankind doesn’t actually solve anything, especially when it comes to forming connections with people. This need to connect cannot be thwarted, but it also cannot be accomplished by hating the people you want to connect to.

The misanthrope then transforms into someone who leads by example by being what they want the world to be.

But what if you don’t hate all humans? What if you just hate men or just hate women? What happens then?

Here’s something to consider: the level of resentment you have towards a particular sex/gender impacts the level of resentment you have towards yourself. Why? Because we all have masculinity and femininity within us to varying degrees.

This means that we all do stereotypically masculine and stereotypically feminine things. Ultimately, we are more alike than we are different. “Women are bossy.” And men aren’t? “Men are cheaters.” And women aren’t? But both men and women enjoy loving relationships and have done awesome things that helped humanity too.

We might do some things differently but it hardly should constitute a battle of the sexes.

But when it comes to dating, things get a lot more subtle. Men and women hurt each other. Men hurt men and women hurt women too. As a result of one’s prolonged issues with a certain sex/gender, one might unconsciously (or consciously) develop a resentment towards them.

And then you become what you hate.

It’s funny how vocal people are about the sex/gender that they despise as they proudly continue to date them only to return from the battlefield shocked at how abhorrent the enemy is.

But it’s just as we spoke about earlier with misanthropes. You have the option to hate from a distance as incels do, or you can date and confirm your hypocritical biases.

Or you take the third option and admit that they are kind of awful but so are you, and then try to be better so that your own dating standards reflect the more loving person you aim to be.

When one is reduced to a sexual object and begins to ingest the poison of resentment, one will fight fire with fire and reduce the people that look sexy to them as objects.

When one is dishonestly criticized by a particular gender/sex and has been poisoned by hate, they will dole out their own unwarranted criticisms.

When women are labelled as bloodsucking leeches and “kill all men” trends on Twitter, it is clear that logic has left the building and anger is the puppet master for these unconscious and hurt people.

Then when they date each other, what can we expect to see? They may be attracted to each other but they certainly don’t trust each other, they make contingency plans because they assume the worst and they reduce each other to sex dolls for mutual masturbation.

The people who don’t hate any genders or sexes look on, confused. They ask, “Why do you keep dating people that hurt you?” And your response will be, “That’s just how _________ are.”

It is difficult to broach this topic and not address the statistics on intimate partner abuse. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported that women (1 in 7) are more likely to be injured by their intimate partner than men (1 in 25). And if one repeatedly suffers this fate, how can one not begin to resent men?

I suppose you have two options here: you can resent abusive men, or you can resent all men. You can also take into account that those statistics included same-sex couples.

If you haven’t already gotten the point, I’m just trying to implore anyone who is sexist (because that’s what it is) to give it a rest already. If you want to connect with someone, how are you going to do that if the people you want to connect with are beneath you?

I don’t have any stats on this but just in talking to people, there are too many of us who are unconsciously sexist and to varying degrees. The reduction of all women to a single adjective is terrifying. The endorsement to exploit men helps no one.

And if you’re trying to date, it would help if you didn’t hate the sex/gender that you’re trying to date. It’s common sense, but sexism from both sides seems all too common these days.

—

This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

***

You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

Escape the Act Like a Man Box

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

—

Photo credit: Shutterstock