Why Relationships With Men Are Giving So Many of Us the Ick

I feel like such a cliche. I’m a romance writer who is apathetic about real-life romance. If this was a Hallmark movie, a local baker/lumberjack/cowboy would convince me to help him save the local bakery/tree farm/horse farm, host a town festival, and simultaneously find love again. But this isn’t a Hallmark movie, and the idea of a relationship with a man just gives me the ick.

The ick is that moment when a person of interest reveals a major turnoff (sometimes due to a minor quirk). Right now, a lot of people who date men are looking at relationships with them as something undesirable. I know many women who have just stopped dating altogether.

In truth, the male loneliness epidemic is about to get worse. As women watch more men sit in silence through the assault on our rights, more of us are deciding that those men are undesirable as partners. With every bit of non-action from our alleged allies, we’re just feeling more of the ick.

And worse than the non-action is the blatant misogyny of so many men. Everywhere we turn, we see men looking for a trad wife who are offended at the idea that they should embody the ideals of a trad husband who supports her. They want to go back to a time when women were oppressed, divorce was nearly impossible for women regardless of the circumstances, and they didn’t have to be accountable or self-aware.

Ick, ick, ick.

Relationships seem to benefit men, not women.

In my experience, relationships seem to benefit men more than women. While men are benefitting from women’s emotional labor, women are often left carrying the weight of men’s unhealed trauma. When I consider my past relationship history, I can see many ways I benefited partners while they only made my life increasingly difficult.

There’s this idea that single people are lonely and miserable, but I’ve been far happier as a single person. I spent so much time in relationships caught up in the anxiety spiral of expending more emotional labor than my partners. While I was constantly extending allowances for their past trauma and life challenges, few were extended to me and mine. While there were beautiful moments and memories, there was also a lot of damage to process when they were done.

I’m not saying that love isn’t worth it. I’m just saying that love should be equitable and reciprocal. Is that really too much to ask?

More women who date men are recognizing the inequitable nature of hetero relationships. We’re seeing all the ways they do the bare minimum while we’re expected to go above and beyond at all times. Many of us have the ick, and it’s not getting better.

If men don’t want to be lonely, they need to smash the patriarchy.

Until there’s more relationship equality, a lot of us are going to be sitting out and not participating. We need more true allies willing to fight for our equality. We need more men who understand that the patriarchy doesn’t just hurt women; it hurts us all.

Until they acknowledge how they benefit from the system and are, equally, hurt by it, they won’t invest in the fight for equality the same way that we will. We don’t need more men telling us they are not like the others while they’re upholding a system that actively contributes to violence against women and gender inequality in all aspects of life. We need men around us who aren’t intimidated or frightened of powerful women — men who respect and value our strength and independence.

We also need more men willing to go to therapy and do the work. Too many men over the years have thoroughly informed me of their faults while impressing upon me their lack of desire to change any of them. The women in my life are working on themselves while the men I’ve encountered seem to be doubling down on their faults with absolutely no motivation to work on self-improvement.

It’s exhausting out there. At the end of the day, I just don’t see how a relationship would make my life better. I only see the ways they’ve made my life harder. I know I’m not the only person feeling this way.

Is there even a cure for the Ick?

I was driving home from an emergency vet care visit with two tired children in the backseat when I had a thought that some of this would be easier with a partner. It was a pretty fantasy of someone holding my hand and sharing at least a bit of the load. But it didn’t last. Reality came quickly on its heels.

I’d been married. I’d been in relationships. When did they ever make a bad situation anything but worse? That feels like an exaggeration, and I’m sure there were times when some of my stress was alleviated by a romantic partnership. But more often than not, stressful times were made more stressful by feeling alone while partnered or by having to carry more of the load than anyone else. Or by feeling like any help I would receive was obligatory rather than gladly given.

Even though reality checked my fantasy, I still wondered if there could be a cure for this pervasive icky feeling when it comes to dating men. Is this a lasting condition, or a temporary state while we watch our rights attacked with little protest from male counterparts? I don’t have the answer.

All I know is that more of us are sitting back and opting out because we’re just tired. Tired of carrying the weight of relationships. Tired of pushing for rights that are so easily taken away. Tired of fighting for our basic right to exist as freely as any man. Tired of turning to partners who just make life harder rather than sharing in our hardships as well as our joys. Tired of putting our open hearts out there only to encounter one emotionally unavailable man after another who would be better served looking for a therapist rather than a lover. Tired of even having to repeat all the reasons we’re tired and trying to justify them to an angry male comments section.

Every now and then, I have a stray thought about the beauty of a strong and equitable partnership. Sometimes, I have flashes of the time I almost had one. But I stop living in the past and for the future, and I start focusing on right now.

We’re not asking for men to carry the weight of all relationships. It would just be nice if, for once, they carried their own weight without expecting us to hold it as well as all the baggage they brought to the relationship. The ick is real, and unless some big things change, it might be here to stay.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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