How to Date Men When You Hate Men

Says Barthes: “I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned.” Like: as an act of charity I decided to become obsessed with you when I could tell you were secretly and shyly into me.

So in practice, when a man who is otherwise a Good, Hot Ally is dismissive of a feminist point or makes a joke that is kind of fucked up, you file in your head to try to change him later and remind yourself that LA LA LA he is tall and good with kids

Do we have free will in dating, or am I always just mimicking something I saw on TV?

In a way it’s nice that I can convince myself to be into anyone.

Deciding to be attracted to someone can help you “practice” love while you’re young, to try it without any stakes. Elena, the teenage heroine of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, refers to her boyfriend as a “useful phantom.”

in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer, our protagonist/antihero, tells his star-crossed love, Ellen, “Each time you happen to me all over again.”

In a moment of desperation in spring 2016, to prove to myself that I did know hot men, I made a very simple spreadsheet of men and my status with them. This is normal because dating is labor invented to keep women busy, and if I’m going to have a side job I might as well use the Google Docs acumen I list on my freaking résumé.

I have often throughout the course of my life suspected that a guy was into me and decided sure, okay, I could be into him as well. It’s really NOT HARD to trick yourself into an obsessive thought spiral, and the fact that a person is into you seems as good a reason as any

Biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher describes this in Anatomy of Love; she says that we prefer those who like us back because we enjoy feeling that we are likable

Objectively, I do think it would be useful to have a list of all the men I think are hot, if I were then willing to put in effort to pursue these men. Instead, I like to withdraw into myself and my writing and just “wait for the magic to happen.”