Maybe You Should Try Dating Women

Maybe it's compulsive heterosexuality. Maybe it's an epidemic of chronic lovelessness in men who are unable to love or be loved by straight women.

this is an essay after bell hooks, who taught me how to ask better questions

You’ve heard the set up before, and you’ve heard the punchline too— hell, you’ve likely delivered it yourself. 

The set up: a straight woman is recounting stories from her love life wherein, inevitably, a man disappoints her, dismisses her, won’t commit, sloughs off responsibility for his actions, etc. 

And the punchline: “maybe you should try dating women.” 

I recently overheard two friends talking about a celebrity couple. One celebrity was a woman, assumed to be straight, and one was a man, also assumed to be straight. One of my friends said, “I hope she falls in love with a woman and they have a beautiful queer relationship.”

In all fairness, I’ve said something to this effect countless times. I think we make these kinds of comments partially an earnest effort to say, she deserves real love, which we are assuming would be more likely found in a woman-loving-woman relationship. And partly we are saying this because we are so (understandably) exasperated by men that we feel that the only way to cope with their antics is to deny any desire we may have for them. But we also say it because we are not thinking about the implications of our words. 

First of all, in the context of gripes over the misbehavior of men, this suggestion poses queer relationships as some kind of subpar alternative to a failed dating life with men. This is not only an insult to queer relationships, but it is also decidedly not the point. Because whether or not a woman is attracted to other women is irrelevant. The point is that the women who are attracted to men, be it exclusively or not, are enduring undeserved and unnecessary heartbreak. The point is that men are not showing up as true partners to women. The problem that straight women have is not that they are dating men, it’s that they are dating a group of people whose continued infantilization, excusal from the consequences of their own actions, and profound disconnection from the lives and hearts of others has left them functionally unlovable. And these men are not unlovable because they are inherently “bad”, it’s not necessarily because they are even a little bit “bad”. They are functionally unlovable because on a widespread level, they simply fail to rise to the challenges of intimacy. They refuse to bear the closeness that love requires of them. They turn down devotion and avoid the deep, sustained care that ~modern women~ refuse to go without. Due to the inconsistencies (and sometimes the cruelties) of these men, straight women find themselves unable to truly love and be loved by men the way we want to be. And the devastation is compounded by the fact I truly think that this is the sort of love that men want too. But simply, Women are coming to expect more emotionally of the men that they date. And men are failing in droves.  When men waffle between attentiveness and inaccessibility, when they don’t ask their partners questions, when they do not open themselves up to constructive criticism, when they do not regulate their own emotions, men and women are incapable of loving and being loved by each other. (this is the part where I drop to my knees and beg you to read all about love and/or communion by bell hooks, as many of the main ideas outlined here are from these books— and for god’s sake don’t buy your copies from amaz*n)

When I heard my friend say that she hoped that female celebrity x would find a queer relationship, I heard myself saying, “I hope she finds a man who loves her the way he should.” 

I know what my friend was trying to say. Like I said, I’ve said similar things before. But as much as it is worthwhile to be curious about our sexualities, to explore our queerness, to question our compulsive desire to be liked and touched and lauded by men, ultimately some of us will still find ourselves attracted to them and wanting to date them. So what do we do about that? 

Sometimes, the suggestion to date women instead of men is accompanied by an ever familiar, “men are trash” which is starting to feel eerily similar to “boys will be boys”. Both can serve to excuse weaponized incompetence and to wash boys’ hands clean of their violence and carelessness. We are too comfortable excusing men from conversations that are actually meant to pivot upon the very axis of their behavior. But instead what we hear in the online or online adjacent “girl, dump-him!” dating scape is that maybe we just need to re-read the lesbian master doc. If you aren’t finding a good man, you should give up and instead excavate some kind of dormant queerness inside of yourself. (Not to mention, this kind of fluttery experimentation with lesbian relationships can often leave queer women who are more certain about their sexuality feeling used and unloved by those still “exploring”.)

I’m tired of the knee jerk implication that women who date men are misunderstanding their problem and that women-loving-women relationships are some sort of impossibly idol, and yet simultaneously less-than-ideal alternative to said problem. And I am sick of pouring time, money and energy into the endless vat of self-improvement in order to solve it. Because I don’t care how voraciously you read a self-help book, how deeply you interrogate your innermost desires, or how completely you perfect your communication skills, so long as men are refusing to accept and reciprocate true love, we will chronically return to this same place of relational pain. 

I want to love a man and have him rise to meet that love. I want a man to love me in a way that is exquisite and surprising and genuine. I know that human beings are capable of that kind of connection. I don’t think it’s so fucking crazy! And listen, I like girls! A lot! I think girls are hilarious and brilliant and hot! And I don’t want to degrade that brilliance by suggesting that they are merely a good last resort.