If there’s one thing I know as an outsider, it’s that women who date men are reaching their limit.
In pop culture the message is hardly subtle: Lily Allen’s new album West End Girl is inescapable, described by one music journalist as a “gobsmacking autopsy” on the demise of her marriage to David Harbour. Elsewhere, Chante Joseph’s essay for British Vogue “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” went viral.
I am being smacked in the face – with love – by straight culture and (largely) straight women’s frustration, anger and embarrassment about men.
But I am also experiencing it in smaller ways. At work and among friends, I sit and listen to my smart, funny and capable female peers describing the constant effort to coax their male partners into caring for their children, or lament that no housework is done without prompting.
This is discussed as though it is an inevitability. They may love these men but in some ways they feel that love is a burden. This forms the backbone of female bonding about men’s perceived uselessness and it makes me feel strange, almost alien. As though there’s some aspect of womanhood I’m missing out on because I married someone (a woman no less) where we try and do everything fifty-fifty.
To assuage the awkwardness, I have a throwaway punch line: “Listen lads, you should have married a woman”. Because from the way straight women talk about it, it certainly seems that their partner’s maleness, specifically, is the problem.
Charlotte*, 30, who lives with her 33-year-old boyfriend, tells me: “I think I am jealous of the idea of getting to be in a relationship with a woman, given how thoughtful [women] are, how much we take on – from housework to general organisation, to being such great emotional support, giving thoughtful and useful advice. I don’t know whether it’s impossible to escape the fact that someone will always be doing more, but in my head it’d be more equal.”
She points to different styles of communication as a fundamental difference she sees between men and women: “When we communicate it’s like we talk two different languages, he enjoys sparring and ‘debating’ me, but I feel like we can never just have a calm, productive conversation. I think this is a very masculine way of communicating – it’s thinking of the next line to try and ‘win’ the debate instead of processing what I’m saying.”
She adds that she experiences a blindness to the invisible labour she does – not just with tidying up but getting passports renewed or organising holidays. “In some ways I think it’s when they’re used to their mum’s fussing around them and always organising them, but it also just seems like skills he does not possess.”
I am not unfamiliar with this. With all the love in the world for my two younger brothers, I still have to prompt them to help with the dishes when we’re at my parents’ for dinner. It’s not that they won’t do it, it just won’t occur to them.
And it emerges in different (but parallel) ways in different cultures. “My experience of Indian (especially Punjabi guys) has been that on the face of it they’re progressive and want women who work, but also expect the woman to then manage the household,” explains Sanny, 32. “They think their role is ‘primary breadwinner’ and ‘man of the house’ and want that title while splitting finances and [women] doing the majority of the housework.”
And, in social settings, women are also expressing disappointment with men.
“It feels important as the men often dominate the conversation and we have to tone down the things we want to talk about for fear of making them uncomfortable,” says Sarah, 29. As a result, she says it is a “mortal sin” to bring male partners to an event bookmarked for the girls. “None of the men we love are invited, even our best mates. It’s a bit mean really, but it’s how we operate.”
Queer spaces are not immune to this perception either. “I feel like people will be disappointed if I end up with a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend or a non-binary partner,” Terri*, 32, tells me, who is bisexual and uses they/them pronouns. “The queers want me to be more queer i.e. straight up trans and/or gay and the straights (my mum) just want me to pick one gender and sexuality, preferably straight.”
Emily*, also 32, has recently re-entered the dating pool. She describes dating men in the 21st century as a catch-22. “We’ve been raised to ‘have it all’, but that means doing it all and we are exhausted. So the idea of a guy looking after you can feel so appealing, but then that would feel like we’ve failed to be modern independent feminist women and are subject to the dangers of being reliant on someone else.”
“Equal team work and community feel harder to find in this day and age,” she adds. So is it any wonder that sometimes when I swing in and “brag” that my wife and I split the housework fifty-fifty, others might feel the tiniest bit of jealousy?
Obviously, being in a lesbian partnership is not a solution to these problems. For one thing, it’s sexist to assume that our relationship is good just because we’re broads. People are not necessarily good partners just because they’re not men. And I also feel deeply uncomfortable implying I live in some kind of relationship utopia. We’ve weathered shitstorms, from the outside and of our own making.
Then there are the material impacts which, I have to remind you, still exist.
There are still places in the world we can’t go for fear of feeling unsafe. I am my wife’s emotional support woman when she needs the bathroom away from home because of transphobic bigotry, meaning she can be targeted for not “looking like a woman”. (One of the hypocritical ironies of claims about “defending women”.)
The cost of having a family will impact us disproportionally, while access to fertility services on the NHS is subject to an ever-changing postcode lottery. And even after all that, we’d feel the impact of parental leave more than other couples as our wages are likely still, in invisible ways, subject to the gender pay gap.
But I guess what we do have is the fact of our relationship is still fundamentally a thrill. I met my wife a few months after same-sex marriage was introduced into law in the UK in 2013. The fact that I could marry her, forge our own path for what our relationship could look like, and say I have a “wife”? I still get caught off guard by the joy sometimes, 12 years in.
My joke line is that to avoid strife in a relationship you should marry a woman, but it’s just a punchline. I know many men in relationships that gently buck norms: one friend has a boyfriend who loves cleaning and is raring to be a stay-at-home dad.
They would all, rightly, laugh at me if I presumed they were jealous of my wife because they have found their own equilibrium. My hope is that women know that there are good men out there – and men know that if they put in the work and really start to listen, they can be one of them.
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