Many men are still asking young women out, going on dinner dates, calling, and adhering to the other “gentlemanly” rules established for them in a much older age and still outwardly pined for by certain female critics. What they’re finding is that young women are becoming less and less responsive to this behavior—the more serious the men get, the more distant the girls begin to make themselves, ostensibly fearing for their “independence”.
Given such a reality, what is the appropriate male response?
Quit going on dinner dates. Quit asking girls out in a formal manner. Don’t call. Cease all manner of “gentlemanly” behavior you may have learned as a child via your parents or the Disney Channel. Replace dinners and other traditional dates with bar/pong dates, and allow late night “booty-call” texts to supplant phone calls and traditional methods of asking a girl out. In short, do less.
And lo and behold, what do men find as they move to these more informal methods of courtship? Far more enthusiastic responses from their female peers and more sexual success. The girls may complain to their peers about a given man’s lack of commitment, but his low investment offers no threat to her perceived identity as a “liberated woman”, and is therefore more acceptable than anything else.
The adaptations we are seeing from men in the dating world are a natural response to female choice. The reality is that women have begun to vote with their feet. Their actions are sending the clear message that they do not want to be stuck in the trappings of traditional relationships, and they are running away from the men who threaten to offer them. They have fought quite vigorously to remove themselves from the confines of traditional dating, and continue to battle in order to maintain that distance.
We do not live in an age where the male retains unquestioned dominance/control over the sexual and social behaviors of his female peers, and it is for this reason that men have no choice but to respect these efforts and the decisions they seem to symbolize.
Girls not responding to traditional approaches about commitment and relationships? Well, you can’t make them want what they don’t want, so just don’t provide it to them. Problem solved!
Slowly, the reality of growing female aversion to commitment is dawning on society and more people are beginning to talk about it. Any discourse, however, will prove unproductive if people fail to acknowledge the fem-centric nature of the trend. Women are the gatekeepers of sex—men (at least in Western nations like the USA) do not get to directly control all aspects of female sexuality as they once did, and it is women who decide which men receive sexual companionship, when they get it, and on what conditions it is given.
Right now, those conditions are increasingly requiring young men to minimize investment. Female action has determined this, and only female action can reverse it. If young women want more male investment in relationships, then they’ll need to accept it more often when it is offered. Until such a time, men will just continue to do what works.
