The Script Needs an Update
Between rom-coms and your aunt's opinions at Thanksgiving, women are exposed to a long list of traits they're supposed to swoon over. A lot of that list was written by screenwriters and advice columnists who were confusing imagination for reality. Some of it is harmless and just a little dated, whereas some of it describes behavior you'd worry about if your best friend were the one dating him. Here's 20 things women are tired of being told they should find attractive in men.
1. Playing Hard to Get
He takes nine hours to answer a simple text about dinner plans, and somehow that's supposed to be intriguing. After a week of it, the mystery starts to look a lot like a guy who isn't that interested. A reply within the same afternoon is a perfectly good speed.
2. Jealousy Dressed Up as Devotion
Pop culture keeps treating a man who fumes over your coworkers as proof he's crazy about you. In practice it means explaining every lunch meeting and every text from a guy named Kevin in accounting. Somewhere around the fourth question about Kevin, you start screenshotting your own texts to prove nothing happened.
3. The Bad Boy
The leather jacket and the motorcycle look great on screen, where the plot handles the consequences. Off screen the bad boy tends to be a guy who owes his roommate two months of rent and forgets your birthday. Before long his friends start texting you whenever they can't reach him, and his landlord has your number too.
4. Negging
Neil Strauss made the tactic famous in his 2005 book The Game, where a backhanded compliment is meant to knock a woman's confidence down a peg. It still turns up on first dates, usually as a comment about your laugh or your shoes. Hearing it once is enough to know how the rest of the night will go and start planning an early exit.
5. Alpha Male Energy
Alpha talk traces back to wolf research that L. David Mech popularized in his 1970 book The Wolf. Mech spent decades afterward explaining that wild wolf packs are mostly families, with the parents in charge. A man building his whole personality around an outdated wolf study is hard to take seriously over dinner, especially on a first date.
6. A Strict Height Requirement
Women get told to hold out for six feet, as if that's a normal cutoff. The average American man is about 5 feet 9 inches tall, according to the CDC, which makes six feet a pretty narrow slice of the dating pool. Two people who stand eye to eye in flats can have a perfectly happy marriage, and nobody at the wedding brings a tape measure.
7. Showing Off on the First Date
Ordering the most expensive bottle on the wine list without glancing at it is meant to read as generous. To the next table, it looks like a man performing for the waiter. A good taco place and a conversation where he asks you questions and listens to the answers makes for a better night.
8. Grand Public Gestures
Flash mobs and stadium jumbotrons put a woman on the spot in front of thousands of strangers. Saying anything other than yes becomes nearly impossible with a camera pointed at her face. The quiet version at home lets her give an honest answer, whatever that answer is.
9. The Guy Who Won't Take No
Movies have sold this one for decades, usually with swelling music in the background. In The Notebook, Noah hangs off a Ferris wheel until Allie agrees to go out with him. If a stranger tried that at a county fair, security would be pulling him down before the ride finished its loop.
10. Watching You Sleep
Twilight turned a vampire slipping into Bella's bedroom at night into a swoony plot point for a whole generation of teenage readers. The books sold more than 100 million copies, and the idea stuck around longer than it should have. A real version of that scene ends with a call to the police and a new lock on the window.
11. The Emotionally Unavailable Brooder
The quiet, wounded guy who won't talk about his feelings gets cast as deep. You spend the first few months assuming there's a rich inner world behind the silence, waiting for him to open up. Eventually the guessing stops feeling mysterious and starts feeling like homework.
12. Never Crying
Women keep hearing that a man who never cries is strong. A guy who can tear up at his dog's funeral and still show up for work the next morning is doing fine. Thirty years of holding it in has to come out somewhere, and it rarely picks a good time or place.
13. Deciding Everything for You
He books the restaurant without asking what you're in the mood for, and that passes for decisive. That's fine for one dinner, especially if he picked a good spot. When he also starts choosing your weekend plans and which of your friends are worth seeing, the decisiveness has gone way too far.
14. Helplessness in the Kitchen
A grown man who can't boil pasta is apparently adorable, at least in sitcoms. Three years in, you've cooked roughly a thousand dinners while he watched the game. A guy who can put together one decent pot of chili is already ahead of the pack.
15. Sarcasm as a Whole Personality
Dry humor is fun in small doses, and it makes a first date easier. A man who can't answer a single question straight turns every conversation into a sparring match you didn't sign up for. At some point you'd like to know what he thinks about something, even if it's just his favorite pizza place.
16. Flexing the Car
A dating profile where the car gets more photos than the man tells you where his attention goes. The monthly lease payment says very little about how he treats a waiter or his mom. You'd be dating the guy, and the car goes back to the dealer when the lease is up.
17. Fish Photos
Dating apps have so many men holding up freshly caught bass that people make memes about it. The fish might be impressive, and he's clearly proud of it. One photo of him laughing with his friends at a backyard barbecue would say more about his life.
18. Always Needing to Win
Some men treat every disagreement like a debate tournament with a trophy on the line and a judge keeping score. Being right about the capital of Australia isn't worth twenty minutes of arguing over appetizers while the food gets cold. A partner who can say he got it wrong is much easier to live with.
19. The Much Older Man
Age gaps get framed as a sign of maturity, as if the extra years automatically came with wisdom. When he's 45 and she's 22, he walks into every disagreement with twenty-plus years more money and experience behind him. That's a lopsided place to start a relationship, even before anyone brings up retirement plans.
20. Starting Fights for Your Honor
Squaring up to a stranger who bumped into you at a bar counts as protective in plenty of action movies. The stranger was probably just trying to reach the bathroom before the next song started. Getting kicked out at 11 p.m. because he wanted to look tough is a rough way to end a date, especially if you'd already ordered food.
