counsellor Rachel Sussman admits, in her foreword to The Breakup Bible: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Healing from a Breakup or Divorce, that her own rocky history with relationships came from having made ‘decisions that weren’t always in my best interest, that chipped away at my self-esteem, and that kept me in a state of suspended melancholy.’ Those decisions, she goes on to imply, had to do with choosing the wrong type of partner. She writes that it wasn’t until a (male) friend pulled her aside and expressed concern over her ‘constant’ decision to date ‘toxic men when so many nice guys ask you out’ that she began to re-evaluate her approach to the game of love. The book received many positive reviews, at least by Amazon users.
Even the misleadingly promising How to Dump a Guy: A Coward’s Manual seems not to treat the endeavour of breaking up with total seriousness, inviting its would-be woman dumper to fill out a tongue-in-cheek worksheet that catalogues the dumpee’s particular flaw (‘e.g. Cling-on, Sexual Savant, etc.’), the ‘[d]ate you first realized you had to dump him,’ breakup outfit, and so forth. It’s as though the book’s female authors viewed the exercise of ending a relationship as nothing more than a future curio to gab about, à la Carrie Bradshaw, over a three-mimosa brunch with girlfriends.
I didn’t see much of my own romantic experience reflected in Amazon’s recommendations. I’ve only dated a few men in my life, all of whom were great. Each relationship lasted at least a year; every time, I’d been the one to end it. Maybe a Good Man is hard to find, but I seem to have a knack for it.
I’m lucky though; many of the women I know can attest to some experience that validates the condescending black-and-white of self-help rationale. Many have been ghosted – dumped without word or warning by way of total silence. Others have found themselves grown attached to men who refuse monogamy, yet remain resolute in their distaste for the ethics of communication that successful polyamorous arrangements seem to be founded on.
We all know the reasons – be they stereotypes or kernels of truth – for why a woman might be inclined to fall for the ‘wrong’ kind of man, one who seems rakish or noncommittal. Players have an irritating tendency to make for better lovers. Maybe there’s an appeal in imagining oneself as the woman who can ‘tame’ a fuckboy’s ways – or, alternately, to have a bit of fun with them. The tropes are tired and trite, but they aren’t totally wrong.
There are also plenty of unsurprising, age-old reasons for why the phenomenon of the fuckboy (or whatever we’re calling him at any given moment) is one that’s so unabashedly gendered. What is new, if anything, are the advances in communication and culture that have made sexual dalliances easier to come by and less of a potential liability on a person’s time, psyche, or reputation. People are freer than ever before to chase their romantic whims, to indefinitely pursue whatever arbitrary combination of attributes they’re sure will make them happy in the now. Prospective partners are commodities we can pick up then put back on the shelf. A warm body is only a screen-swipe away.
Yet despite today’s freedoms and conveniences, men and women remain fundamentally unequal in our society. It’s common knowledge that men earn more on average than women do, even for the same types of work. Men are disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of influence and capital. They’re typically bigger and stronger than women, better equipped to have and take.
And therein lies the bind. No relationship is an island. They are socio-cultural units informed by the world at large. Even the most egalitarian partnerships must negotiate the power structures that threaten to reproduce themselves, on a micro level, within every marriage and romance and bed. And because of this, the way women experience partnership cannot help but be fundamentally fraught in ways that men might never know, whether or not we admit it to ourselves.
The timeless trope of the fuckboy – the noncommittal rogue, the Casanova – is a function of the tiresome imbalance that has always existed between men and women in Western society. And in the age of internet media, it feels as though we’re crescendoing toward some kind of tipping point. ‘Alongside the wage gap and the emotional labour gap, the antics of softboys, f-ckboys, fading and ghosting constitute a pronounced communication gap [between men and women],’ writes journalist Sarah Ratchford in a 2017 article for Canada’s Flare magazine, citing a glossary of terms that more or less describe the same general idea. While a person needn’t be male to be a challenging partner, Ratchford argues that most women are raised to be considerate of others’ feelings in ways that many men simply aren’t. The argument goes that this perceived communication gap – again, the result of asymmetrical ethics instilled during men’s and women’s respective upbringings – has produced a spate of men who altogether lack the tools necessary to be the kinds of partners that modern women want. Women who date men have, in turn, increasingly given up on the prospect of relationships altogether. It’s worth mentioning that the article is titled ‘Why I’m Giving Up Dating Men and Just Staying Home.’
Ratchford leans on the observation that boys are raised to value different things from girls, and that men and women are socially rewarded for different behaviours, but the emotional inattentiveness she describes seems to be less the consequence of men’s conditioned inability to exercise consideration for others than their unjust possession of the upper hand – and the privilege to play it at will. Though it’s certainly possible that a deficiency in empathy can account for the sexual callousness of individual men, it stands to reason that in a romantic (and literal) marketplace where they are overvalued, their bad behaviour might remain unchecked (or at least tolerated) for years.
Women, on the other hand, face a labour market that values them less than men at the outset of their careers, and goes even lower than that should they choose to begin families. This is compounded (for women who date men) by a relationship market that sees their worth rapidly deplete with the passage of time, thanks in large part to the baleful tick of our biological clock. Aspiring to gain a foothold in either marketplace threatens success in the other. In both, we’re at a clear disadvantage from the start.
The economic parallel is more than a convenient model for comparison. Corinne Low, a professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, has gone so far as to chart women’s reproductive capital on the US marriage market. ‘Pricing the Biological Clock,’ Low’s 2016 paper, argues that the differential impact of aging on women’s reproductive health negatively affects both a woman’s relationship prospects and her future socioeconomic outcomes. This, Low writes, ‘is an inherent, biological asymmetry between men and women: whereas for men the reproductive system ages and declines in function at the same rate as other biological systems, for women this decline is much earlier and swifter than other aging processes.’ Low finds evidence that this asymmetry has real economic consequences for women, impacting their willingness to invest in human capital, since such investments take time, and may therefore limit their appeal on the marriage market.
To prove this, Low sets up an experiment that assigns a randomly generated age to an online dating profile as a means of determining whether men’s apparent preference for younger women has to do with aesthetic attraction or a valuation of her prospective fertility. From there, she collects information about participants’ conscious age preferences for a hypothetical partner, their levels of education, incomes, and the dating profiles they wound up choosing. She finds that men have a strong preference for younger partners, even when beauty and other factors are controlled for, and that this preference is driven by men who have no children and have accurate knowledge of the age-fertility trade-off. Low concludes that each additional year of a woman’s age means she would need to earn an additional $7,000 for her potential partner to be indifferent – the market price of her fertility, a rapidly depreciating economic asset.
The figures paint a clear picture. It is not only emotionally fraught and potentially crazy but quite literally economically disadvantageous for women to end relationships with men who meet the requirements to be deemed ‘a catch.’ While evaluating the market price of fertility is, to say the least, unromantic, partnership has always, on some level, functioned as a contract. Where it comes to marriage, that legislative component is literal: a formal, legal union of individuals and assets.
But what partnership and romantic love respectively entail have changed dramatically over a relatively