Before someone can match your freak, you must first become a freak
Choose your own Please Please Please
The girls are not having a good time, according to the girls and the media outlets reporting on the girls with such jarringly blunt URL slugs as tiktok-videos-single-women-crying.html. The vibes have plummeted to the point that many young women are eschewing dating altogether. The girls are not having a good time! And for good reason(s). My hypotheses:
Nobody knows what they want.
But boy do they want!
And they will not accept ANY substitutes or concessions.
They are too busy working on their personal brands.
Too inside, being online
Too online, being inside
Doing it for the plot has resulted in too many plot twists.
Too much social media “advice” churning wholesale anxiety about “correct” relational dynamics, pathologizing human behavior, and flattening the complexities and nuances of other people’s lived experiences with reductive jargon. (It’s confusing.)
This is in no way putting the onus of despair on the besieged. We are working against formidable odds. From what I can glean from the copious amount of oversharing on the Internet, most people want to be with someone they feel safe with, someone who validates them and reflects their values, and of course to feel desired by someone they also desire. Seems simple enough, but with excessive fixating, it does seem that an Ideal Companion is expected to be a container for all the unruly desires and wounds one can fit in another person, from which one may sip or spill at their pleasure (ie. in finance, 6’5, blue eyes, etc).
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Being in the era of self-empowerment by way of Dump Him™ and Sprinkle Sprinkle methodology places value on the treatment you receive from men in a way that turns it into a form of hierarchical zero-sum status amongst other women who date men.
Our collective getting-on-the-same-page-ry about how we (women who date men) expect to be treated (nothing less than capital-D Doting) has created a very narrow binary out of our we’re-not-going-to-settle-for-less-than-what-we-deserve-which-is-everything…ism. The idea also implies that if women hold each other accountable for not allowing men to get away with being cads and lechs, we will force them to amend their behavior. This does not have the effect of supporting women, so much as it does add a sense of shame and failure to the imperfect ways we all navigate relationships.
The truth is that no one can control another person’s behavior. And that, unfortunately, the inherent risk in dating men (in their widely agreed upon flop era) is that there is always the potential that they may embarrass you. Sometimes especially the more attractive they seem on paper.
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Love makes us all a bit embarrassing while simultaneously, mercifully removing any shame from the very cringe behavior that happens under love’s spell. As long as there are butterflies in your tummy, you are always on the brink of doing something cringe in the name of love and that’s beautiful, innit.
People will disappoint you — even the people who match your freak, fit the bill, check off all the boxes, etc. It’s something you must accept and learn to work with when it happens. And this is only more likely with indirectness. No one may be able to totally mitigate heartbreak (or the drawn-out ego death of heartbreak), but an abiding commitment to honoring your inner freak can only attract a partner who is willing to not only match you but hopefully also celebrate and inspire you to be your most evolved freakiest self. Matching is table stakes. We cannot guarantee any ideal outcomes, but we can at least make for damn sure that the people who fw us, fw who we truly are — our most genuine, uniquely individual, weird-ass, freak vibes.
I once read a therapy Instagram infographic post that said something to the effect of “You’re always teaching people how to treat you by the way you treat yourself” (which is true to the extent that those other people possess an abundance of self-awareness).
Thus, the only way for someone to match your freak is to be one. Do with that what you will.
No one will catch me crying into a front-facing camera, but my condolences to anyone trying to find love in a hapless place. If I am going to be rejected, it will be for the right reasons (they do not get me and simply cannot get on my level), not for pretending to be the kind of person I believe they will find the most palatable (chill girl, cool girl, zzzzzz).
Nothing is serious until it’s serious! After several lengthy burnouts with a few people who initially presented as husband material and gradually became restraining order material, my list has become much abbreviated. I may regret some ways I handled those situations (namely, by staying in them as long as I did), but I will never regret loving anyone as much as I did. Freak begets freak, after all.