The Partner You Are Looking For Doesn’t Exist
Why the Internet needs you to believe men are bad and women are too fat.
The Internet is destroying relationships. It really is. It is a 24/7 machine that manipulates you into thinking that there are perfect people roaming all around soaking in ice baths while their crypto is making billions of dollars in passive income. It wants you to never question why someone with big, big dollars would still be recording and self editing videos for you to watch them sit in first class and go to the day spa. Even on Medium, a platform I like, the articles that go viral on relationships are often obscenely titled and many are intentionally written on a third grade reading level. That’s not a slight on Medium, it’s more of a slight on Western education. I spent a bit of time with one of my friends that is a major YouTube celebrity (but in the music industry) exploring how I could make the jump to more video. His take is that my “down to earth vibe” and inclination towards saying whatever I want (he said “irreverent”) could become popular there. When we looked at the relationship accounts that did well on YouTube though I had an overwhelming sense of ick. I can’t even describe how much disdain I feel for the vast majority of popular relationship coaching. I also think it’s dangerous and divisive. Relationship coaching should be about connection and grounded in real experiences. Most people would do better just to turn off all internet access for a month and make it their goal to talk to ten real people a day they thought were attractive. There you go, I saved your romantic life. I don’t think my internal discomfort with the way relationship and self help work is marketed is a ‘me’ problem though.
This thinking is everywhere.
Recently, I have listened to the most caring and normal men I know start to say they are looking for ‘red flags’ in dating. These men didn’t get that language from books or therapy. These are just regular dudes that work a lot and eat hamburgers. The wellness machine is leaking into middle America. I have never had a high quality therapist or coach encourage me think of human behavior as either dangerous (red flag) or holy (fully healed). High quality mental health support pushes you into what boundaries are right for you based on your past experiences, personality and culture. It lets the pressure off, especially for quirky people like me who have a tough enough time making best friends let alone picking out someone to live with. Divisive language like ghosting, red flag, catfish, breadcrumbing and toxic love bombing comes straight off of what hits well on social media. If you are meeting men online and intensely interviewing them in a Bachelor TV style dating energetic then you have been influenced to do that by the wellness industry. That is not natural, safe or grounded human connection behavior. If you are a dude who waits days between texting a woman back and has a long list of rules you follow then you are just filtering out anyone worth dating. Each person in our lives has their own communication cadence and the pace that makes sense with one girl isn’t the one that will work for the next. That’s something you just know if you spend time with real people.
I am part of the machine and that’s why I understand it so well.
The reason I struggle so much with internet marketing is because you have to be polarizing to get the algorithm to work. I have 2.5k followers on Instagram and I have done a ton of personal work around how to show up in a way I can feel good about but that also gets actually seen by anyone. Most days I still want to just turn it all off. But, being a homeowner and a mom of older kids that ask for things like $800 for their school trips keeps me plugged into selling myself out here in the Internet streets. Also I genuinely believe I know what I am talking about and really can help people. Figuring out how to do it in a way that doesn’t sell an emergency and therefore double down on someone’s issues is still somewhat of an enigma. By the nature of my work I need clients to feel neutral about their bigger issues so we can calm their nervous system down enough to create some real shifts. Scaring them into giving me money is counter-productive.
Having followers online doesn’t mean you get engagement. The purpose of being online is for me is to share what I am learning and to sell services in both of my businesses. So I have to sort all of this out, if you follow me on Medium you are watching me do that. The only video reel I had that really went big was one about Taylor Swift with me talking about why women with an ego rub people the wrong way. If I just talked about celebrities in my car and linked to something that no one will ever open that costs about $10 and promised to help you find your soul mate I’d be very rich, very quickly. Unfortunately I just can’t stomach that kind of work, never have been able to. I am telling you all this from the inside because it’s true. If I would just make empty promises that aligned with human fear I could have a big piece of the wellness industry pie. It’s easy money but at a cost. The messaging monster is also changing the way we relate to each other on a core level. Part of the machine continuing to make money is ensuring that we all keep looking for imaginary perfect humans that don’t exist. If we do that we will keep spending money on abs, soulmate drawings, water machines, and healing seminars to break contracts with our past life lovers.
Balanced, middle of the road voices that don’t think all men are scary narcissists and simultaneously eye roll at the red pill community as they sensationalize sound bytes from Jordan Peterson get pushed to the very bottom of the internet pile.
“On average, social media accounts for 35.8 percent of our daily online activities, meaning that more than 1 in 3 internet minutes can be attributed to social media platforms” (dataportal.com). Most people spend several hours a day on social media. No wonder we are having such a hard time having the bandwidth for real human relationships and real human emotions. No wonder people have such a hard time grieving and moving on from their past relationships. No wonder most people feel truly stuck. We have a low nervous system capacity for real life plus we are being fed a constant stream of, “men suck and women don’t want partners”.
There is a 5.6 trillion dollar beast that needs you to believe that with just one more small investment you too can become perfect and meet your perfect match. Women seem to sign up for this cult really easily and be influenced more quickly by claims like “revenge body in 90 days” or “60 days to finding your soulmate”. While I think men are more likely to avoid it all but internalize a sense of failure they aren’t conscious of. The charge on our Visa cards and the first few weeks of the total life makeover we are about to experience relieves stress and helps us feel for just a moment like we have total control of everything and our perfect man, body and mind can be earned through self investment. The bots that built it just extracted what works from patriarchy and psychology and pummeled it through the evil genius that is social media.
Most internet marketing for women reminds me of the truly darker part of the Barbie movie. When you look at how the WOMEN (not the men) self-created the 2D, plastic, sterile, anti-human bubble they lived in. When Ken comes in and ruins Barbie’s Truman Show like fantasy world and makes her angry with his absurd behavior it is one of the more real parts of the movie. She’s forced (face down in the grass) into truly seeing herself and the glass house SHE built for the first time. She’s forced into a moment of humanity. It’s like someone deleted Barbie’s wellness TikTok feed, banned Botox and closed her Pilates studio. Ken unplugged her. If you date and partner with women you are going to have to learn to deal with and set boundaries around the unrelenting pull they feel to be perfect. You are going to have to patiently re-direct the neurotic KonMari sock folding and be super supportive and kind about it. The greatest thing a man could do for a woman in 2024 is tell her pretty much daily through words and in his actions that, “it’s safe to be a real woman”. Unfortunately most of my younger male clients are still sorting for the hottest and “sweetest” girl in town who actually won’t grow into motherhood or adulthood all that well as she struggles with the loss of her abs, volatile adulthood and the hormone changes of mid-life.
The Internet would lead you to believe that all women hate men and want to be hot, single cat ladies that work online and solo travel. As a hot (but in a Stacy’s mom sort of way) cat lady who works online and travels, I will also tell you that my life long core orientation is towards monogamous partnership. Most of my work is sort of this weird, gifted kid way of making sure I figure out how to do that well for myself and for the men I connect with. I want to understand what is actually possible and how real people (my clients) successfully build and maintain real and rare relationships. My female clients DEEPLY want a mutually fulfilling romantic partnership. They are frustrated surely with their online dating experiences and how hard it is to meet men in the wild. BUT they keep trying and hold actually a beautiful core orientation towards love. I feel sometimes like the keeper of that light for them. Reminding them not to snuff it out just yet because the world really needs it. When I say I help women with feminine energy that’s what I am helping them remember to hold. The ‘thing’ where a woman in love can believe so deeply and so truly in it that she kind of swallows the whole room. It’s a real thing, not an internet thing. It makes me sad to think about all the real magic that the Internet swallows up like sunsets that take your breath away, noticing things being born in spring and the glow of real love and trust.
I have found that pulling basic data has been more helpful than ever for clients because even my most educated clients are getting sucked into the perfect human marketing machine. I even made up a funny term for it with my female clients called “man math”. A very quick Google search would show you that, “17% of all men earn over $100k per year, compared to only 8.4% of women” (zippia.com). People might not be perfect but math that comes from income taxes and health data can be close to perfect if you can read more than one article on a topic. The facts are that most people are struggling financially right now because even six figures (which most people don’t make) isn’t enough money to feel really comfortable in most parts of America, especially with kids.
The Internet wants you to think that there are rare, super rich unicorn men who aren’t struggling with the massive invisible labor of being the provider (in an age when that really isn’t possible)… but there are not. Men have a ton of echoes from patriarchy to sort out and old orientations towards women to discover and they don’t have many reliable, middle of the road role models pointing toward the way out. Because the way out isn’t profitable. If you want a male partner he is going to be struggling with these issues in some way his entire life. He is going to have to make sense of all of this on his own terms and it’s going to be messy and imperfect. He’s going to need re-direction at times and kind support when he’s slipping back into old thinking and behaviors he has seen modeled by every man in his family.
It’s very easy for men to feel like they aren’t enough and to slip underneath shame. Shame is a place of selfishness and a place where nothing good happens because you feel like there is nothing left to lose. Men aren’t dangerous but shame is very dangerous. I call it being in the ‘badlands’ when I talk about it with my kids. Anyone with any degree of intelligence can do about five internet searches on phrases like “men suck” or “men are dangerous” to see why this is happening. Men aren’t conditioned to integrate and mature emotions and the machine doesn’t want them to figure it out either. Emotional beings with embodied boundaries aren’t great widget makers.
So remember, when your pretty decent man does something just completely selfish and out of character that his great grandfather probably wasn’t too keen on you even voting and he saw twelve headlines this week telling him he is broken beyond repair. Plus the machine really needs him to be a mindless widget maker and for you to be buying a bunch of shit to fix him. That’s not conspiracy, it’s math. While all this is going on men are often partnering with women that expect them to pay for everything or at least for more things which is its own kind of invisible labor, even if the guy prefers it. Sometimes men do really suck at house work and sometimes their partner is exhausting herself in the unachievable, never ending task of sorting things no one really needs into storage bins, lists and spreadsheets when she should also be taking the break she is giving him so much shit for. If your boyfriend is divorced from a past partner like that he did things like sort waspy tasks into playing cards endorsed by celebrities while a marriage therapist supervised his follow through and he’s a little tender and sensitive in some places… just like you are from your past. So be nice to the good guys they have some stuff to heal too.
The machine is loud, exhausting and unrelenting and women just got bank accounts… it’s going to take some time to get our bearings out here between checkbooks and smartphone life. We just all have a ways to go. Men and women are both struggling.
Some men are so worth the investment. I know that for sure, not because the single Tarot card reader on Instagram said that she say it in the astral codes or because a male pastor promised me it was true from my man-God guidebook. But because I coach and know good men in my real life who do struggle sometimes but are net good to the world and to their partners. Men who face their demons and learn to do way better than their dads did. Men who can really hold space for me when I am trying to build another perfect glass yoga house full of exhaustion and bullshit and remind me that it is ok to get old and to have cellulite and to feel afraid and to need things that are tricky to give.
The best you can do is turn down the advertising monster and just let yourself feel afraid, hold it, don’t soothe it with buying something or doing anything. Then keep moving forward in the real directions you know are best from your real lived experiences. There is a quote by John Steinbeck that has hung in every office I have ever worked in as an adult for over 20 years and it is at the heart of everything I believe in: “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”