Pity the Young Male Pair Bonder

Or: Why Everyone's Wrong about Male Desire

Everyone Knows Why Men are Trash

My networks are abuzz with angst over young men. Those oversexed creeps, those trash-minded reprobates. Creatures of lust and entitlement and resentment, yearning to tup every female in sight. William Deresiewicz gives a profile of the breed:

[E]xcept for the fortunate few—the born rich, the strikingly handsome, the 6-foot-3—young men are shit, and nobody gives a shit. Young men … those losers, those loners, those apes—are left to pick their psychic zits on the periphery. Unfuckable? No one needs to tell you that. You are unfucked: unwanted, unattractive; in the most literal sense, unloved.

And this from a piece that's sympathetic to young men!

Is the portrait fair? For as long as I've been laying eyeballs on articles, commenters from across the discourse have been in a tizzy over the views and habits of right-leaning young bloods. The incels, the alt-righters, the neckbeards, the fedoras, the stans of Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan. The one thing everyone agrees on is that these angry young men have a problem, and their problem is that they can't get laid.

Everyone Is Wrong

I have nothing special to offer beyond the observation that I was once myself an angry young man, and my experience was almost nothing like this. Yes, I was lonely, creepy, unsavory, bitter, trollish, self-loathing, unsuccessful, gap-toothed, scrawny, balding, zit-spotted, hollow-chested, and narcissistic—a flyblown and unprepossessing creature, in every conceivable way. But I was not, I don't think, uncontrollably horny.  

My problem wasn't that I wanted to go to bed with every girl I saw. My problem was that I didn't want that.

Instead, what usually happened was that I'd get stuck on one particular girl—sometimes a girl who was available, often a girl who had no interest, but always a girl I knew fairly well—and obsess over her for years and years. Usually I had other girls interested in me. But I could never muster much interest in them, because once I'd devoted myself to girl X, nothing else in the world would do.

In short, along with all my other faults, I was a romantic. Or, to update my terminology with the sociological lingo that's popular nowadays, I was a young male pair bonder. It ruined my life.

I suppose I know what you're thinking. Isn't pair bonding the whole point of the game? Isn't that the ostensible goal of dating in the first place? Isn't the problem with most young men that they aren't pair bonders?

Well, maybe. I can only speak to what I know for sure. And I know this: when you're a young male romantic, the world tells you, day in and day out, that this is not how you're supposed to be.

The folk theory on the right, drawn from behavioral biology, is that men, as the sex that produces small gametes, are hardwired to seek out and impregnate as many partners as possible—and then, presumably, bolt for the hills—while women, the sex that invests in gestation, are hardwired to select high-status partners who can provide resources and produce fit offspring. If you translate those urges to high-tech dating markets, where both sexes have a near infinite pool of potential partners, men become beggars and women become choosers—or, in a somewhat more sophisticated analysis, 80% of women focus their energies on the top 20% of men, leaving both sexes in the lurch.

The folk theory on the left, drawn from feminist theory, is that men are socialized to exert power over women by reducing them to sex objects, using a variety of underhanded tactics. Attractive men pretend to fall in love with women, use them for sex, and break their hearts. Powerful, high-status, but unattractive men use quid pro quo bargains and threats of professional retaliation to pressure women into unwanted trysts. Low-status, unattractive, but physically powerful men use their strength to rape and batter women. And low-status, feeble, unattractive men, lacking all those other options, resort to weaselly emotional tactics, including implicit threats of violence, to torment and intimidate women, which is where we get the specter of the too-online misogynist weirdo with his arcane complaints and incessant mewling for attention. Put it all together, and each bad behavior becomes a different avenue to the same end goal, which is to make women feel like garbage.

Then you have the more fringe theories, which hold that heterosexuality and marriage and monogamy and possibly even reproduction itself are outmoded ideas. And you have the pop-culture take on the subject, which is basically, "aw, man, everybody be so horny!" repeated ad nauseum forever and ever.

To all of which I say, "Sure, OK, I get it, I believe that these are sincere attempts to make sense of common experiences." But they touch only tangentially on my experience, which mostly involved falling hard, and helplessly, for one girl after another, not being able to get over her, and not wanting, while I was obsessed with her, to put myself out there and sleep with other people.

I feel like it might be worth lingering on that pattern a bit, because:

A) Young people nowadays rarely seem to describe their romantic experiences in these terms, which suggests that something big may have changed, and,

B) Even when I was young, many people insisted that men weren't really like this or that people overall shouldn't be like this, which confused me and led to a lot of bad behavior.

We're Here, We're Male Pair Bonders, We're Not Going To Suddenly Become Promiscuous Horndogs

There's certainly no paucity of older literature dealing with male pair bonding behaviors. The sorrowful young swain mooning over his inamorata is a stock hero of the nineteenth century novel, while the oversexed cad who tries to bed as many women as possible is depicted in those books as a deviation from the norm. I used to hoover up such novels by the shelfful, and trust me, you get about twenty Gatsbys for every Byronic hero. It's only recently that people began to insist that there's something perverse, insincere, or even freakish about this kind of ardent young male devotion. 

But insist they do. When I was on the scene in the early 2000s, the cynical hookup culture of the 90s had mostly withered away, but the current hypercautious approach to dating hadn't quite risen up to replace it. The prevailing norm then was that you shouldn't have too many feelings at all, whether lustful or romantic, because feelings were a sign of vulnerability and vulnerability was uncool. A studied diffidence characterized the urban dating scene, both online and off. Having sex was how you proved that you didn't care much about sex, which was, in turn, a handy way to demonstrate that you didn't care much about anything. Gen-X aloofness ruled the roost.

In that milieu, no one knew how to make sense of a guy who was, essentially, a failed chivalric hero in a modern metrosexual's clothes. I used to get together and have long conversations with other men of a similar bent. We all agreed that we had no clue whatsoever how to behave. We wanted to make sacrifices for our beloveds, or at least have beloveds worth making sacrifices for. Fat chance of anyone taking that attitude seriously. They don't even make those kinds of movies anymore. Why would they? Who would buy the tickets? What kind of sap, what kind of rank Darwinian failure, armed with a career and an advanced degree and a side gig in a creative industry (which pretty much describes every man I knew back then) would turn his back on a surplus of urban singles to go moping around after the girl of his dreams? He'd have to be some kind of freak.

And that's how people saw us, or how they seemed to see us. In feminist circles, the young male romantic is typically viewed as an unusually insidious species of creep. He might not go so far as to grope you on the subway, he might even seem to be solid dating material, but when you actually start to look under the chassis—skimming his bookshelves, peeking at his screens—he comes across as a bit too much. Or maybe a whole lot too much. He's the kind of guy who's more in love with his own fantasies than he'll ever be with any flesh-and-blood girl. He'll use you for sex, but also more than sex; he wants it all, every drop of your attention; he'll latch his mandibles onto you and gulp down all your independence. And boy, he'll get scary if he doesn't get his way. He's an incel-times-ten, a loser's dream of heroism, a stalker-in-waiting and a suicide risk. Underneath the well-spoken exterior, he's nothing but a ball of red flags.

In the online manosphere, meanwhile, the young male pair-bonder is treated like a member of a totalitarian state who actually believes the propaganda. Sure, the manosphere insists, we're all supposed to say we're romantics, but no one takes that stuff seriously, right? Even women who say they want romance don't really want romance. What they want is a man—a real, old-fashioned man—the kind of man who's got the skills and will to sleep with any woman who catches his eye, and who'll go on playing the field forever until one special lady fights like hell to get her claws in him. What kind of miserable simp, what kind of soft-skulled virgin, would actually fall for that Valentine's Day crap? I'll tell you what kind—a self-deceiving loser who doesn't have the game to do better. Who's so utterly hopeless, so bereft of mojo, that he pretends not to want what everyone knows he wants. A man so pathetic and unsure of himself that he can't even bear to get rejected a few times. Or, hell, a thousand times. Why not? What difference does it make? It's all part of the game. And the game doesn’t care about what kinds of sad musings swirl around inside your wretched little head while you lie at home looking at old yearbook photos and wondering what happened to the cute girl from Accounting. The game is just the game is just the game is just the game.

If there's one thing these different schools of thought have in common—one rare area of overlap for society's many subcultures—it's the suspicion that the young male romantic is someone who still has a lot to figure out. He's at the very beginning of his therapeutic journey. He's unreconstructed, inchoate, delayed. He's got one foot in the world of children's fiction—and not the good, modern kind about self-esteem and teamwork, but the bad old kind full of dated gendered roles. He might eventually meet his special someone, but only after he gives up the childish fantasy of wanting to meet her someday. He'll find love when he stops looking for love. Because that's how real men behave.

In short, what people want a man to be—what modern culture tells us a man should be—is someone who is horny, has game, is independent, cultivates his skills, achieves success, sows his oats, doesn't get attached—is traditionally masculine in nearly every way—then chooses to give all that up. He matures! He sheds his masculine persona like a molted second skin. But you don't get credit for ditching those behaviors if you never mastered them in the first place, bub. You've got to prove you're strong enough to be a real man, then that you're strong enough to quit showing off. You've got to be uber the ubermenschen, hyper the hypermasculine, confidently humble and so hot you're cool. Like a fetus that recapitulates the stages of evolution, you've got to pass through a Greek Hero phase before you earn the right to settle down.

Is this a fair summary of how people actually think? Probably not. I'm channeling the cultural message I received at the age of twenty-six or so, when views of masculinity really mattered to me. This is what my radar picked up. This is what came down my antenna, from magazines and dating sites and even TV. This is also, for what it's worth, the message I received, perhaps subliminally, from a lot of girls I was seeing at the time.

And none of it made a bit of difference. I still felt like the same hopeless romantic I'd been since the age of thirteen. I did my best not to feel that way, to conform—to prove that I could play the game, if only so I could give up playing the game, which I hated. I pissed off a lot of people, I'm sure.

The Not So Ugly (But Still Quite Ugly) Truth

Meanwhile, looking around the internet, there's this:

Still, I think some women don’t really understand that, for men who are still out and about looking for women, it’s all rather a lot of work. There’s a slight Acme Corporation quality to being a single straight bloke, going out there, getting knocked back and then coming back again and again. I’d never reveal the number of women I went to bed with, but I would like to put on the record – and this is not, to be clear, to indicate that it was an enormous number – that it was an awful lot of effort.

And this:

There’s more. Young women can have sex whenever they want. For most young men, persuading a woman to sleep with them is like trying to crack a safe. You understand that it’s theoretically possible, but you have no idea how to do it. 

And this:

The alternative reality to male hornyness, in my opinion, is female neediness. Where men want sex, women want romance. Men want adventure; women want commitment.

Will anyone be annoyed if I say it wasn't like this for me? I repeat: the thing that caused me grief wasn't that I couldn't get girls to sleep with me. It's that I didn't want to be sleeping with a bunch of random girls. I dated. I flirted. I approached girls in bars. I used dating sites. I went to parties. I got phone numbers. I did all that stuff. And I found—I'm sorry to say—that it was not terribly difficult, circa the mid-2000s or so, in a large coastal city, to get laid. I certainly didn’t go around cracking people like safes. I didn’t have to lie, or use tips from pickup-artists, or have a high-powered job, or even fix my manifest flaws, whether physical or otherwise. I just had to show up.

Am I saying that I swanned around bedding oodles of beautiful women without any muss or fuss whatsoever?

The way it worked was this. I was part of a bunch of different friend networks that were connected at the fringes to other friend networks. From time to time—not often, but often enough—various people in these networks would decide they wanted to, ahem, get together. There was a lot of partying and a fair amount of drinking. If you hung around long enough, kept going to parties, basically maintained a decent attitude, opportunities came your way.

So I would, in keeping with the expectations of the time, go with various girls to the places where young people seek privacy, and start the processes that typically lead to the activities young people like to do in private. And then—this always happened—I would realize I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to be having casual sex. I didn't want to be sleeping around with acquaintances and friends and near-strangers.

And I would shut down. I never knew how to extract myself from these encounters, and I invariably did so tactlessly, even cruelly. I have no idea how the women involved interpreted these behaviors. If men, as is commonly believed, are uniformly goatish and undiscriminating and want to screw every female and sight, what does it mean when a man—a healthy young man of twenty-six—makes it eminently clear, despite previous signs to the contrary, that he has no interest in screwing you?

What it meant was this: I was hooked on someone else.

And I never knew how to push past those feelings and become the kind of oversexed satyr everyone told me I was supposed to be.

I kept at it. I got out there again and again and again, because I believed what everyone around me was saying—that men are naturally promiscuous and afraid of commitment and only interested in sex, and that men who don't feel this way will inevitably grow out of their shyness and turn into real men and want to sleep with lots of strangers.

And it never happened. What can I say? It just never happened. I did eventually settle down, but that's a different story, as boring and ordinary as any relationship story ever told. What people want isn't the marriage story, I've found. They want the dating story. And my dating story is that I spent years and years trying to prove the conventional narrative right, and ended up proving that it's at least partially wrong. It's not true that young men are only interested in sex, or that modern, liberated society has exposed the "reality" of universal male promiscuity behind the "myth" of traditional romance. At any rate, it wasn't true twenty years ago. And I can't help but note that it hasn't been true for many of the men I've known in my life. Why, then, do so many people insist that it's true? That's a question for another time.