But unpick it I did (though over a glass of wine, not in a therapist’s office), and I was usually only hurting myself. Having grown up watching Carrie dumped via Post-it note in Sex And The City, and taken my dating advice from teen magazines obsessed with ‘catching’ men, I’ve had to unpick my own self-destructive behaviour over the years. ‘What that can then mean is that men bring all their emotional needs to their partners, which is too much for one person to hold, resulting in mutual frustration.’ And, in short, resulting in all of the burden of emotional labour being put on the woman in a relationship.īut is it justified to expect men to seek therapy? I haven’t had any myself – and, as a Millennial woman, my expectations of dating haven’t always been healthy.
#Women only date up how to#
‘I do think that men tend not to have the kinds of friendships that allow them to be safely emotionally vulnerable, in a way that some women seem to have,’ says Lucy Clyde, an accredited psychotherapist and counsellor and co-host of the podcast How To Cope. But could his appeal have something to do with his time on the therapist’s couch too? Or as a woman on Twitter put it, amid talk over a certain celebrity’s appeal, ‘Why don’t I see people taking the angle of PETE DAVIDSON HAS GONE TO THERAPY!! Men who have been to therapy are hotter than men who haven’t? Duh?’ SNL comedian Davidson is one of the most desirable men in celebritydom, if his exes are anything to go by. Men need to stop using their girlfriends and hire a professional.’ In the end, he agreed with her that he needed help – though not before she ended things. ‘It’s selfish not to.’ It’s a realisation that she came to after dating a man who hadn’t recovered from a very volatile relationship in his past, and blamed women in general for it. ‘Everyone should get therapy after a bad relationship before considering another one,’ says a friend in her mid-thirties. The theory is that a man who has therapy is more emotionally open, more willing to communicate, and not so steeped in the culture of toxic masculinity that he sees therapy as weakness. ‘Is it OK for me to state that I will never again bind my life to someone who hasn’t been through therapy?’ asked one 30-something Briton of New York Magazine’s famous agony aunt Ask Polly in a recent column.
It’s easy to feel hurt, gaslit or like Netflix’s favourite stalker, Joe Goldberg, when you realise you’ve been planning minibreaks based on someone’s heartfelt messages, while they’ve been copy-and-pasting them across four apps.Īs a result, some women are narrowing the field beyond the basic parameters of age and location. Breadcrumbing, ghosting, softbois… it might sound like a fairy story, but even the brothers Grimm couldn’t have dreamt up these horrors. Should you only date a man who’s had therapy? That’s the million-quid question trending on social media – and as a single woman navigating the heterosexual dating scene, I can tell you that it’s enough to make anyone want to lie down on the therapist’s couch.
Finding love is never easy – but as women say no to toxic dating behaviour, some believe there’s only one thing that matters when it comes to positive relationships…
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