Dating Apps Are Showing Us Who We Are

Men have long prioritized ease over connection, it’s finally catching up to us.

Source: Newsweek

The New York Times recently published an article imploring men to “come back.” We never needed you to be perfect,” the author writes, addressing men who she says have grown emotionally vacant. “We needed you to be with us. Not above. Not muted. Not masked. Just with…We’re not asking for performances. We are asking for presence.”

Like many, I was struck by something undeniably true in the piece. Men are disappearing from social spaces and intimate connections. “A slow vanishing of presence,” is how the writer, Rachel Drucker, describes it. But inherent in this plea for men to “come back” is the call to an earlier time when men cared about presence and connection.

“There was a time, not so long ago,” she writes, “when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast.” Like the author, I’m old enough to remember mornings-after filled with fried eggs and the hope for more. But those moments were, more often than not, performed obligations. After the eggs, I mostly never heard from them again. She also notes that men once gained status by showing up with a woman by their side. But that woman always had to fit the shape of traditional beauty standards to achieve that status. It…