Doobie Doo
Veteran
\
Credit...Illustration by Kristina Tzekova
By Jean Garnett
The stranger arrived at the bar before I did, as I intended him to, and was waiting for me at a table in back. He had the kind of face I like, and he had been a little difficult to pin down, delayed in his responses, which I also like. The place was loud with the “having fun” sounds people make when they expect to have fun any minute now, so we were leaning in to hear each other. His hair, I thought, would be good to put my hands in.
Listen · 35:39 min
There comes a time, usually, when a few extra beats of eye contact are enough. We passed through these beats, took each other’s wrists and met across the table, which was wide enough to frustrate kissing in the right way, keeping the rest of us well apart. Back at my place he was a little shy, I thought, or a little out of practice, but I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted — to be organized and oriented by his desire, as though it were a point on the dark horizon, strobing.
“I was really looking forward to seeing you again,” he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, “but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low
.”
“Totally understand,” I replied, but I didn’t. Feeble, fallible “looking forward” is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all. I was about to collapse into a ritual of frustrated horniness (fantasy, masturbation, snacks) when a friend urged me to join her and two other women for dinner.
“Of course he has anxiety,” said one of them, a therapist, who sat across from me at the restaurant. “That’s life. That’s being alive and going to meet someone you don’t know well.”
“Yeah,” said the woman beside her, a historian. “It’s called ‘sexual tension.’ Stay with it for a minute and you might get some.”
“They can’t,” said my friend with triumphant disgust. She told us about a woman she knew who was dating a man from another city. After weeks of saying “I can’t wait to see you,” the man ghosted her during his actual visit. His explanation later? He’d been “too anxious.”
“Aww, poor baby!” cried the historian, and we all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to “man up and [expletive] us.” We were four women at a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan; we knew what show we were in, and we couldn’t help but wonder, in a smug, chauvinistic way: Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?
The therapist mused about the anxiety of needing to “justify the phallus.” “You know,” she said, “from the child’s point of view, it’s like, ‘I get what Mom is for, but what are you for? What’s the point of your thing?’” This sent us miming confrontations with imaginary members — “Who invited you?” “What’s your deal?” “Are you lost?” — which led to wisecracks about the not-so-precision scalpel of the surgeon the therapist was seeing. Privately, jokes aside, I am quite susceptible to penis — like, I worry that in some Hobbesian state of nature I might just automatically kneel to the prettiest one — but lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want, and this bawdy, diminishing humor soothed me, made me feel more powerful, more in control.
“When did the men get so anxious about desire?” asked the therapist, and I said I didn’t know. “Yes, you do,” my friend said. “It was when they were put on notice that they can’t just get drunk and grope us.”
I haven’t been dating long (just the other day my ex-husband and I received our Judgment of Divorce as an email attachment), but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.
One of the reasons my marriage ended was that I fell in love with another man — whom I’ll refer to by his first initial, J. Spontaneously graceful, with a soft voice and an inordinate, sad-eyed smile, J. made me laugh, stopping my breath. Being a “good guy,” he intimated from the jump that he did not know how to “do” relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one with him (or, as he may have conceptualized it, from him), I did so at my peril (which was his peril, too, since he would hate to hurt me). Still, he pursued me; we seemed to be “doing” something together.
It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who “can’t.” Have these men not heard of “don’t want to?”
Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, “laying low,” unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.
The Trouble With Wanting Men
Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name: heterofatalism. So what do we do with our desire?Credit...Illustration by Kristina Tzekova
By Jean Garnett
- July 21, 2025
The stranger arrived at the bar before I did, as I intended him to, and was waiting for me at a table in back. He had the kind of face I like, and he had been a little difficult to pin down, delayed in his responses, which I also like. The place was loud with the “having fun” sounds people make when they expect to have fun any minute now, so we were leaning in to hear each other. His hair, I thought, would be good to put my hands in.
Listen to this article, read by Kirsten Potter
Listen · 35:39 min
There comes a time, usually, when a few extra beats of eye contact are enough. We passed through these beats, took each other’s wrists and met across the table, which was wide enough to frustrate kissing in the right way, keeping the rest of us well apart. Back at my place he was a little shy, I thought, or a little out of practice, but I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted — to be organized and oriented by his desire, as though it were a point on the dark horizon, strobing.
“I was really looking forward to seeing you again,” he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, “but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low
.”“Totally understand,” I replied, but I didn’t. Feeble, fallible “looking forward” is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all. I was about to collapse into a ritual of frustrated horniness (fantasy, masturbation, snacks) when a friend urged me to join her and two other women for dinner.
“Of course he has anxiety,” said one of them, a therapist, who sat across from me at the restaurant. “That’s life. That’s being alive and going to meet someone you don’t know well.”
“Yeah,” said the woman beside her, a historian. “It’s called ‘sexual tension.’ Stay with it for a minute and you might get some.”
“They can’t,” said my friend with triumphant disgust. She told us about a woman she knew who was dating a man from another city. After weeks of saying “I can’t wait to see you,” the man ghosted her during his actual visit. His explanation later? He’d been “too anxious.”
“Aww, poor baby!” cried the historian, and we all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to “man up and [expletive] us.” We were four women at a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan; we knew what show we were in, and we couldn’t help but wonder, in a smug, chauvinistic way: Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?
The therapist mused about the anxiety of needing to “justify the phallus.” “You know,” she said, “from the child’s point of view, it’s like, ‘I get what Mom is for, but what are you for? What’s the point of your thing?’” This sent us miming confrontations with imaginary members — “Who invited you?” “What’s your deal?” “Are you lost?” — which led to wisecracks about the not-so-precision scalpel of the surgeon the therapist was seeing. Privately, jokes aside, I am quite susceptible to penis — like, I worry that in some Hobbesian state of nature I might just automatically kneel to the prettiest one — but lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want, and this bawdy, diminishing humor soothed me, made me feel more powerful, more in control.
“When did the men get so anxious about desire?” asked the therapist, and I said I didn’t know. “Yes, you do,” my friend said. “It was when they were put on notice that they can’t just get drunk and grope us.”
I haven’t been dating long (just the other day my ex-husband and I received our Judgment of Divorce as an email attachment), but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.
One of the reasons my marriage ended was that I fell in love with another man — whom I’ll refer to by his first initial, J. Spontaneously graceful, with a soft voice and an inordinate, sad-eyed smile, J. made me laugh, stopping my breath. Being a “good guy,” he intimated from the jump that he did not know how to “do” relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one with him (or, as he may have conceptualized it, from him), I did so at my peril (which was his peril, too, since he would hate to hurt me). Still, he pursued me; we seemed to be “doing” something together.
My husband and I had an open relationship at the time that J. and I met, so the terms of our involvement were, at first, limited, and although J. exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another. I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration, things I wanted with (from?) J., even as, throughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who “can’t.” Have these men not heard of “don’t want to?”
Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, “laying low,” unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.
