if he wanted to, would he really?

why tik tok dating advice is ruining your dating life.

Have you noticed that social media dating advice has become especially unbearable lately? It seems like no matter what app I’m rotting my brain on, I’m being fed videos instructing me to dump every man in my vicinity, and be pre-annoyed at guys I haven’t even dated yet.

It seems like I can’t even go five seconds of scrolling without some influencer shouting “If he wanted to, he would!” at me. Perhaps you’ve been jolted out of a resting state by being screaming at with this phrase too. If you’re not familiar with this insufferable motto, it’s our generation’s “he’s just not that into you,” a mantra pushed onto innocent young women accused of being over-eager to fabricate excuses for inadequate men.

Just like its predecessor, “If he wanted to, he would” seems innocuous at first glance. The expression offers a simple and refreshing take on situationships and long-term relationships alike. Given that women tend to have more codependent tendencies that make them believe they can change their partners, the expression can nudge them into leaving a guy who doesn’t meet her needs, instead of making excuses for him.

But, the more I sat with it, the more I despised it. And the more I had a sneaking suspicion that it was setting men and women up to fail in modern relationships.

Photo by Deric on Unsplash

Let’s start with the basics. If he wanted to, would he really? Sure, men are simple-ish and when they know what they want, they chase after it. There’s a nugget of truth there. After all, men are hunters (or something) and when they set their eyes on a prey, nothing can stop them.

While this may describe securely attached men, it’s certainly not the case for those who aren’t, which is according to the data, more than half of them.

For men who have avoidant attachment styles for instance, the attraction-to -relationship pipeline isn’t quite that simple. Often, it’s not if he wanted to he would, it’s if he could he would. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the woman he’s with, and in fact it can actually be precisely the opposite. The more right there is with you, the more wrong it can feel to him. It’s not that avoidant men don’t crave intimacy, it’s that they don’t possess the natural skills to maintain it.

Now this doesn’t mean that women should stick around and accept breadcrumbs! To understand, does not mean to tolerate. For many women, dating an avoidant person is just not going to pan out and that’s okay! But if an avoidantly-attached man is actively working on becoming secure, they may still struggle with a reduced capacity for intimacy, which may show up in ways that could be read as disinterest if not inquired about. But if we just chalk it up to “if he wanted to, he would” there’s no room for the nuance of men who don’t have perfectly secure attachment styles, and whose behaviors don’t always align with their desires. Ignoring this basic principle, means unnecessary suffering for a woman who might personalize a man’s actions rather than understanding them as his pattern that’s completely divorced from how he feels about her.

Men, just like women, are complex creatures. We all do things we wish we didn’t do, and act in contradiction with what we want. Assuming that men will somehow magically operate under a different human paradigm because they used to hunt saber-toothed tigers 12 000 years ago is absurd. “If he wanted to, he would” doesn’t just reduce men to neanderthals— it disempowers the modern women trying to date them.

Like other oversimplified dating slogans, it’s feminist-passing, but only in surface. It may free a woman to leave a toxic relationship, but it’s not self-affirming. It’s encourages her to internalize male behavior, which actually just reinforces the very codependent patterns that the phrase claims to set her free from. While it’s seen as a freedom cry for women, its pernicious anti-feminist undertones ultimately blames women for male disrespect. “If he wanted to he would” implies that a woman is responsible for the way a man acts around her and that his treatment of her is a reflection of her worth to him. It suggests that if a woman was better, she would be treated her differently, when the way that a man treats a woman is always a reflection of how he treats himself. This was my entire thesis of For the Love of Men. I was so sick of hearing feminists say that men just hate women, when in fact their poor treatment of us just reveals a deep rejection of themselves.

But the motto isn’t just chauvinistic, it’s astonishingly outdated. “If he wanted to, he would” might have been true in the past, when women were mandated to take on a passive role and men were in charge of seduction. But in a world where men don’t feel as comfortable being as forward out of fear of misreading cues or coming off as a creep, they’re not as commanding as they used to be. This means that a guy might be very enticed by a woman, but more conservative in his courtship, just because he’s trying to be overly cautious and deferential to her. There are so many reasons a guy might be more tepid! Telling women to slap a blanket mantra onto every encounter feeds the arrogance that makes us believe that we already know someone’s intentions, which is at the root of bad communication.

We must also remember that we are living through strange times! Men are still expected to be bold and make the first move, and yet they’re often reprimanded for not knowing if the woman they haven’t even hit on yet, is interested. Women on the other hand, still want to be approached, but not too approached, for very valid reasons.

Women aren’t sex objects, but men aren’t mind-readers! Nonetheless, I think we could see our dating lives improve if we had more compassion for the other gender’s tricky position, rather than looking for confirmation bias in our feeds that we’re in fact the victim. If both genders were a bit more patient with each other, we could avoid a lot of courtship headaches.

And the elephant in the room is that the stakes of this conversation are extremely high. We’re in the middle of loneliness crisis and it’s a code red situation. We’ve have never had this little physical intimacy with each other. Currently, one in four women under 35 has not had a single sexual partner in the last year, and the amount of men under 30 who are single has gone up a whopping 51% since 2019. Maybe the fact that we’re all watching (bad) videos about dating, instead of actually dating is contributing to our seemingly inescapable sex recession.

So get off your phone, and go on some dates! It’s okay. You won’t self-combust even if it’s not the right fit. If you’re straight, resist the urge to overcomplicate or oversimplify the opposite sex, just to feel a sense of control. They are weird and complex, just like you. Trying to predict how someone feels about you, and analyzing their behavior might give you temporary relief, but the truth is, romance is unpredictable and that’s why we like it.

So get off your phone, go on some dates and stop taking other people’s crap personally. If you wanted to, you would.