Women, you are worth more: raise the bar

One of my guy-friends said to me: “I chose never to settle for someone. I’d rather be alone than with someone who is not meeting my standards.”

“Wouldn’t you get worried at some point?” I asked him

“May be in my late 30s, but before then, no”

It was a confidence that many (not all) men had, and many (not all) women lacked. Many women rushed towards relationships like fish swimming into a bear’s mouth.

Women who rush into relationships

What motivated this mad rush?

It was many factors, chief among them a lack of self-esteem and self-love.

If you asked women, as I asked the woman I know best, myself, “why is a relationship so important to you?”, there would be a barrage of reasons. Few of them held strong once challenged.  I like being in a relationship because:

1. I like doing things for other people. I like to give.
2. I like someone to rely on for things like installing black-out blinds, changing the light-bulb, fixing things around the house
3. I don’t like making major decisions by myself. I feel I need a thought partner
4. I like companionship – I like having some to make life’s little observations to
5. I want to have children
6. I don’t want to be the only single person in a coupled society – I want to feel “normal” and like I belong in a community by following recognizable milestones
7. I enjoy romance, to “Netflix and Chill” etc.

Each of these reasons sound valid on the surface yet a few of them crumble to pieces when you look at them closely and look what’s propping them up: the ugly monster of female low self-esteem is behind a bunch of the “awww”-inducing reasons that Hollywood, Disney and LoveTM have extolled as normal, natural and highly desirable motivators for the past several decades. You don’t see that ugly monster easily until you start to really observe, but it’s there standing next to certain couples, the invisible third wheel, an integral part of what keeps their relationship together. Heck, it may even be walking around with you as you walk around “alone”.

The ugly low-self esteem monster, it is really ugly, sorry

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Here are at least 3 indicators, related to the first 3 drivers for relationships above, that you are afflicted by the low self-esteem monster:

Being overly giving: Why do women like to give so damn much? I don’t think all of it is because we are loving, caring people. I think some of it is more sinister and based on a need for feeling worthy or for external validation. Some of the giving works to solidify the relationship as central to a woman’s life. It’s like women are investing more and more to create sunk costs for themselves. Why is any woman spending time making elaborate scrapbooks and gifts for their boyfriend, rather than spending the same time on self-love, their career or on a project that betters or furthers themselves? I would like to issue a challenge to all my female readers: just do less for your male partner. They won’t even notice, I promise. They may even be grateful for the extra “space”!

Not being self-sufficient: What is stopping you from learning more skills yourself? Are you fundamentally incapable of changing a light bulb or learning basic DIY? Investing in her own skill-set to ensure she can take care of her own safety and errands should be a top priority for all women. It’s become a top priority for me certainly. I make sure now when I interact with men that they aren’t giving me fish, but teaching me how to fish. And if they can’t teach you anything, you shouldn’t be dating them.

Being overly reliant on a romantic partner for decision-making: There’s no reason at all that your thought partner be someone you are sleeping with. In fact, there are many reasons why a better thought partner may be someone more platonic in your life who is able to give you the bigger, less biased picture when making decisions such as big career moves etc. By anchoring on one person as a thought partner, many women are short-changing themselves constantly. Cultivate a diverse network of mentors and thought partners for better decision-making. It takes work, and if you are making less damn scrapbooks for your partner, you can do it 🙂

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Once you have eliminated at least those 3 reasons for needing a partner, you have an amazing freedom to raise the bar, and improve the male species (who are in dire need of improvement). Their improvement has been held back for centuries because of women with low self-esteem, and its sister manifestation of low independence, being overly forgiving.

Take that bar out of its current hold, place it higher. You are worth more. And if no one can surpass the bar, that’s a totally fine outcome too – you are enough as you are, and you can change that light-bulb by yourself!

The pyramid of attraction and why online dating is like throwing darts in the dark

It was a warm Thursday night in San Francisco, circa 9.00 pm. I was at the Alchemist bar, a classy gothic bar with very interesting art. I grabbed a candlelit spot (by one of those artificial candles, a throwback to our more romantic past) and watched the Tim Burton-esque silhouettes being projected on the walls. In the silhouettes, two children are wandering around in a forest, and then a witch emerges. She holds out a juicy apple. One of the children takes it. There it was. The apple of temptation, delivered by a witch whose identity was unbeknownst to the innocent children, who somehow overlook her gnarly face and the curly-pointed hat and her black robes…it sent a shiver down my spine.

The apple was love (or the illusion of it). The witch was the heartbreak that always reveals its ugly face after you’ve taken bites of the apple. And here I was waiting to engage in the most dangerous sport of our modern times: online dating.

Exhibit A: the perils of dating as captured by Instagram artist violetclair

My date arrived and it was with the cursory awkwardness of 2 strangers that we greeted each other. When 2 online dates meet, the first thing each person wants to do is take the other person in. Do they look like their photos? Do they look as imagined? Yet you have to pretend you are not taking the other person in and just jump into free-flowing easy confident conversation.

I think we should institute a time-out of 2 minutes where each person walks around the other, looks them up and down, smells them and does some basic checks like stretching their arm out, tapping them to see they’re made of the right material, inspecting their muscle-fat composition. Online dating isn’t all that different from online shopping.

The fact of the matter is we are animals, and online dating is deeply flawed because it ignores what really drives attraction. This became very clear to me when I attended a workshop on Social Intelligence earlier this week (with Jaunty – a life school) and came across a framework called the “Pyramid of Attraction”. It’s so highly relevant to our lives that I felt it deserved a blog-post:

Exhibit B: The Pyramid of Attraction

The point of the pyramid is it shows what weighs the most in your attraction — the base layer, and what weighs the least — the tiny triangle of ‘logic’ at the top.

The most fundamental drivers of attractiveness are Health & Status. Health is the most important – does this person look like they are healthy and going to live for a long time? This is why self-care routines like exercise and having a good diet are so fundamental to attractiveness. Status consists of internal and external status. Your external status is conveyed by how you’re dressed etc. Your internal status is the confidence you project, stemming from your skills, your self-esteem, your belief system. These are conveyed in your body language. This is why people generally know who they find attractive in like 30 seconds. Our minds quickly process health and status information about someone. Arguing against such behavior as “shallow” or “superficial” or accusing people of being “looks-based” is futile – attraction short-cuts are hard-wired into our reptilian brains. We’re all driven by this type of subconscious analyses/instinct, even if we like to pretend we aren’t.

The second layer is emotion. This is also powerful. This is why you can become attracted to someone over time by getting to know them. You can form an emotional bond based on your psychological similarities, your kindness and compassion towards the world and each other, based on your similar sense of humor, your shared smiles and laughter. I’ve never dated anyone who I haven’t been attracted to within the first two minutes, but my chemistry with certain people has grown over time. As I get older, I grow more appreciative of this layer in the pyramid of attraction.

The last and smallest layer is logic. This is the layer people falsely assume that most of us operate on, and indeed some people probably do, but my opinion is that those are the people that really miss out on romantic connection by choosing safety over excitement (a valid choice perhaps – I’ve always chosen excitement and now I’m 29 and single…so may be it’s time I favored logic?). It’s frustrating for me when I get asked questions such as the following, about people I’m seeing: Did you meet at business school? Does he have an MBA? Which University did he go to? Is he Indian? Is he Sikh? Invariably the answer to all is No/Not important. None of those are qualities I have ever found particularly attractive.

We need to stop asking people this style of logic question because it does not matter much, at least not in a romance-based society (it’s a separate issue and blog-post whether a romance-based model of relationships and marriages makes much sense in the first place). You can match someone on every logical dimension possible, as my mum once did on the Indian matrimonial site Shaadi.com for me, and then they meet and have no desire for anything but a platonic friendship. Even in friendships, logic can be a poor predictor. Some of the people I best get along with are very different from me in their profession and life choices.

Online dating : death by irrelevance 

Online dating turns the pyramid of attraction on its head – giving greatest emphasis to the least important drivers of attraction. You start by logically filtering people based on their photos and the descriptions they wrote about themselves. Then you text and start building some form of emotional connection, and then you finally meet and get to assess their health/status.

I’ve been on so many dates where I’ve turned up, taken one look at the guy, and been like “no” in my head and then had to sit through an hour and a half of mild to moderately interesting chit-chat. I had a negative reaction to their health/status straightaway in many cases. One of my new goals is to minimize time spent on such dates down to 45 mins.

Where does this leave us, the people with Hinge, Bumble, CMB, Tinder and The League, all in the “Lifestyle” folder on our phones? It leaves us with the conclusion that online dating is like throwing darts in the dark. You may get lucky eventually, but it is a painful process to go through so many dates with totally irrelevant matches.

Wouldn’t it be better if we could come across more people organically? And then fall into our natural tendencies to evaluate their health/status first? I’ve seen attractive guys at street-crossings, in bookstores, certainly in the yoga class in Cow Hollow (where all the demi-Gods and demi-Goddesses of physical appearance in SF do yoga). And yet I’ve never really gone up to these attractive men and asked them out…how the hell do you talk to a stranger on the street? For now, I am engulfed by the culture of our modern time and city and confined to throwing darts in the dark.

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In the Alchemist, it took a couple of hours for us to get more comfortable. Good conversation takes time between strangers (and sometimes between friends too). We were smiling as we walked to the next bar. At least the dart kind of landed on the dart board, I thought. A good date, whether one follows or not, is still something to be grateful for. It’s truly a small miracle given the odds.

Fairy-tales and myths part II: The shackles of Gender

In this blogpost, I tackle the biggest myth of all: the myth of freedom, and expose the reality of shackles that we live in.

The delusion of “Freedom”

Sometimes I feel like I might have an underlying Tourette syndrome-type problem. Especially when I’m bored stiff in a meeting or group interaction, I toy with the idea of saying something crazy, to shake people up, see how they would react. But so far at least, I haven’t said it.

The point is we are all in shackles. There is no free speech. There’s not even fully free thought. No one has full freedom. When I think of the word “freedom”, I think of America. A century of slogans of liberty, life, pursuit of happiness has brainwashed everyone. And the opposite of freedom makes me think of countries where you can’t wear whatever, do whatever. But the reality is no one is really free, not even the people you think are free are free.

Wait, why are you writing about freedom? Don’t you blog about dating? 
What inspired this post was a glass of wine, and a copy of Men’s health which was left in my hotel room at the W (I guess they thought I was a guy?).  Also, I haven’t been on a date in six months (wah wah) so can’t really write about dating any more.

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The shackles of men

I wonder what men read I thought as I enthusiastically started to flick through Men’s health…

Most boring magazine ever.

This particular one didn’t even have an article on sex. The articles were mostly about exercise, and full of serious, slightly angry looking men. The color scheme was strictly masculine (read: strictly boring) and the fonts very straight-edged, harsh.

This is masculine culture as the world has defined it: harsh, straight-edged, lacking warmth, tenderness, joy, appreciation, gratitude, depth, complexity, bitter-sweetness, emotion, indecision and all the other things that make humans 3-dimensional. Men are flat in this world. They’re just meant to wear suits and expensive watches and go to ‘business meetings’ or go shirtless with six packs, and have a few girls around them, who they sleep with but don’t have particular attachment to. That’s marketing’s view of masculinity.

I find it preposterous that for the longest time men weren’t meant to use certain products. Take moisturizers as an example, as if only women needed moisturizer. Or to groom their eyebrows, as if only women need to interfere with nature. And if you look at cosmetic products today for men, it’s just ridiculous how blue and grey they are and how much effort companies have to go to to make them look boring and ‘manly’ enough to be accepted, and how they always have to be labelled as ‘For men’. Have you ever seen a cosmetic product labelled ‘For women’?

The magazine that kicked off all these thoughts

Looks like they had to add blue coloring to it and label it ‘For Men’ to make it acceptable

My perusal of Men’s health got me thinking about the other ways in which men are shackled. Some of these are counter-intuitive and I deep-dive into the ones I feel most worthy of editorial exploration:

• They can’t like anything that’s not black or blue or grey
• They must have masculine hobbies like watching sports, doing sports. Straight men can’t say they like doing embroidery or going to art galleries 
• They can’t cry during movies
• They need to be stronger than women even when they’re sick/tired
• They can’t say ‘no’ to sex even when they don’t want it
• They can’t seem to want sex too much
• They have to pretend that monogamy is normal and that they only want to sleep with their wives/girlfriends
• They can’t text more than one line at a time, or use punctuation (Ok, I’m not sure why this is, but men consistently are sparse and lack attention to detail in written communication versus women in my experience)
  

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Let’s talk more about the meatiest shackles….

Shackle: Men must have masculine hobbies like watching sports, doing sports. They can’t say they like doing embroidery or going to art galleries

Or doing anything that a girl like me who likes poetry and art might actually be able to relate to!

I have many female friends who I can have endlessly long conversations with that traverse many topics, because many of my female friends share the same interests as me: photography, nature, art, poetry, reading, movies, travelling, observing and philosophizing on social phenomena.

And conversations with men? Honestly, I struggle sometimes. The men that are good conversationalists usually are those that have a broad range of interests, and these men are rare. I’ve come across a higher proportion of guys than girls who have just one or two hobbies that I find unrelatable (like playing pool, or watching football). It makes me wonder: is it that they were raised that way?  Is it that they weren’t encouraged to love whatever caught their interest freely, because certain activities are considered more ‘female’ than others. May be it’s not that they were explicitly told that they couldn’t pursue art, but that our society is still pretty gender-segregated from birth to death and so you tend to do what your social group likes doing.

Are many men who pursue stereo-typically masculine interests truly free?

A friend pointed out, however, that in many ways men to get to still have the best of most fields. For example, even if it is relatively less common to come across men who are into art versus women, many of the world’s most renowned artists are men. Similarly with chefs.

Shackle: Men can’t seem to want sex too much

This is a fairly recent phenomenon that I have observed in future-forward cities like San Francisco. Because it’s so widely known that men want sex, many men have taken upon themselves a new shackle of pretending they don’t want sex that much. It has actually made some aspects of dating even more frustrating for girls.

“It’s been date 5 and he hasn’t even kissed me yet, I just feel like he doesn’t want me” – Anonymous girlfriend

I did go on a Tinder date many months back in San Francisco, and was enthusiastically expecting light-hearted banter and flirting, and was disappointed when the guy outstretched his hand and said ‘Nice to meet you’ upon arrival as if it was a business meeting and then proceeded to ask lots of fact-based questions about my life as if he was actually interested in me as a person. Ughh dude, this isn’t Co-founders lab, it’s Tinder. Also, if you’re an Indian girl, 99.9% of people just automatically assume you are boring and a prude. 0.01% have the imagination to treat you like an individual.

Shackle: Men have to pretend that monogamy is normal and that they only want to sleep with their wives/girlfriends

 “When men cheat, it’s not necessarily because they don’t love the woman. Sometimes, it’s just the thrill of it. When women cheat, it’s because they’re unhappy with the man, because they’re not getting what they need” – wise SF guy friend

The more I’ve seen, experienced and talked to men, and read about these mystical creatures, the more I’ve come to believe that monogamy is not their nature, but a constraint forced on them by society. They can love someone and sleep with someone else, in a way that a higher proportion of women would struggle with.

The shackle of monogamy is a tough one to enforce on many men as it runs so very counter to their instinctive nature. So it takes a lot of cultural reinforcement to keep it in place. We see this in the media and in our society all the time with the glorification of people who make positive statements about their marriage. I’m not necessarily saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just observing with curious ambivalence at this point.

When we had business speeches at Oxford by CxOs, some CxOs would randomly bring in that marrying their wife was the best decision they ever made, and this statement would be met by approval from the audience. Was it really Mr CEO? Is that why you barely spend any time with your token wife?  

“Thursday is date night with my wife” say some, which is met by approving nods from everyone around the table. Even though you know they are bored as hell on date night listening to the same drab conversation, but they have to make it look fun and fulfilling to the outside world, and they have to contribute to maintaining the group norm that monogamy is a desirable state, and that one person can be the most fascinating person in your life for 60-70 years straight.

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Concluding thoughts

The interesting aspect of shackles is that they work in several opposing directions. Some shackles bring men and women closer together by pretending that and making us behave as if we are more similar than we actually are. Some shackles bring us further apart by pretending that we are so different and want such different things when we don’t actually. What I hope for is a world with more freedom where people can gravitate to what truly interests them without as much worry about what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. And selfishly, for men to become more interesting. Please.

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Disclaimer/Note: What I write is based on my perspectives, and is highly generalized. It’s also written from a heterosexual perspective. I do not intend to cause offence, nor to assert my views as ‘correct’, but intend to bring up topics to inspire interesting thought and conversations among my readers.