Why Is It So Hard to Admit We Need Each Other?

At the core of this moment of gender animosity is an unwillingness to be vulnerable.

The Sleep of Cupid by Jean-Baptiste Michel

This essay is the third in a series on the state of gender relations. I recommend reading the first, on whether men like women, and the second, on whether women like men, before reading this.

I’ve spent the last few weeks musing over something obvious: that men and women no longer seem to like each other. While many have added to the discussion, critiqued my framing or highlighted themes I missed, nobody has refuted the premise. Everyone agrees that we hate each other, the debate lies in the specifics of why, whose reasons for hating each other are more logically sound, who hates each other more, whether any of this is actually new and whether the fact that we hate each other even matters at all.

My purpose in belaboring these themes was to offer some, but not remotely all, explanations as to why they’ve come to be, but my primary intention has been to emphasize that yes, all of this does matter. It matters regardless of whether we’ve always hated each other. It matters regardless of whether our reasons for hating each other are stupid or profound. It matters even if it’s a problem that seems relegated only to the very online.

It’s understandable that all of this would be hitting an apex now. Gender is at the center of this week’s election (I’m sorry, I didn’t even want to bring it up!), though I’m not sure that is even a very productive way of looking at it. While the gender divide is as visible as its ever been, the current polling split between men and women is about the same as its been since 1996. There is plenty of evidence that this has worsened among younger generations, however. This all contributes to our era of gender antipathy — this moment of hatred between the sexes — but it is not the sole cause. Whatever happens this week, this antipathy will remain. It may well worsen. That’s part of why I feel compelled to say any of this now.

This is obviously a political problem, but to say it’s only a political problem is too easy. It absolves us of our own responsibilities, of our own interpersonal debts. Every post about hating the opposite gender is fundamentally saying the same thing: they’re all so desperately trying to prove just how badly they don’t need anyone else. This hostility isn’t just a battle of the sexes, it is a crisis of intimacy. It’s not that we aren’t having sex, but rather that we’re unwilling to relate to each other with any sense of emotional closeness at all. Hating someone makes this easy, palatable. It’s a safety measure that saves us from the work of introspection or analysis. Hatred is an uncomplicated emotion, one we can cite as coming from the gut. We may have logical explanations for it or the ability to explain it in depth, but it is ultimately a feeling that does not require justification as we are experiencing it. It is something that is simply there, sourced from a place beyond rationality.

Our desire for intimacy ought to be just as simple an emotion, far more so than this gender antipathy. That it is so absent from this cultural moment strikes me as irrational, completely against our natural state. As I concluded in my previous essay, we are supposed to like each other. We are supposed to want to be together. We may well be built to lament the shortcomings of the opposite gender and our dissatisfaction with them, but we are also built to overlook, ignore, accept and embrace these flaws for the sake of intimacy, just the same.

Some of this animosity would be settled, I think, if we could all just admit that we need each other. Our refusal to do so is only pushing us further toward a culture of loneliness and fragmentation.

Our historical reliance upon each other has long meant something different. It is no longer the case that women must rely on men for material stability, or that men must rely on women and their domesticity for social status. Most of us have the choice and opportunity to be independent. We are capable of producing an income and feeding ourselves without being pushed into marriage. There is probably much to say about how changing gender norms have produced much of this animosity in itself, that perhaps we are rigidly clinging to a sense of gendered loyalty in the absence of more concrete ways to define ourselves. Much of this conflict feels due to our incohesive cultural standards and expectations: men and women alike are expected to both reject gender norms and embrace them at once, and if we aren’t sure precisely how we’re supposed to act, we can at least critique everyone else.

On a more basic level, I think we’re still dealing with some residual resentment and rejection. We either resent that this shift has occurred, as many in the Manosphere seem to do, or reject the idea that we have anything else to offer each other at all, as some young women seem to do. Either way, we’re positioning ourselves to say that there is nothing for these pursuits to offer us in part because we haven’t any clue what pursuits we’re supposed to aim for. Being alone is easier than navigating our current disordered gender norms. Being angry is easier than revealing our anxiety.

It’s an attitude that extends well beyond our romantic lives. We spend more time on our phones than with our friends and families, we prefer to work from the isolation of our apartments than socialize in an office setting, we increasingly function as though there is nothing we owe to our communities and in turn nothing they owe us back. And again, I get it! I’m talking about myself here, too! It isn’t just out of ease or laziness— we’re trying our best to get by. There are fewer spaces for us to even connect with a sense of community, going out costs more and more, and commuting to work is a thankless chore. I want to stay home and look at Instagram, too. But still I see this fracturing and know that something is being lost. Every ritual and tradition is being opted out of. We’re continuously dwindling our sense of identity down until there’s only the self: we’re no longer part of a village, no longer part of a family, and now no longer even part of a relationship.

Like with our reliance on phones and the comfort of being an antisocial homebody, this avoidance of intimacy manifested in gender antipathy is similarly a matter of coping. Those of us expressing our distaste for the opposite gender are often doing so in response to disappointment. These are people who once had the desire for closeness and relationships and have had it beaten from them through years of rejection, mistreatment and loneliness. But hating each other does not offer any sort of collective fix. It’s an individual reprieve that worsens the source of the problem.

Let’s admit that men need women, not to make them look like more of a man or look better in front of their peers or cook them dinner or provide them with sexual fulfillment but for the sake of being a human being with feelings and emotions and a desire for companionship. Let’s admit that women need men, not for protection or financial support or to squash bugs or take our the trash but for the sake of the comfort and enjoyment of being together. We can reject the gendered tropes of what we’re expected to provide in a relationship without denying the reality that we, as people, regardless of gender, need each other.

To say all this, though, would require that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. That is a particularly tall order in a time when we see ourselves as the only person we have to fall back on. We are alone in facing our vulnerability, and yet the consequences of our vulnerability have an ever-expanding audience online. Our shortcomings and mistakes are subject to the scrutiny of strangers, while our successes and strengths are reserved only to ourselves. To be vulnerable would require that we take on not only an added burden of self-responsibility but open ourselves up to the possibility of being failed by others again, and of sharing our own failures with others, too. Being vulnerable could mean being less online. It could mean opening ourselves up to the reality that human bonds are worthwhile, be it through family or friends or romantic partners. It could mean treating each other with a bit more grace. It could mean living out of alignment with this gendered battle that the culture seems to want for us.

And I’m aware, too, that I’m calling for an attitude adjustment in a time of complete structural collapse. Not hating each other won’t fix every problem, but hating each other is a problem in itself. Our unwillingness to be vulnerable is a problem in itself. Our avoidance of emotional depth and intimacy is a problem in itself. We’ve yet to do much questioning of whether this gendered disdain is offering us any sense of growth or liberation or well-being. Instead, its only real purpose is further Gender War fodder. It’s an ouroboros of angst and seclusion.

For some people, maybe decentering men or women from their lives is indeed a positive development. Decentering, however, looks very different from outwardly disliking. If you spend much of your day thinking about how dumb and boring women are, they’re continuing to occupy your time. Undoing the attachment to anger that decentering requires involves empathy and patience, not just for yourself but the people around you. It is not achieved by making “I hate men” TikToks.

And for the rest of us, a good dose of empathy and patience is needed just the same. It is something both sides have to buy into. Perhaps with a renewed sense of privacy and mystique, too. Our reasons for disliking each other might be valid, but they’re not useful. They aren’t bringing us any closer to anyone else. They’re not even bringing us closer to ourselves.