The One Thing Most Women Get Wrong About Dating

Don't confuse s*** for the shoreline.

I was first taught gender dynamics in high school.

It was the AIM era, when chatbots were a lot dumber but named SmarterChild. I spent long school nights on AIM with a boy from another high school, convinced that through sheer force of rational economic logic, I could persuade him to date me so that I could finally obtain the coveted job title of girlfriend.

But no. He had his sights set on another girl.

A girl who was leaving for college in the fall.

"But I’m a sure bet," I argued, fundamentally misunderstanding not only gender roles but also the marketing principle of scarcity.

Wasn’t a bird in the hand worth two in the bush? Wasn’t I the bird? Why was I trying to convince him that he should take a guaranteed marshmallow now rather than an uncertain marshmallow later?

He didn't accept my impeccable logic. He went for the other girl instead.

This was my first inkling that I had completely misunderstood the game I was playing.

It was like signing up for competitive reality show—mentally preparing for obstacle courses, relay races, and high-stakes political maneuvering—only to realize I was not, in fact, a contestant.

No.

I was a prize on the prize shelf.

My job was not to compete, strategize, or convince.

My job was to sit on the prize shelf, broadcast to the right contestants that I was a great prize, and polish myself into the shiniest, most alluring prize possible. Crucial to this process was scrutinizing all the contestants with Simon Cowell-esque energy so I could judge them on whether they were even allowed to select me as their prize, since I had turned the prize shelf into a really nice little place to live.

The role of women in heterosexual dating is very weird to me. Even now, two decades later, I'm still getting my head around it. But now that I see it more clearly, suddenly, a lot of my problems and those of other women I see posted online, are actually extremely simple to solve.

Basically, what I failed to understand as a 16 year old was that what makes a man a good romantic prospect is not just his looks and resume. It is his level of interest and effort.

By trying to short circuit the process by actively pursuing them, I was removing the crucial interest and effort filter. It's ok for me to start a conversation and give someone an opening to speak to me, but it's not very helpful to ask them to hang out multiple times if they aren't enthusiastically reciprocating.

In my experience, the men who were good romantic prospects knew very, very quickly they were interested and demonstrated as much very, very early. I have never had a relationship result from dragging along a twitchy, inconsistent, flinchy man. They either are into it, or they’re not. I never had to do a ton of convincing and auditioning to prove myself with men who ended up becoming my boyfriends, except to be reasonably nice and to not outright reject them.

The issue is that when you've been swimming in an ocean of shit for a very long time, it is hard to remember that there is a shoreline. You are tired. You want to convince yourself that some random floating wood board is the shoreline, or that a floating turd in the middle of a particularly punishing wave swell is the final destination. It's like how when people are put in environments with too little stimulus, they start hallucinating because their brains just can't deal.

I will call this Shit Shoreline Syndrome, for when you confuse the shit you're swimming in for the shoreline you're trying to reach. People with Shit Shoreline Syndrome will ask questions like, "Why hasn't he texted me in the 3 days after our date?" Or, "Is he not that interested because he doesn't find me attractive enough?"

All of these questions completely miss the target. They are confusing the shit for the shoreline. You have to swim through the shit to get to the shoreline, not argue and get angry with the shit for acting like a shit.

Of course it's acting like a shit: it's shit. That's what shit does. It has demonstrated that it is shit by not texting you for three days. Your job is to determine as quickly as possible that this is shit so you can swim the fuck away.

I know this is much, much harder than it sounds, because attachment and ego and feelings are involved. I obviously still get a little upset when someone treats me badly. It's just important to remember that we need to see poor behavior in early dating as a kind of intrinsic signifier, the way the vast majority of women would refuse to go out with someone who had beat his ex-wife. In this scenario, you wouldn't ask questions like, "But why did he beat his ex-wife?" "Maybe his ex-wife did something that made him mad so she could have just like, not done those things." "Maybe he just under a lot of pressure at work so that's why he beat his wife." Those would be incredibly unhealthy ways of thinking. You would just avoid the wife beater.

In my 20's, I suffered from this kind of madness when I dated someone whose own sister called him a sociopath. I tried to construct a mental model of how his brain worked so I could rationalize why he kept forgetting we had plans and was constantly out of town whenever we planned a date, yet constantly told me how amazing I was and talked about wanting to commit to me long term. My friend Nora attempted to help me put together an escape plan when she realized that me attempting to communicate in an adult manner with this man was only resulting in him twisting every conversation around so that I ended up apologizing to him for being overly emotional, irrational, and having unfair expectations.

She saw the situation for what it was: a woman in the midst of a terrible episode of Shit Shoreline Syndrome. I was arguing and reasoning with the shit about why it was acting like shit, rather than swimming away. I was trying to solve my situation by thinking super hard about it and forming abstract behavioral models and reading books, since that works sometimes with math problems but I failed to understand that it usually doesn't work that well with people.

I remember walking across a foggy bridge that long, strange summer we dated when I felt like some tightly wound ribbon inside me unfurled, revealing its insight: I had been treating my relationship as some great mystery for me to solve, but there was no mystery at all. I had been pounding my fists, trying to open a door to a room that didn't exist. I just needed to move on.

It is always easier to see when someone else has Shit Shoreline Syndrome than yourself. I see posts by women that say things like, "I caught my boyfriend of six years on Feeld, please avoid him, he has a long history of cheating but I thought we were past that, he blocked me after I confronted him and didn't even apologize." Like, girl. Him not apologizing is the least of your concerns.

Which is all to say, when you've been treading water in an ocean of shit for long enough, it's easy to forget you're swimming toward something, not just trying to keep your head above the worst of it. The challenge in early dating isn't to wonder why things are bad—it's to ask better questions. Not, "Why is this particular man behaving this way?" but, "Do I want a man who behaves this way?”

I think there's sometimes a level of female entitlement to male attention that's actually masking sensitivity to rejection. It's easier to be angry than to be hurt about being rejected. But instead of being angry or hurt, it's more productive to frame it as a undesirable, disqualifying trait, like he just admitted that he wants to live in a tent in Antarctica the rest of his life, an experience you have no interest in sharing.

Rather than asking: “Why are they like this?” "Why are men trash?" "Why did he refuse to do XYZ?"

You should be asking: “Do I want this?" "Is this how I would want to be treated in a long term relationship?" "Is he demonstrating the kind of behavior I'm looking for?"

Do not confuse the shit for the shoreline. Don't hallucinate that some turd is the final destination. Don't argue with the shit or get mad at the shit or resent that the shit exists or think the existence of shit means you're shit too.

The ocean is not your home. When you recognize shit for what it is and swim past it without trying to analyze or negotiate with it, you'll waste less time, conserve more energy, and reach the shoreline to realize that it was worth the long journey there.