Still Missing Each Other

FYI: This piece is a departure from my usual writing. No data, no statistics, no market trends. Just a question I have been sitting with for a long time.

I know men who are brilliant.

Lawyers, founders, investors, people who can hold a conversation on anything from geopolitics to Godard.

Men who, on paper, are everything.

And yet somehow, in the context of a relationship, the same man who can argue a courtroom or build a company cannot find it in himself to call. Cannot prioritise. Cannot show up in the small, unglamorous, entirely unsexy ways that partnership actually requires. He is not a bad person. He just never decided to try.

That gap, between who a man is in the world and who he is willing to be for you, is what I cannot stop thinking about.

I am in my early thirties. I have built a career spanning 10 years that I am proud of. I am on my way to my next adventure, business school in the fall. I work incredibly hard to be there for my family, friends, and even strangers, in moments that may not be the most convenient for me. I have not done all the work I would have hoped to by this age, but I am trying to do more and be more every single day.

And I know I am not alone in wondering: if both men and women are doing the work, why aren’t they able to find the partners they crave in this increasingly isolated world?

This is not an attack.

I want to be precise about that.

I am not interested in the piece that tears men down or declares them irredeemably lacking.

That piece is boring, it is everywhere, and it does not actually move anything forward.

What I am genuinely, honestly, confounded by is something quieter and harder to name. Two people, both doing the work, both wanting the same thing, but why are they still somehow missing each other?

Women of my generation were raised, explicitly or implicitly, to become more. More capable, more independent, more self-aware.

And from what I can see, many men of this generation are trying too.

Building careers, showing up for their families, asking harder questions of themselves than the generations before them did.

So why, when two people who have both done that work find each other, does the partnership still so often fail to materialise?

A conversation with my book club put it plainly. It talked about the casual concessions that women intentionally make, asking for less, making themselves smaller, and actively choosing to ask less of the men they are dating.

Why are women themselves propogating the concept of the chill girlie?

The girl who is okay trading a Friday comedy show for a quick dinner. Archiving the restaurant list because her man prefers a quick jiggle down. Letting a quick trip to Paris, that you had found a great deal on, become a footnote because something sports related that was crucial to his existence was taking place, and you didn’t want to be the ‘difficult one’. Women and men are almost always too busy to build memories in a world that keeps us constantly overwhelmed.

But why give up a single opportunity to give ourselves those experiences and build those memories in the rare moments we get a chance?

Let me clarify: the rare moments we get a chance as partners.

I have watched this happen to people I love. I have felt the edges of it myself.

The Before Sunset monologue it reminded me of is the one where a man talks about leaving an imprint on a woman’s soul, this romantic idea of impact and connection, without ever quite reckoning with what he leaves behind when he goes. An imprint is not a partnership. It is a trace. And a lot of men and women in their twenties and thirties are quietly covered in traces left by someone who mistook intensity for investment.

What I am looking for, what I think a lot of people my age are looking for, is something less cinematic and more structural. A partner. Someone who is also doing the work. Who has also asked themselves the harder questions about who they are and what they want and what they are willing to build. Someone for whom a relationship is not a place to receive care but a place to exchange it.

Is that a high bar? In theory, no. In practice, why does it turn out to be so rare?

I do not think the problem is bad people. I think it is two people who have each done the work independently, in parallel, without ever quite learning how to do it together. Growing alongside someone is a different skill from growing alone. And nobody really teaches you that part.

So I sit with the question I cannot fully answer.

It honestly confounds me.

For women, where are the man we need?

For men, where are the women they need?