I am a recovering pickmeisha withdrawling from a string of back-to-back toxic, low effort relationships for the past 9 years. As a result, I myself tend to be a toxic person in relationships - insecurity, jealousy - it eats at me and I blow up and destroy my relationships that are already kind of shitty anyways. I graduated from toxic men to "nice enough" LVM and have yet to be in a place to meet HVM.

Something I realized is that I never advocate for my own needs. I spent so long being the cool girlfriend. I thought men would appreciate me and see me as a sTrOnG iNdEpEnDeNt wOmaN if I payed for stuff, didn't let them help me, make them feel equal to me, ect. I thought that by not asking for anything, it would make them want to do more for me. If they saw I can hold my own by not needing anything, I would protect myself from being abused by men who think I am weak. I would keep this mindset - Then, I would wonder why all my friends were being taken to nice places by their boyfriends, and my boyfriends never go out of the way for me. Yet, I would tell myself not to get mad about it because well, my boyfriend bought food for my apartment that he stays at for 5 nights in a row, and my boyfriend bought me flowers a couple times (he works at a grocery store where they sell flowers though). But these are nice things, he spent money, its 2020, why should I expect these fancy dates? How dare I want to demand. I should just appreciate them for not being abusive pieces of shit to me, right?

This mindset made me bitter and insecure. It left me feeling like I'm not good enough for the extra effort, even though I didn't ask for it in the first place and I don't really have the right to expect it. Deep down inside, I knew men should be trying to impress me. We would break up, and they did more for the next girlfriend. I had one boyfriend who I dated for a year and he tried cheating on me with this girl, he was writing her letters to make her feel better about the issues she was having at home and he couldn't even be assed to go with me and support me when I had to get an abortion. It hurt so bad. It still stings when I think about it, because of how destroyed my self worth was.

The truth is, those gestures are more than just making a man spend money contrary to what I taught myself. It's about him going out of his way to impress you. It's because he loves you and knows you are a prize. Just because he takes care of domestic tasks doesn't mean he's a HVM. That is the bare minimum. It is POLITE to pay for food or have food a guest would eat. Food is a requirement to survive, if you are in a LTR and he's making you dinner after work, it is NOT automatically a HVM quality. If he's cooking dinner once in a while, then spends day after day not planning a god damn date, not actually TREATING you to anything: you are basically his mother.

Its ok to want the cute candlelit dinners. Its ok to expect your man to plan a fun day hiking on his own initiative. You are not wrong for feeling disappointed watching other men plan these amazing cute quarantine dates for their girls. And if you feel that disappointment, you are probably dating a LVM. A HVM is thinking of you and wants to impress you. Domestic tasks are not romantic. Expect romance in your relationships. Us women have to worry about being killed by men, going through childbirth, taking care of birth control, we have to invest in our beauty by society's standards. We pay constantly, for the rest of our lives. Men can stand to treat us well.