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There's certainly a lot of compare and contrast done with the experiences of men and women, and although there are objectively more things that are in common, we tend to focus on the differences. The goal of this post is to focus a bit more on similarities, and to do so by showing a similarity in something commonly seen as a huge difference.

I stumbled on this idea from having two friends going through romance troubles. I'm generally the therapist/dad of the group or with individual friends. The result is I get to hear a lot of dating grief from both sides of the aisle. One of those two friends is a girl who recently got ghosted by a love interest, and the other is a guy who's pursuing a girl that keeps giving him halfway reciprocation.

The girl was on the phone with me recently and was just crying and venting about this man. She expressed the idea that she felt a brokenness in her pride as a woman, and that it's something that, at the end of the day, I'll never understand. She really liked this guy, they went on some dates, they fucked, and now he's just gone. She really made the point that she's happy she can call, but no man can really relate to the feeling of being used so much so that it resembles being treated like an object—"being objectified."

I didn't think about it too deeply. I just thought "yeahhhhh". At first glance, I simply agreed and had always thought that way. I'd be sad if a girl I was into fucked and ducked, but I know I wouldn't have that feeling of being used like a material object. Of course, you know the title, and you know where this will go 😏.

Jump to a week later, where my guy friend says he's done pursuing this girl. He was angry, emotional, and heartbroken. He liked this girl, and he did, in his view, all the right things. He invested the time and money, he thought about her and what she uniquely cares about, tailored his approach to show he's listening (tickets to the show she likes, food she expressed she wanted to try, paying for her tickets since she loves to travel). Most importantly, he was direct, saying, "I'm into you, and I want to be your boyfriend. What do you say?" In short, she didn't say yes, she didn't say no. Originally, my friend thought she was deciding and he needed to give her his best to prove he was worth that shot. An incident happened, and to make a longer story in this post short, she just wanted the stuff that came from his affection.

So I'm listening to him rant and rave, and for a moment, I HEARD IT. I heard why he was so upset, and something clicked with the last conversation being fresh in my mind just a week before. He says, "I was literally just a wallet to her, not even a person. Some fucking oil-rich country that gets America's attention and hands. She said what I needed to hear to keep taking, and when there was no oil, no cash left in the wallet, she was done. My usefulness was over, and she threw me aside like a thing!"

If you haven't put it together already, he felt objectified. And although he wasn't crying, he was clearly emotional and expressed anger and sadness stemming from a feeling of betrayal. And I realized I stumbled on something I keep finding as I get older, which is that in the heteronormative world, men and women tend to deal with similar things, but in different ways. Being used for stuff is a common issue for men, just like women being used for sex. I never saw the similarity before, probably for a few reasons: men generally having less emotional IQ, a cultural norm I grew up with telling me that objectifying is a sexual thing and happens more often to women.

In reality, it just happens more commonly to the things that are more broadly desired by the different camps. Of course, we are all individuals, and these are patterns, not rules, with many people breaking from the pattern, but it's still a pattern. Many men like sex for sex and can get it from women. Many women enjoy the act of receiving tribute and can get it from men. So both sides have the common situation of really caring about someone, hoping they see them as a person to love, and finding out they were just a means to something else. Something that has nothing to do with you as a person. And thus we were seen as a thing, not an individual. We feel hurt and suffer and lash out. Women might be used for sex, men for stuff, women might cry, men might yell, but we all feel betrayed for putting our heart out there and being tricked with affection, only to be taken advantage of as a thing.

I know dating is rough. I know it's easy to feel like it's harder for us, and it's so easy for them. But I think the closer view to reality is that "the grass is always greener on the other side." We don't deal with their side as much; we deal with our own. So it's easy to feel like the other gender in the heteronormative world has it easier. We are all getting fucked. We are in it together. Not in exactly the same way, but there is more in common than less.

Sincerely,

Some guy on Reddit