Are Men Allergic To Fun?
What is happening? Why is nothing happening?
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
Are men allergic to fun? I have to ask because no other answer is currently presenting itself. In recent months, I’ve tried to get a couple of different men to have fun with me in real life, but they…won’t. I don’t know what is happening, but I do know that nothing is happening, and this isn’t how we’re meant to live. It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when the shift occurred, because it happened slowly and without fanfare, much like you’d boil an unsuspecting frog in a pot of water. At some point in humanity’s timeline, men stopped doing things. Is it apathy? Laziness? Or have we genuinely arrived at men’s lack of interest in…anything at all? I don’t think I care what the answer is, so long as women aren’t internalizing other people’s inaction as our fault or responsibility.
Men have stopped leaving the house, any single woman can tell you that with her eyes closed, but it’s more than that. It seems like they’ve also stopped engaging with life. They’ve certainly stopped engaging in conversation with women either in person or via text. They’ve apparently lost all interest in connection or time spent with women at all. I know men exist, I know they’re real, but they’re not acting like it, and I’m wondering if they just don’t enjoy having a good time anymore.
Earlier this year, I connected with a human man in the wild. Rare, but not impossible. After months of very tepid (but consistent!) text conversation which was mostly limited to responding to each other’s Instagram stories, I began to ask myself the same question many women ask themselves about men in their lives who aren’t really in their lives: What is the fucking point?