The Women Are Out There

The men are not.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver.

A slice of pizza and a glass of wine I had while sitting next to a single female friend of mine. The only two men who walked into this venue while we were there for two hours were married. I lost count of the number of women.

The most consistently confusing part of my single life and the most unrealistic part of Sex and the City is and was the existence of single men in the wild. That fa’cacta television show made it seem like men were everywhere, like pollen. In real life, throughout the 17 years I’ve been single and the decade or more I’ve been working in this space, the most steadily perplexing reality is the fact that single men don’t leave the house.

We leave the house! Single women, for better or worse, listened to the bullshit. We developed a culture of social activity and participation. We were groomed to “put ourselves out there,” so we went “out there” and did things and became socially invested people. Now bitch, where are the guys?! The people who told us to “put ourselves out there” forgot something, didn’t they? If you only focus your dating advice on one gender, the seesaw of dating culture will remain stuck on the ground because it has to have someone on both sides in order to work. We are out here, doing things, making ourselves available, waiting for the other side to hold up their end of the goddamned bargain. We have been waiting, a long time.