One thing needs to be said plainly before engaging with this: none of this is misogyny or an indictment of women. I want to be precise about that.
This is a critical, personal reflection on heteronormative dating dynamics - dynamics that have become as demoralizing as they are largely because a percentage of genuinely terrible men poisoned the well for every decent one. Women have every right to approach any man with caution. They have earned every defense they've built, and I genuinely believe dating carries far more disadvantages and dangers for women than for men.
I am not angry at those defenses. I am exhausted at being misassigned to the category that warranted them. Those are different things.
Most of us have been misread at some point. Some of us live it constantly. That's what this is about. All engagement, discourse, and pushback is welcome.
And, yes, I am neurodivergent as you will see later not just through blunt confession but through my behaviors, thoughts and actions.
I watched a video recently on the YouTube channel HealthyGamerGG, hosted by Dr. Alok Kanojia, an Indian-American psychiatrist whose work I've found credible. In the episode "The Harsh Reality of Women's Attraction," Dr. K walks through survey data comparing men's and women's reactions to a man's 12-week body transformation from a "dad bod" to a chiseled physique. The results were striking, and not in the way most people would expect: men responded positively to the after photo, with 24% preferring the before and 43% preferring the after. Women's responses were almost exactly inverted: 27% preferred the before, and only 7% preferred the after.
I want to be clear: I didn't come to this video looking for confirmation. I came hoping to be wrong. I've spent years fighting my own instincts about this dynamic, afraid that trusting them would make me judgmental, bitter, one of those guys. I wanted the video to tell me I was missing something - some nuance, some complexity that would explain everything away. It didn't. It told me my gut was right. That felt bad. Not vindicating - bad.
This tracks with lived experience. When I run shirtless through my neighborhood with a body that explicitly shows decades of training for intense, athletic competition and not aesthetic, I am largely invisible to women. The nods, the looks, the acknowledgment come almost entirely from other men. I used to question whether I was imagining this. Now I have data. I wish I didn't.
What the video went on to describe was the interpretive layer women placed on the physique itself: the leaner, more muscular man reads as self-obsessed, possibly gay, cold, emotionally unavailable, potentially abusive. One commenter wrote that the dad bod says "I could be your loving, protective boyfriend you snuggle up and have fun with." I understand the emotional logic of that. I genuinely do. But I want to sit with that framing, because I think it contains a fundamental error - one I've been personally paying for a long time.
The Character Inference Problem
Reading character from physique is a cognitive shortcut, not an accurate read. I'll own something here: early in thinking through this, I assumed a disciplined physique correlated with better executive function, impulse control, and provider qualities - the delayed gratification logic, i.e. the Stanford Marshmallow test. And while the body does keep the score, while how you do one thing often reflects how you do all things, and while there is real overlap between physical discipline and life discipline, it is still a correlation and not a determinism. A man can have a dad bod and be the most reliable, emotionally present partner alive. I know this from the people I train every day. The correlation isn't a verdict.
The error I was making is the same one being made about me: reading the container and deciding you know the contents. The difference is that the women in this survey aren't just expressing a preference - they are assigning moral character: cold, selfish, abusive, emotionally unavailable. Serious characterizations made without a single word exchanged. And I thought women prided themselves on not doing exactly this.
No one suspected John Wayne Gacy - the "dad bod" who dressed as a clown and murdered children. No one suspected Ted Bundy, who was charming and soft-featured and raped and killed women. The book-cover logic cuts both ways, and it cuts deep.
The Tax of Looking Like I Do
What might read as a credentials parade in what follows is not vanity - it is armor. Because the presumptions about who I am based on how I look are constant, cumulative, and wrong - and I've learned the hard way that if I don't get ahead of them, I get assigned to a category I don't belong in even before the first exchange.
I volunteer for Planned Parenthood. I canvass in red counties in red states for progressive candidates - as a jacked, cisgender, heterosexual white male, knocking on doors in places where people look at me and assume I'm there to preach the MAGA gospel. Knowing the attributes others assign to me, I use this body and face to engage in dialogues and hopefully change minds where a woman can't. I fundraise. I phone bank. I show up every election cycle and most of it is for a woman's right to choose.
I have been proposed to by a woman and I have proposed to a woman. At least half of my friends are women who trust me and have my back as much as I have theirs. Sixty percent of my clients are women - women told their whole lives that strength, lifting and fitness was masculine and that they should stay small and delicate. I train them to walk through our city at night without fear. I train them to be strong, capable, and unconfined by the limits they were conditioned to accept. I train them to walk into gyms full of grunting, sweating meatheads and not be intimidated. That confidence and competence extends into every part of life and is priceless.
I don't list this to claim superiority. I list it because I've been turned down for a dance by women who then danced with guys sporting man buns and hemp bracelets. I've been called a bro at a gym for lifting heavy by a female boss who already knew I was politically active for feminist causes. I've been at parties full of artists and counter culture types and largely ignored, only to be told afterward - stunned - that I was "a lot more insightful and intelligent" than expected. A gym member once told me - in all seriousness - that I was "pretty smart for a personal trainer." I've had old, white conservative men open with terrible racist, misogynistic, or homophobic jokes, assuming I'd laugh along. I've surprised people at their own front doors who expected someone who looked like me to not give a damn about women's bodily autonomy.
I'm sure a lot of you know how exhausting it is to fight a presumption you never created, over and over, in every new room you walk into - to have to earn the baseline assumption of basic complexity that most people get for free.
The Catch-22 Nobody Talks About
Here is the bind I live in: women say they want a man who is driven, has his life together, has energy and presence and direction. They say they want emotional availability. They say they want a partner, not a project. But then, faced with a man who has built all of those things - including the physical discipline that is the direct engine of the executive function and energy that makes everything else possible - they assign him the opposite qualities based on his silhouette alone.
I get up at 5:30 AM Monday through Saturday. I train clients for four hours, train myself for two and a half to three, then coach clients for another five. I do my own bookkeeping, cooking, cleaning, and errands. I run my own business. I made $225,000 last year as my own sole employee and only missed two weeks for vacation. I read avidly, write, sketch, meditate, do yoga, volunteer, and do therapy in earnest. Fitness is not the enemy of that output - it is the infrastructure of it, born from my earlier years of overindulgence and aimlessness. It is the reason I can now do all of it day in, day out.
But apparently none of that matters. Because I have visible muscles and practice temperance, I am reduced to cold, selfish, emotionally unavailable, and a poor long-term partner.
And here is where the hypocrisy becomes genuinely abhorrent: if a man wanted his partner to make him her entire world, to orbit around him, to exist primarily in relation to him - we'd call it "chauvinist," "controlling," "toxic". But when a woman says the dad bod gives "protective boyfriend you snuggle up with" energy, what she is describing is a man whose gravitational center is her. A man who, by implication, doesn't have much else pulling at him. And that is the romantic ideal? The self-abnegating man with nowhere else to be?
I also hear this from women I train who are far into long-term relationships or marriages, confessing quietly that they're losing attraction to their warm, soft, emotionally available guy. Their partners don't put in the same work anymore. The comfort has curdled into complacency. Fitness and health have youthful effects on appearance and vitality. This is not controversial. And yet pointing it out makes me the shallow one.
There is a monumental purpose to exercise that people who don't do it either forget or misunderstand when they reduce it to aesthetics alone. Fitness and health profoundly affect quality of life, mental and emotional wellbeing, longevity, and reduced comorbidities. Most importantly, it fosters independence in old age - rather than relying on your partner to pick up the slack for ailments that could have been avoided had you not neglected your temple. That is not vanity. That is consideration and effort.
On Emotional Availability and the Ick Factor
I am autistic and BPDII and have been in therapy for decades for it. The result is that no subject is off-limits if I'm being honest about it. When I open up, I am not testing anyone, not performing vulnerability, not looking for a specific response. I state the good and the bad without expecting the other person to carry it or solve it. The truth is the opposite: I have learned to be self-sufficient, sometimes to a fault. Disclosing my feelings is not a strategy. This is just how I am.
And consistently, it lands as the ick. Before we had even met, my last partner nearly swiped left on me on a dating app because she saw my arms - I had intentionally avoided posting shirtless photos for obvious reasons - and immediately filed me under "gym bro douchebag." She only reconsidered because my bio said I was looking for my "soulmate/wifey," and the photos, despite the physique, showed someone being goofy and genuine. She told me later that my insides don't match my outsides. She meant it warmly. I partly received it as an allegation of everything I've been fighting against my entire adult life.
How many people swiped left and never found out? How many decided in two seconds, based on arms, that there was no interior worth exploring?
I've also witnessed the other end of the overfunctioning dynamic - the one where the emotionally warm, available man becomes less attractive precisely because he makes his woman his entire universe. The openness that was supposed to be the draw becomes the liability once the limerence has dissipated. Apparently you have to be available but not too available. Present but not consuming. Which brings me back to the impossible standard.
The pattern I keep running into is not that women can't handle emotional openness. It's that they can't reconcile it with the exterior. The openness reads as incongruent, and incongruence reads as suspicious. Or it reads as weakness, triggering a loss of attraction that has nothing to do with my actual emotional health and everything to do with internalized templates about what a man who looks like me is supposed to be. I am looked at rather than actually seen.
The Overfunctioning Pattern and What It Actually Is
I have consistently been the overfunctioning in almost all of my relationships - historically attributing this to lackadaisical partners who were among the very few able to see and understand me yet couldn't meet me halfway. The truth is I compromised my standards out of desperation for meaningful companionship and the need to be seen for who I am rather than what I appear to be. The languid partners, as smart, talented, and funny as they were, could not put in commensurate effort - whether financially, domestically, or in emotional and physical upkeep.
But overfunctioning is never just about the other person. It is a relational strategy - usually learned - that keeps you indispensable, in control, and protected from the vulnerability of actually needing someone. If you do everything, nobody can fail you. You never have to find out what happens if you stop.
What I know about this in myself connects directly to my history. My avoidance with my first serious long-term relationship - the one who got away - taught me that withholding yourself costs you the person worth keeping. What came after taught me that giving everything gets you destroyed. I absorbed that abuse - the hitting, the screaming, the public humiliation, including being spat on - because I was already running a guilt debt from losing the first one; I thought tolerating mistreatment to the point of self-erasure was what growth looked like. It wasn't. It was self-punishment dressed as patience. And somewhere in my gut, I believed I had it coming. That is the false narrative I am still combating.
The Double Standard, Named Plainly
The research cited in this video confirms something I've experienced: women select masculine-looking men significantly more often for short-term sexual relationships. The same men they characterize as cold, selfish, and emotionally unavailable are the ones they pursue for hookups. The men they publicly assign negative character traits to are the ones they privately treat as disposable flings.
I have been on the receiving end of this more times than I can count. I have been the fuckboy, the one-night stand, the person treated as incapable of commitment before I've made any indication to that assumption. Because I've already been pre-read as the guy who would leave first, they preemptively do. And then the data shows that men who look like me have more sexual partners and invest less in parenting. Yes - because the women who could have built something with us decided we weren't worth the risk and used us instead.
I even dated multiple women simultaneously because none wanted to build something lasting or meaningful. They made their apathy crystal clear - telling me they didn't care if I saw other people so long as I practiced safely. One looked me dead in the eyes across a dinner table and told me she didn't need anything from me other than orgasms. A lot of men would envy that setup. For me it was the opposite: I wasn't getting what I wanted or needed from one person, compensating in the most extreme way possible, and feeling lonelier, more diminished, and more worthless than I ever had. I sometimes knowingly put myself into these positions hoping these women would have a change of heart and actually want a relationship of substance. Sound familiar?
The prophecy fulfills itself.
I also heard from women I dated - years in or after - that they hated walking next to me because I got more looks and ogling than they did. If that is not the absolute apex of shallowness, I don't know what is. A fit man is deemed not emotionally attuned, while the woman is the one weighing everything on aesthetics because she feels less attractive standing next to him. The projection is total.
The Impossible Standard
There is a version of all of this that reminds me of the America Ferrera monologue in Barbie, but as a flipside for men - and I mean that as genuine structural observation, not self-pity. You cannot be fat or out of shape, but you also cannot be so fit that you take attention away from her or so lean that you "won't survive the apocalypse." You have to be emotionally available, but not so much that you look like you have nothing else going on. You have to be a feminist, but also provide, protect, be the emotionally compressed “anchor”, open doors, bring flowers, and pay for dinner. You have to be kind but not so kind it reads as weak. Grounded enough to make decisions, but not so decisive it becomes controlling. Smart, but without opinions that challenge. Present, but not consuming.
I am intense and inexorable. I wasn't always. Like women building defenses against men, this world and my past relationships built the person I am - and then those very qualities get held against me by the people who were attracted to them first. My former partners loved my drive, focus, and determination. Some thought they could osmotically assimilate it, that I would somehow transfer my exhortative will onto them so we could both fix their chaotic or meandering lives. That plan inevitably failed. They couldn't keep up, and I wasn't slowing down. Then the narrative flipped: my drive became selfishness, my focus into distance, determination into stubbornness. The attributes don't change. The story around them does. And that is an unwinnable game.
When relationships go wrong or rejections start aggregating, I bury myself deeper into career and development, fitness and competition, solitude, and practice - a feedback cycle that cuts both ways. Good because it forces self-reliance and a life that doesn't require anyone else to feel whole. Bad because it makes me less relatable, rendering me progressively incompatible for the companionship I still crave but every day I see pulling farther out of reach.
On Being Child-Free and the Selfishness Accusation
One of the attributes women assign to men like me is that our physicality signals indifference or resistant to parenting. I have never been married and have no children - I have no desire for the latter, and I'm increasingly at peace with the same being true of the former. Both men and women have called me selfish for this - some linking it to the same arrogance they attribute to my fitness. I want to address that directly, because it is one of the more infuriating inversions in this entire conversation.
I don't have children because I believe in consent, and you cannot get consent from someone who doesn't yet exist. I don't have children because I carry neurodivergence and am not willing to gamble that on someone who didn't ask to be born into it. I don't have children because there are 8.2 billion people in this world - a staggering number of them food insecure, impoverished, unhoused, orphaned, without medical care, or living under brutal authoritarian conditions. The idea that the most meaningful contribution I can make, or the only way I can express my love for my partner, is adding another person to a planet already straining under the weight of the ones already inhabiting it feels, to me, banal and hypocritically selfish. There are people already here, already suffering, already being ignored. I would rather love or at least take care of them.
Am I selfish because I didn't want to create a human being against their will so that they would have to love me unconditionally - or so I'd have someone to take care of me in old age after deciding to stop taking care of my own body? Am I selfish because I went to therapy instead of forcing my unfulfilled dreams onto a smaller carbon copy of myself? Am I selfish because I chose community over reproduction? Apparently so. I'll gladly wear that label.
Where I Actually Am
I think existence is largely absurd and meaningless. Most people are doing their inadequate best, and everyone dies without their consciousness surviving to experience whatever legacy they leave. Yet this does not stop me from trying. When I was canvassing and phone-banking for Harris in 2024, I knew she was going to lose months before anyone went to cast their ballots. I could hear it in the phone calls to swing states, in the doors slammed in my face in formerly blue areas - the support simply wasn't there. I kept canvassing anyway, kept making the calls, kept hitting the streets with pamphlets and forced optimism. I couldn't live with myself knowing I quit before the fight was officially over. Even when the odds are one in a million, I hold on to that one.
Partnership is the one place I have stopped doing that. And I know why. Every other kind of rejection - a bombed lift in competition, a lost client, a PhD program that didn't work out, a job rejection - is a rejection of one dimension of me. A thing I did or didn't do. I can audit it, address it, fix it. Partnership rejection is a rejection of the entire person in four dimensions. It is you, not your output. And I have been rejected as a full person enough times, by enough people who liked the idea of me but couldn't sustain the reality of me, that the cost-benefit has shifted.
I am still working on whether that shift is wisdom or a wound wearing the mask of wisdom.
