> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.memorydoll.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # "If he wanted to, he would" - URL: https://www.memorydoll.com/if-he-wanted-to-he-would/ - Published: 2026-08-27T13:19:49.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T13:19:49.000Z - Description: Fear of vulnerability teaches us to keep our worlds small - Author: Aubrie Johnson - Tags: Connection I’m kind of telling on myself when I say it’s impossible to open my social media of choice without scrolling past at least one post insisting there’s a gender war raging on all around me. As (I hope) you know, algorithms train themselves to serve content you’re most likely to engage with. Everything I know about Jubilee’s Surrounded series and Pop the Balloon is against my will, but sometimes the comments below manage to piss me off juuuust right to play in the mud with the other slop piggies. It happens. Because our community connections and third spaces have deteriorated, men and women have had to form their own strategies to avoid the terror of being perceived. Some even feel overwhelmed by *all* social engagements altogether. It’s those people who dwell in the comments of dating coaches (many of whom are single), trading tips on how to either stay safe from [predatory dating partners](https://www.memorydoll.com/the-resurgence-of-misogyny-as-horror/) or…well, how to be that unsafe partner. When the online dating discourse looks like *that*, it’s easy to stoke the flames across the gender binary. More often than not, this discourse pretends there are no other options beyond a long-term romantic partner; that isolation from sexual or romantic connection means isolation from life itself. Singleness is hell on earth. Singleness is ego death everlasting. Everyone is afraid of being hurt, so the podcasts and coaching offering guaranteed successful dating advice proliferate like weeds on my curated Instagram lawn. But the discourse feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy: ## There’s no such thing as a guaranteed return-in-investment in relationships You’re gonna get hurt. You’re *supposed* to get hurt. It’s part of living in community. Days after a messy breakup, in a petty lapse of judgment I sent my ex-boyfriend the article that launched a thousand podcasts: a Harper's Bazaar piece about how girlfriends find themselves managing the social calendars for their male partners. When left to their own devices, these men would otherwise sit at home playing video games. My ex, who declined many trips and outings with friends to play video games throughout our relationship, obviously took offense to this. But pettiness wasn't my only goal. Underneath the petty text was a real question I never got to ask out loud: who *else* is missing from the equation when a relationship ends? I kept thinking about the friendships we ignore in prolonged honeymoon periods, the insistence on prioritizing romantic relationships above all others. I kept coming back to the common refrain swarming my feed at the time — "If he wanted to, he would" — and how the demand for a specific [performance of masculinity](https://www.memorydoll.com/bl-lovers-have-broken-containment/) felt different depending on whether a woman or a man was making it. I wanted to ask him where our dead relationship fit in the greater network of his life. Whether he had mentors, older friends. ## Where did the expectation of “one relationship to rule them all” even come from? What about mentors, come to think of it? Apprenticeships? Community leaders? Wouldn't life be so much easier, and breakups so much smoother, if we had other people to talk to, dig into hobbies with, and experience the goodness of life with? I found myself wishing I'd had that conversation with someone — anyone — instead of just an ex I'd dumped a week earlier. I kept turning it over because I was new to the idea that someone could "optimize" a partner. Groups of women online insisted that only men who'd fly them out were worthy of their time — a transactional read on love that felt as flattening as it did familiar. My autistic brain wanted to name the pattern out loud, run it past someone, argue with it until it made sense. After all, requiring a man to perform a very specific script of What Masculinity/Worthiness Is using such vague language is dehumanizing and robs both parties of the experience of who they actually are. That conversation never happened, obviously — we'd broken up, not started a book club. But the question outlived the relationship, because it was never really about him. In an [amatonormative](https://www.memorydoll.com/wicker-2026-whimsy-amatonormativity/) world we're taught to prioritize romantic relationships above all others, but trying to wait out or "train" an ideal partner lets us feel more in control while dating, less fearful of the consequences of loving someone. But, again…loving is dangerous. You'll never be fully safe from the love of your life. Isn't knowing that, and still choosing them morning after morning, kind of the point? ### Links - the male loneliness epidemic doesn’t exist ([YouTube](https://youtu.be/x9oWi3K2reM?si=I9G7ilZGz3-BUpkF&ref=memorydoll.com)) - Men have no friends and women bear the burden ([Harper’s Bazaar](https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689/toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/?ref=memorydoll.com)) - Communion by bell hooks ([Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/116410/9780060938291?ref=memorydoll.com)) - All About Love by bell hooks ([Bookshop](https://bookshop.org/a/116410/9780060959470?ref=memorydoll.com))