Abundance

Illusion of Abundance

She has never once, in her entire adult life, experienced the thing that forces growth in relationships: the real possibility that no one is coming.

From the moment she turned sixteen, the supply has been constant. Boys in school. Men in bars. Matches on apps. DMs from strangers. Coworkers who linger too long. Friends of friends who always seem to appear when she's single. Every platform she's ever joined has confirmed the same message: you are wanted. There is always someone. There will always be someone.

And so she has never had to do the thing that his loneliness, for all its cruelty, at least forces him to attempt: try. Not try to be attractive — she knows she's attractive, the metrics confirm it hourly. Try to be a partner. Try to compromise, to adjust, to make room in a life that has been engineered, since adolescence, to require no one.

She doesn't know she hasn't tried, because the abundance feels like evidence that she's doing fine. The options keep arriving. They must be arriving because she's doing something right. What she can't see — what the abundance actively hides from her — is that the options keep arriving and none of them stay. Not because men are disappointing, though some are. But because nothing in her life has taught her the skills that make someone want to stay.

The Window

Nobody tells her this part, because telling her is a career-ending act. But the biology is not negotiable.

Her options are endless at nineteen. By twenty-four there are still many. By twenty-eight her tricks no longer work the way they used to, and something she cannot name has shifted. Now she wants children but cannot explain why — the wanting arrived without a decision, biological and uninvited. But children require a partner, and a partner requires at least two years of dating if she's found the right man, and she hasn't started looking because she was told there was no rush. By thirty-six, the men buying drinks are not the men she wants, and the men she wants are buying drinks for the twenty-four-year-old who reminds them of her a decade ago. This is not a moral judgment. It is a market reality she was told didn't exist by people who benefit from her not planning for it.

"You have plenty of time" is the most expensive lie a woman can be told. Not because it's entirely untrue — she does have time for many things. Career, travel, growth, reinvention. But for the specific biological project of having children with a partner she chose at the peak of her options, the window is narrower than the culture admits. And the culture doesn't admit it because admitting it would mean telling women something they don't want to hear, and the attention economy runs on telling people what they want to hear.

She did everything right. She believed what she was told. She leveled up her career, her fitness, her apartment, her friend group, her Instagram. She optimized every variable except the one with a deadline.

And now the apps are different. The matches are fewer. The men her age who are single are single for reasons she can see immediately. The men she'd actually want are dating younger women, not out of malice but out of the same preference that has operated for all of human history, which nobody warned her about because warning her would have been called sexist.

She is not a victim. She made choices with the information she had, and the information was wrong. The people who gave her the wrong information will not be there to help her recalibrate. They will be busy telling the next twenty-five-year-old the same thing.

The Fictional Man

She has consumed ten thousand hours of romance. Novels, films, series, TikToks of boyfriends surprising girlfriends with flowers, Instagram accounts that post curated moments from curated relationships. She has watched love performed so many times that the performance has become her reference point, and every real man is measured against the edit.

He stumbles over his words and she compares him to a screenwriter's version of a man who always knows exactly what to say. He has a bad day and she compares him to the boyfriend in the TikTok who came home with roses for no reason. He is quiet on a Sunday morning and she compares him to the fictional husband who always knows when to speak and what to say and how to make the silence feel like poetry instead of absence.

Real men are being measured against fiction and losing. Not because they are inadequate, but because fiction doesn't have bad lighting. Fiction doesn't have morning breath. Fiction doesn't have a Wednesday where it just doesn't feel like talking. Fiction is a performance optimized for the viewer's emotional satisfaction, and no living human can sustain that optimization across the ten thousand unedited hours that constitute an actual year together.

And the cruelest part is that the fiction she's comparing him to was written by people who know it's fiction. The screenwriter goes home to a spouse who is irritating and wonderful and flawed. The romance novelist knows that real love looks nothing like what she writes. The couple on Instagram fought for an hour before filming the thirty-second clip. Everyone who manufactures the romantic ideal knows it is manufactured. The only person who believes it is real is the woman holding real men to the standard of people who don't exist.

Her Mother's Shadow

She watched her mother shrink for a man who didn't deserve it. She saw the dinners cooked without thanks, the ambitions deferred, the personality dimmed to fit inside a marriage that had no room for her full self. She watched her mother swallow her opinions at the dinner table and cry in the bathroom and pretend everything was fine. She was fourteen and she swore — with the absolute clarity available only to a teenager — that she would never do the same.

Reasonable. Perhaps the most reasonable vow a young woman can make. The problem is not the vow. The problem is that it metastasized. "I will not shrink for the wrong man" became "I will not adjust for any man." She confused compromise with submission because the only model she saw was submission. She confused accommodation with erasure because in her mother's house, accommodation meant erasure. She built a self so defended, so armored, so aggressively complete that no man could ask her to make room without triggering the alarm system her mother's marriage installed.

The man sitting across from her at dinner has no idea he is also sitting across from her father. That every request he makes is heard through the filter of a marriage he was never part of. That "could you put your phone away" lands as "could you make yourself smaller." That "I need more of your time" registers as "I need you to disappear into my needs the way your mother disappeared into mine."

He is not her father. He might be a good man making a reasonable request. But she cannot hear it as reasonable because reasonable was not a category that existed in her mother's house. There was compliance or there was conflict. There was his way or punishment. And she decided, at fourteen, that she would never comply. So she fights everything, including the things that aren't fights, including the things that are just a person who loves her asking to be let in.

The Primary Relationship

The group chat is the first thing she checks in the morning and the last thing she checks at night. It knows her history, her patterns, her anxieties, her 2 AM thoughts. It provides daily emotional processing, check-ins, validation, advice, humor, the feeling of being known. It has replaced the intimate knowledge that a partner would accumulate over years. It is the relationship she is actually in.

By the time she gets home, she has already told the story about her day. She has already processed the thing that upset her. She has already received the comfort she needed. Her partner gets the version of her that has already been fed, already been heard, already been held — by five women in a text thread who may know exactly what role they're performing.

But the group chat does something worse than substitute for a partner. It prevents her from becoming a better one. Her girlfriends optimize for the short term — making her feel good right now, tonight, in this message. So they tell her what she wants to hear. At five-foot-one and two hundred pounds, she's a catch and any man would be lucky to have her — unless Ozempic is available, in which case she's brave for taking it. The body was perfect and also needed pharmaceutical intervention. Both are true simultaneously because both get likes. The guy who stopped texting is intimidated by her success. The one who mentioned her health was negging. She doesn't need to change a thing — she's perfect as she is, and the world needs to catch up.

This is the exact mirror of his forum. His group tells him it's over, there's no point trying, the game is rigged against him. Her group tells her she's already won, there's no need to try, the game owes her a prize. Both groups prevent growth by making stagnation feel like wisdom. His forum validates his paralysis by calling it realism. Her group chat validates her complacency by calling it self-love. Neither group has any incentive to say the hard thing — because the friend who says "maybe you should hit the gym" gets the same treatment as the incel who says "maybe I should just talk to her." Both are ejected for threatening the story the group needs to believe.

And just like him, she performs for the group because it is easier, not better, more convenient. He posts his most hopeless take because despair is the currency of his forum. She posts her most ruthless screenshot of a man she rejected because independence is the currency of hers. He competes to be the most broken. She competes to be the most unbothered. His performance says: look how rigged the game is. Her performance says: look how little I need to play. Both are auditioning for approval from peers who reward the exact behavior that keeps them stuck. The man she just ghosted might have been fine. But the screenshot of his awkward text got five laughing emojis in the group chat, and five laughing emojis feel better than a Tuesday night date with someone who's trying.

I Don't Need a Man

She said it so many times it stopped being a statement of independence and became a prophecy.

It started as armor. A necessary correction to a culture that told women their value was contingent on being chosen. A pushback against the aunt who asks about boyfriends at Thanksgiving. A shield against the specific humiliation of wanting someone who doesn't want you back. "I don't need a man" was, in its origin, a survival statement: I will be fine alone. I am not diminished by singleness. My worth does not require external validation.

All of that is true. None of it is the problem.

The problem is that the armor fused to the skin. She wore it so long she forgot it was a garment. "I don't need a man" stopped being something she told the world and became something she told herself, and the telling became a practice, and the practice became an identity, and the identity foreclosed the wanting.

Because the wanting is still there. It surfaces at weddings, watching someone else be chosen and feeling a pang she immediately suppresses. It surfaces at 2 AM, in the particular silence of an apartment that is beautiful and organized and empty. It surfaces when a friend's husband does something small and kind and she feels something flash across her chest that she will not examine.

"I don't need a man" and "I don't want a man" are very different statements. The first is strength. The second, when it isn't true, is a wound dressed as philosophy. And she has repeated the first so many times that it has become the second without her noticing, and now the want has nowhere to go except down, where it sits in her body as a low-grade ache she attributes to stress, or hormones, or just being tired.

She is not tired. She is lonely. And everything she will build from here — every system, every routine, every structure that fills the space where a partner might have been — will be designed to ensure she never has to say so.

The Checklist

She was told she deserves everything. By her parents, who praised her for existing. By the culture, which told her to never settle. By the Instagram accounts that post quotes about queens and high-value women and knowing your worth. By the therapist who said her standards aren't too high, they're just right. So she built a list.

Six feet. Six figures. Emotionally intelligent but not soft. Ambitious but available. Dominant but gentle. Confident but vulnerable — on her schedule, in doses she controls, never more than she's comfortable witnessing. Funny but serious. Protective but not possessive. Experienced but not promiscuous. Successful but not consumed by work. Handsome but doesn't know it. A leader among men but tender with her. War lord potential.

The list came from the same place his hopelessness came from: the apps. She swiped through thousands of men, each one a highlight reel — the guy skiing in Aspen, the guy with the rescue dog on the beach, the six-four lawyer whose bio was just self-deprecating enough to signal emotional intelligence. The app taught her to evaluate men the way a menu teaches you to evaluate restaurants: by scanning for the best combination of features in the shortest possible time. She comparison-shopped across a catalog of curated male performance and assembled a composite from the top entries. His data told him he wasn't enough. Her data told her she could have everything. Both datasets were generated by the same machine, and both were lies.

The list is a composite sketch of a man who does not exist. It is assembled from the best traits of every man she has ever swiped on, every character she has ever watched, every curated couple she has ever seen perform their relationship for an audience. No individual human being can be all of those things simultaneously, because many of them are contradictions. Dominance and gentleness trade off. Ambition and availability trade off. Confidence and vulnerability on command is not a personality — it is a performance she is requesting without knowing she's requesting it.

Every man who arrives is measured against the composite and found lacking. Not because he is deficient but because he is specific. He is this particular person, with these particular strengths and these particular flaws, and the flaws are the part that the checklist cannot accommodate. The checklist has no column for "imperfect in a way you could learn to love." It has no field for "not what you imagined but exactly what you need." It is an instrument designed to evaluate humans and structurally incapable of admitting one.

Meanwhile, the men who do appear to match the checklist — the ones who perform all the right qualities on a first date — are, almost by definition, performing. A man who seems to have no flaws is a man who is hiding his flaws. She is selecting for the best actors and then wondering why the mask slips on month three.

The Fortress

The therapist is her confessor. The cat is her child. The brunch is her church. The wine night is her ritual. Layer by layer, the system becomes airtight. No man is structurally necessary.

The therapist absorbs what a partner should hear. He says something that hurts her and instead of telling him, she saves it for Thursday's session. The therapist validates her interpretation. The man never gets the chance to explain, to apologize, to repair. The relationship runs on a five-day delay through a professional intermediary, and she wonders why it feels distant.

And then the therapist gives her the diagnosis: avoidant attachment style, rooted in childhood trauma. Now the pattern has a clinical name. Now the walls she built have an origin story. Now every man she pushes away is not a choice but a symptom — and symptoms are things that happen to you, not things you do.

But she is not avoidant. She is inexperienced.

Her time has been given to her girlfriends, her job, her books, her social media, her cat, her therapist, her brunch, her wine nights. She has invested ten thousand hours into everything except actual men. She does not know how to sit with a man's silence without interpreting it as withdrawal. She does not know how to receive a clumsy compliment without scanning it for manipulation. She does not know how to let someone be close because she has never practiced it — not because her childhood broke her, but because her adulthood never required it. The abundance made sure there was always something easier to do than the hard, slow, awkward work of learning another person.

This is the exact same misdiagnosis that happens to him. His forum takes a nineteen-year-old who has never talked to a woman and tells him he has a structural genetic disadvantage. Her therapist takes a twenty-eight-year-old who has never been vulnerable with a man and tells her she has a clinical attachment disorder. Both are converting inexperience into identity. Both are taking a skill deficit — something that could be fixed with practice, with discomfort, with showing up badly enough times that the badness wears off — and recasting it as a permanent feature of who they are.

The diagnosis becomes the final brick in the fortress. She can now explain her inability to let a man in using the language of science, validated by a professional she pays three hundred dollars an hour to listen. The group chat nods. The friends understand. "She has avoidant attachment, it's from her childhood, she's working on it." She has been working on it for four years. Nothing has changed. Nothing was supposed to change. The diagnosis was never a tool for growth. It was a certificate of exemption — clinical permission to remain exactly where she is.

The cat receives her nurturing energy. All of it. The tenderness, the caretaking, the physical affection, the baby voice, the unconditional warmth. The cat tolerates her on its own terms, without complication, without opinion, without ever making her feel inadequate. It is a relationship with zero friction. Which means it is a relationship with zero growth. Nothing is demanded of her that she doesn't already want to give.

The Sunday night silence tells the truth the system was built to obscure. The brunch is over. The group chat has gone quiet. The cat is asleep. The wine glass is in the sink. The apartment is beautiful, organized, exactly as she designed it. And she is alone with a feeling she will not name, because naming it would mean the architecture was a cope. Naming it would mean the full life is full of everything except the one thing she swore she didn't need.

Compartmentalized

She doesn't know she's doing it, but she has reverse-engineered the concept of a relationship by distributing its functions across multiple men. The gym guy for physical validation — he tells her she looks good and asks nothing else. The work friend for intellectual stimulation — he engages her mind and never touches her body. The ex she still texts for emotional depth — he knows her history and she can be raw with him without it leading anywhere. The situationship for sex — he shows up on her schedule, performs adequately, and leaves without complication. The orbiter for reliability — he is always there, always available, always willing, waiting for a promotion that will never come.

Each man gets a slice. None of them gets the whole thing. And she thinks she is winning, because she is getting everything she needs without being dependent on any one person. She has decentralized the boyfriend. She has built a distributed system.

But she has built a set of compartments where she needed a partner. And the thing about compartments is that nothing crosses the walls. The gym guy doesn't hold her when she cries because that's not his compartment. The emotional ex doesn't sleep with her because that contract expired. The situationship doesn't ask about her day because that's not the arrangement. Every function is covered. No one is there.

And none of it is load-bearing. The distributed system works on a Tuesday — when life is routine and the needs are small and each man can handle his designated function without strain. But life is not always a Tuesday. The biopsy comes back wrong. The parent dies. The company folds. The thing happens that requires someone to show up completely, not for one function but for all of them, not on a schedule but right now, not within the terms of an arrangement but with the full weight of a person who has chosen to be there. She looks around and realizes that no single man can carry the load, because no single man was ever asked to. She distributed the weight so evenly that none of them developed the strength to hold it alone. And now none of them will.

And the man who could be all of those things — imperfectly, inconsistently, humanly — looks at the roster and does the math and walks away. Not because he can't compete with five men. Because he can see that what she's built is not a gap he can fill but a structure designed to ensure no one ever does. The arrangement isn't a temporary structure until the right person arrives. The arrangement is the defense against the right person arriving. Because the right person would ask her to dismantle it, and the dismantling would require trust she has never had to develop.

The Validation Layer

If the group chat is the relationship, the audience is the porn. One-directional, ego-feeding, consequence-free. The likes, the comments, the DMs, the views, the followers — this is not where she is known. This is where she is wanted. And she has confused the two for so long that the difference no longer registers.

Any actual man who shows up is competing with ten thousand people who ask nothing of her, and he is the only one who does. He wants her attention when the audience wants it too. He wants depth when the audience only requires surface. He wants her to be a person when the audience only needs her to be an image.

And from her side, the man always loses the comparison. The audience loves her unconditionally — or what feels like unconditional love. The man has needs, moods, bad days, opinions she doesn't share. The audience can be curated. The man cannot. The audience grows when she performs. The man grows distant when she performs, because he can feel he's not getting the real her — he's getting the content version, the one that was built for the followers before she met him.

The man she dismissed was offering something the audience never could: to see her without the filter and stay anyway. But that offer is quiet, and the applause is loud.

The Dubai DM

And then there is the version of abundance that reveals what the market actually thinks she is worth. Not as a person — as a product.

The DMs from "celebrities" offering parties in Dubai. The invitations to yachts she didn't earn a place on. The first-class tickets from men she's never met who saw her Instagram and did a calculation she doesn't want to examine too closely. The attention economy spent years training her to build a profile, to curate an image, to present herself as aspirational. And now the aspirational image has attracted buyers.

She thinks she's being invited because she's special. She's being invited because she's available. The Dubai party circuit is the wholesale market for what the dating app is the retail version of — men with resources purchasing access to women who've been trained by the attention economy to confuse being wanted with being valued.

The pipeline is seamless. Instagram did the marketing. The likes did the grooming. The dopamine of validation did the softening. The lifestyle inflation did the pricing — she now requires a level of experience and luxury that her own income can't sustain but that someone else's can, for a cost that is implied but never stated. By the time the plane ticket arrives, the sale was already made. Years ago. One selfie at a time.

And she can't talk about it afterward. Not because of a non-disclosure agreement, though sometimes that too. Because admitting what happened means admitting that the abundance was never abundance. It was pricing. The attention she received was not admiration. It was appraisal. The market was not celebrating her. It was shopping.

The Same Room

Here is the thing that connects her to the man in the other article — the one measuring his jaw, the one posting about canthal tilt, the one who has never walked across a room to say hello. They are in the same room. They are suffering from the same disease. They are both substituting a system for a person.

He built an ideology to explain why he can't connect. She built a lifestyle to ensure she doesn't have to. He hides behind data. She hides behind abundance. He says women are impossible. She says men are unnecessary. Both are standing on opposite sides of the same wall, both certain the wall was built by the other side, both refusing to look down and see that they are laying the bricks themselves.

His exit is simple and terrifying: go talk to her. Hers is equally simple and equally terrifying: let him in.

Not the edited version of him. Not the checklist version. Not the version that meets every criterion and has no flaws and never triggers the alarm system her mother's marriage installed. The real one. The one who will sometimes say the wrong thing and sometimes not know what to say at all. The one who will need something from her that she has never practiced giving because the abundance never required it. The one who will fail her in small ways that are not her father's failures, and succeed in ways the composite sketch never imagined.

The group chat cannot love her. The audience cannot hold her. The checklist cannot surprise her. The compartmentalized men cannot know her. The cat cannot challenge her. The therapist cannot choose her. The wine cannot warm her the way being seen by someone who is actually there can warm her — terrifyingly, imperfectly, in a way she cannot control and did not design.

That is the offer. It has always been the offer. It is the only offer that is real.

Let him in.

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