Women are people. I knew it, of course, and it seems obvious. But it took me forever to internalize what it meant. My hormones were telling me that there was

Women are people. I knew it, of course, and it seems obvious. But it took me forever to internalize what it meant. My hormones were telling me that there was something separate and other about them, something I absolutely positively had to have. It's hard to separate that from the messages I absorbed from the culture. Either way, it was incredibly overpowering, and that made me miss a lot of what was obvious. I approached it in a stereotypically male way, as an economic transaction. This was bolstered by a lot of the "evolutionary" approaches I read about, which I now see as poorly supported but was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to believe and sounded like science. I was perhaps 30 when it finally started to come together for me. And honestly I cannot tell how much of that is just due to the hormones subsiding a bit. I found myself a social group and started to date online. And that worked great: I was finally able to engage with women as people and found out that they were just like me. It was also when I finally figured out what women were afraid of when it came to men. I knew I represented no threat and was baffled that they couldn't see that. But of course they can't see that. The biggest single thing a dating man should know: not all men are rapists, but it only takes one to badly affect her for the rest of her life. Men often underestimate both the gravity of that trauma, and the strain of living with that threat at literally every moment of their lives. It's different from the threats that affect us men -- which are also very real and serious, but also very visible. Women carry a lot of burdens that men don't see. Every time the subject of dating comes up I see HN is filled with men who don't get anything I'm saying here, and I struggle to convince them. It's frustrating because I think their lives could be so much better, but it starts by giving up some preconceptions that are so deep that they seem absolute and objective -- truths so basic you don't even recognize that an alternative could exist. It took me many miserable years to figure this out and I still don't think I've conveyed it well.