Are you “doing the work”, young man? (BBC/Showtime)
A woman films her boyfriend standing sheepishly in their kitchen. He holds his pudgy pink hands together like a nervous ballerina. “So, basically you puked in the bed on Sunday night,” she says, as clear and stern as a primary-school teacher. “Yes I did,” he confirms with inappropriate confidence. The list of infractions lengthens. “How many did you have tonight?” He admits to three; she argues four. “Is that one drink? Let me ask you — is that one drink.” “No,” he admits, balancing flamingo-like on one shoeless leg. She dumps him, guiding him expertly through little tantrums and bargaining and despair. This is a grown man, a partner of three years, being handled like a Year 5 who puts chewing gum in girls’ ponytails.
Social media would have us believe that this dynamic is now the norm in heterosexual relationships. Men err like bumbling toddlers; women manage and chastise and cajole them. These videos are fed to me continually on TikTok: women telling horror stories about terrible dates; women offering advice on harnessing “dark feminine energy” to manipulate love interests; women fresh out of breakups denying the value of romantic love at all. Associating with men, these videos tell us, is a matter of tragic compromise — an embarrassing slip into an enclosure of backwards baboons destined to disappoint us. The assumption, borrowed from the language of motherhood, is that girlfriends have a monopoly on reason and on perspective; their partners, on the other hand, are hopelessly in thrall to impulsive urges and emotions, base creatures reliant on sex and drink. In this dynamic, the woman’s celestial faculties have one major source: therapy culture.
The cult of the Therapy Girlfriend was thrown into relief last week in a skit which went viral on X. In it, a woman sits across from her date; she quizzes him on various attributes. Age? 28. Attachment style? Secure. Credit score? 780. Therapy? Once a week. So far, he passes muster. But then the guy scuppers the deal by asking her to “go to my place”; she weighs anchor.
Yet it wasn’t the woman’s skittishness about casual sex that summoned discourse; it was the fact that attending regular therapy was on her list of requirements — once a week being the bare minimum for dateability. Assessing it later, the commentator Colin Wright wrote that the requirement made sense because of “how thoroughly many Left-wing women view nearly every interaction through a kind of ‘therapy ideology’ with its own special language”. He went on to describe how such women conceive of therapy as a sort of “mental-health gymnasium” — part of the necessary upkeep of every healthy adult.
Rather than emerging fully fledged into the adult world, there to deal with the ups and downs of life, therapy culture has us with one wing dangling from the chrysalis — always ready to be bashed by a gust of wind. To go through life unscathed requires Joan Didion’s vision of self-centered psychological labor: “[We are] something to work at, work on, ‘make an effort’ for and subject to an hour a day of emotional nautilus training.” With all this self-discovering, who has any time for seduction?
Clearly, there are occasions when therapy serves a purpose. Men and women alike benefit from it when living with grave psychiatric disorders; in many cases, these interventions should be lifelong with otherwise disastrous consequences. But should all men, even those without troubling histories, be marched off to a headshrinker for the mere purpose of neutering defects, buffing out the bad before they are allowed near a relationship? Any reasonable dater would say no.
And yet, increasingly, social media pins romantic disappointment on the sins of untherapized men. The language of relationship “attachment styles” is a nauseating example — a bullshit taxonomy of daters said to be doomed by early parental relationships and who, in a better world, would simply be called “desperate” (instead of “anxious”), “not into you” (instead of “avoidant”) and “normal” (instead of “secure”). The greatest trial sent a dater’s way seems to be to fall for an “avoidant” — those who run from intimacy because their mother didn’t rush in when they cried in the crib, or something — and advice on how to “handle” such partners is everywhere in the online femosphere. Such women would do better to avoid those who don’t like them back. Put that on a T-shirt. But the comforting delusion that this attachment-style discourse affords women is that it lets them avoid the horror of simply not being wanted; instead, they are free to meditate their way through an “avoidant discard” (when said partner ups and leaves out of nowhere) by a man whose inner child feels abandoned, and so is scared of intimacy, or whatever the rationale may be. As usual in the theater of hyperindividualism, everyone else is to blame. Easy to see how this flattering framework might have gained traction.
Equally, any amorous mishap can be palmed off on a partner who has failed to do “the work”: the usual, devastatingly reasonable causes of breakups — loss of feeling, wandering eyes, the contempt of familiarity — are traded for ego-friendly explanations: “He is frightened by his enormous passion for me”; “He wants to be with someone less emotionally challenging”; “He is afraid of replicating the mistakes of his parents’ marriage” and so on and so on. Let’s not face the fact that, sometimes, he’s just not that into you. Humility and resilience around this truth is an essential lesson of adulthood — far more valuable than any therapy package going.
This is not to say that the Therapy Girlfriend intentionally weaponizes counseling-speak in her romantic campaigns. In fact I’d contend that the assumptions of therapy — that we must continually enforce “boundaries”, manage “disclosures”, hold “dialogues” and seek “growth opportunities” — pervade Millennial and Gen Z dating culture to an extent that they no longer bear the antiseptic stench of their clinical birthplace. Therapy culture is hopelessly in bed with identity politics, and adherents of one are all but guaranteed to cleave to the other: its obsessions are the same, primarily the unimpeachable traumatized individual, whose needs and expectations supersede those of all others. Its emphasis on “empathy” always seems to go only one way: towards the therapy subject. Even in the context of couples’ therapy — something which, shockingly, I have known unmarried couples in their twenties to do in London (just end it!) — the “discoveries” of therapy seem far more likely to advantage the woman, who is encouraged by our culture to be more analytical, perfectionist and cautious in heterosexual dating. We go through our teens and twenties being told by TikTok dating gurus to fear and loathe men who are both guaranteed and determined to take advantage of, two-time and/or abandon us, such is the culture of fear around relationships; therapy culture is the peg with which we can hold our noses if we must associate with one. We women are encouraged to wield theories about personal growth and the emotional trigger as a sort of disinfectant: get with the program or be cast out — you’re a romantic biohazard.
Now, don’t get me wrong — our exasperated kitchen-berator from the bed-puke breakup video can clearly do better: this man is an unsalvageable loser. The problem is that when women are encouraged to use the teacherly language of pop therapy (which, unlike real therapy, flatters the help-seeker rather than challenging them), they make losers of everyone they date. Yes, some men — like some women — are unstable to the point of being beyond saving; but a reasonable dating culture would tell us to avoid them, not to reconstruct them. But the Therapy Girlfriend necessarily turns the entire male dating pool into a shuffling army of bashful apologetics, self-flagellating for their criminal lack of “inner work” or suffering through ritual weeping sessions to show their emotional literacy.
And, critically, the Therapy Girlfriend avoids all fun. Love interests should not be cowed by a watchful therapist lingering in the background of all amorous encounters, like the forever-scowling HR team of a midsized corporate office. Men are right to be suspicious of women steeped in the language of “grounding” and “journeys”. These concepts are so often rigged towards things that do not a good relationship make: cautiousness, endless analysis and fragility. At the precious center is always the therapized person, cradling their own self-esteem. In striving to be perfect, placid and invulnerable beings, we miss out on the thrill of romantic risk; the pleasure of being around people who are perhaps not precisely like ourselves. Falling in love is by its nature “dysregulating”, a spinning blizzard, a waking dream. It very often ends in tears — but it’s always worth it. Therapy Girls reading this: send your inner child off to crèche. At some point the grown-ups have to do the talking. If not, you might just let the good times pass you by.
