Twelve Things You'll Learn as a Woman Dating Men in Her 20s

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In your early 20s, you know nothing about sex, dating, and relationships. I hate to sound condescending, but as a 27-year-old woman, I now know this to be true. Women in your 30s or older reading this and smirking that I too know very little: You are correct. I freak out when someone stops telling me I'm amazing every five minutes, have never seen a relationship to its second birthday, and have the commitment issues of a stray cat. But that's the point: You have to live through all sorts of romantic relationships to get it.

Your 20s, I'm afraid, are where you do a lot of the painful learning. As a girl, you're evolving from someone who keeps their bra on during sex to a Self-Assured Adult Woman (SAAW). If you're a nascent SAAW dating straight men, you'll have to deal with varying degrees of emotional intelligence—hello, incels: Yes, men are slower to develop than women—meaning you'll inevitably swing from belief to belief about the nature of relationships. You'll stubbornly consider each truth about men and/or dating to be gospel, all until the next disorientating experience. It's fun! It's a fun time!

Here are those stages. Here is a timeline of everything you'll believe as a woman dating men in your 20s.

High School 'Love' Is a Lie

You spend a happy year-and-a-half googling "famous couples together since high school," taking performative cues from porn and pretending to orgasm from poor quality penetrative sex. Then your high school/freshman year boyfriend either cheats on you or sits you down and tells you they "love you but just need to have some sex... randomly? Spread my wings a bit?"

What, you think, is "spreading your wings?" We did shower sex? We did it up the butt??

If you're honest, you knew this first pillar of truth was coming. You knew sex was supposed to last longer than 45 seconds; you knew that Tiffany heart necklace he bought you for your 18 birthday was fucking tacky; you knew you were living a lie. Well done on spending the first year of college on a Megabus back to your hometown to see a boring cunt named Dan. Thank you, next.

Men Just Want to Fuck

Turns out your mom's not wrong about literally everything: Boys really are after one thing!

With that first breakup, you start to suspect that men are disgusting animals—pigs! rats! ratty pig-boys!—who see all women as pieces of meat and just want to endlessly have sex. Post-Dan, you're reading introductory feminism, which is confirming this miserable life lesson.

While your sexual encounters at this point can be boiled down to "two people with poorly-formed personalities rubbing bodies together," you're deep in a mode of believing that sex could lead to a potential relationship with every person you sleep with, even though you actively don't like most of them.

Partners Should Provide Nothing But a Good Fuck and Make You Laugh

Is this you settling or becoming more realistic? Who knows! The better part of a decade has shown you that all you needed from a man all along was: The ability to go three times in a night and a consistent flow of quality memes.

Clarity/Namaste/Death Is Coming/Look at All That I've Learned

You find peace with dating. Facts: Romantic relationships really do require compromise, should never be transactional, you should always be present when you’re with someone (get off your phone for an evening, Jesus), and it's only going to work if you like the same kind of sex, I'm sorry. You see younger women giving inspirational dating advice online and feel ancient and content about that.

Maybe you meet someone else who makes you want to create another cult of two. Someone you look at while they engage with other people and think, Yep, I’d crawl across broken glass for that shithead. Maybe you have a second "the one is not real" meltdown six months down the line.

Either way, it is now that you realize you—and everyone else—ultimately knows very little about dating. That includes knowing what you want. But you are clear about what you don’t want. You leave situations that aren’t right quicker and with more belief that everything will be OK. You develop something resembling personal boundaries. If you’re very lucky, you won't date someone with single raw pillows ever again.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

from VICE https://ift.tt/2zwalMO
via cheap web hosting