스크립트
00:00:00Where are all the good men at?
00:00:01Are we in the middle of a good man shortage?
00:00:05Where are all the good men?
00:00:06Where are we meeting the men that don't stop?
00:00:08Get out there.
00:00:09Please.
00:00:09Where are all the good men at?
00:00:12Men simply stopped engaging.
00:00:14They stopped showing up.
00:00:16That's something women ask online all the time.
00:00:18And it begs the question, what constitutes a good man?
00:00:22I saw a comment on Instagram that I can't stop thinking about.
00:00:24It said, I'm trapped in a generation where I don't know whether to buy her flowers
00:00:28or ignore her to get her to like me.
00:00:31Has popular media conditioned women to desire emotionally unavailable men
00:00:35and therefore made men less emotionally available or vice versa?
00:00:39Let's dive in.
00:00:40I want to run an experiment on you.
00:00:42I'm going to describe two of the most beloved romance movies ever made.
00:00:46And I want you to spot the glitch.
00:00:48In the movie The Notebook, Ali is engaged to Lon.
00:00:50Lon is the perfect example of a man that any mother would want her daughter to marry.
00:00:54Successful, devoted, and genuinely kind.
00:00:57She's got a good future ahead of her.
00:00:59But then what happens?
00:01:00She runs into her ex, Noah, whose entire original courtship strategy was threatening to jump
00:01:05off a Ferris wheel and die unless she'd go out with him, which honestly sounds like a better
00:01:10way to get a restraining order than a date.
00:01:12But now, Ali has to make a choice.
00:01:14Stay faithful to the good man she's engaged to, or reignite a spicy new romance with her
00:01:20Chaotic X. In the end, Noah gets the girl, Lon gets the cuck chair, and it's all framed
00:01:25as a happy ending. It's a story as old as time.
00:01:28And here's another example from one of the most popular movies ever.
00:01:32In Titanic, Rose is engaged to Cal.
00:01:34Cal is successful, well-connected, and a totally secure bet for the future.
00:01:39The only problem is Rose feels bored and disconnected from that life.
00:01:43Something is missing.
00:01:44Then she meets Jack, who is everything that Cal isn't.
00:01:48Just like Noah in the notebook, Jack is totally broke, impulsive, and romantic.
00:01:53Over just four days, Rose decides to leave Cal to pursue a life with Jack.
00:01:58Jack's entire five-year plan is just, see where the wind takes me.
00:02:04And the wind, as we all know, takes him to the bottom of the Atlantic.
00:02:07Rose spends the next 84 years treating those four days as the most real thing that ever
00:02:13happened to her.
00:02:14She literally dies thinking about him, and the entire time she's telling the story, Cal
00:02:19is framed as the villain in her mind.
00:02:21The safe man isn't just portrayed as the loser in the love triangle.
00:02:25He's the obstacle standing between the woman and real love.
00:02:30Jason Pargin broke my brain with this insight.
00:02:32He says, I grew up with tons and tons of movies that kept saying the worst thing a man could
00:02:36be is a grown-up.
00:02:37You'd see a love triangle where the guy you're supposed to be rooting against, his only sin
00:02:41is that he's kind of normal.
00:02:44He's got a job and he's responsible.
00:02:46But then some other guy comes along and it doesn't matter that he sleeps in his car.
00:02:50Or if both guys are financially stable, you're supposed to root for the one who's less
00:02:54emotionally stable.
00:02:55The one who's more childlike.
00:02:58Jason even handles the objection where he could say, oh, well, Cal wasn't a good guy.
00:03:02In Titanic, he was evil.
00:03:03But the evil part didn't come out until later.
00:03:06The thing that established him as undesirable was that he spent his time having boring conversations
00:03:11instead of partying.
00:03:12Modern romance culture isn't just telling stories.
00:03:16It's shaping selection criteria.
00:03:17Across movies, media, and even mainstream dating advice, women are subtly conditioned to
00:03:22seek out emotional unavailability and volatility as signs of desirability.
00:03:27In Twilight, Edward Cullen is dangerous, obsessive, and emotionally tortured, and that's precisely
00:03:32what makes him desirable.
00:03:34Bella's rejection of Jacob, who's warm and grounded, underscores the trope.
00:03:38Safe is boring.
00:03:40Danger is hot.
00:03:41Similarly, Star is Born presents Ali's rise and Jackson Maine's spiral as tragically intertwined.
00:03:47Her love is deepened, not diminished, by how much he unravels.
00:03:51The result is a generation of women confusing conflict with compatibility, drama with depth,
00:03:57and brokenness with passion.
00:03:59Rather than choosing partners based on emotional maturity or shared values or long-term compatibility,
00:04:05so many women are drawn to conflict, aloofness, and unavailability.
00:04:10This is a twist on something called the Byronic hero.
00:04:13It's a literary archetype based on the persona of the poet Lord Byron.
00:04:17He's usually emotionally isolated or unavailable, morally ambiguous or anti-heroic, at odds
00:04:23with society or authority, and marked by a tragic past or trauma.
00:04:28And women are often drawn to him, despite his destructiveness.
00:04:32Even modern women's magazines keep repackaging difficult as passionate.
00:04:37Teen Vogue runs headlines like,
00:04:39Super bad.
00:04:40Why are smart girls drawn to bad boys?
00:04:42The son gushes about why the sexiest stars go for the bad man.
00:04:46The takeaway is, if he's cold, complicated, or broken, he must be worth it.
00:04:51Safety is sterile and suffering is sexy.
00:04:53It's the, he's hard to love but I can fix him fantasy, repackaged over and over again.
00:04:59The sad thing is that the high emotionality of the stories only works if the girl chooses the guy
00:05:04who acts like a teenager.
00:05:05But can you imagine what would happen if the notebook had actually given an honest portrayal
00:05:10of what their relationship would have been like over 10 or 20 or 30 years?
00:05:15There's a neuroscience trick being played on us here.
00:05:18Our brains confuse scarcity with value.
00:05:21That's why emotional unavailability is often mistaken for worth.
00:05:25The harder he is to access, the more meaningful his eventual affection feels.
00:05:30But realistically, this just prioritizes partners who aren't capable of commitment over ones who
00:05:37have their act together and are ready to go.
00:05:39It's emotional immaturity masquerading as romantic spark and it works on the exact same
00:05:45mechanism as addiction.
00:05:47You are not in love.
00:05:48You're hooked.
00:05:50Variable schedule reward is the bullseye of dopamine.
00:05:53It's how slot machines work and why social media is so compelling.
00:05:55Our brains are wired to think that if something is scarce or intermittent, it must be precious.
00:06:01So if someone stops texting us or if we feel like they're drifting away, all of a sudden
00:06:05our brain says they must be important.
00:06:09If someone says, here I am, I genuinely like you and would very much want to commit, our
00:06:15brains respond with, what's wrong with you?
00:06:17But if you treat me like crap, you're in and out of my life, you text me a bit and then
00:06:21you go cold and disappear.
00:06:22Many people think perhaps they're the one.
00:06:25We have taught women to interpret emotional inconsistency as romantic tension, to believe
00:06:31that love is meant to be hard earned, not freely given.
00:06:35And this has real consequences.
00:06:37It normalizes dysfunction.
00:06:39It rewires attraction around trauma.
00:06:41It sidelines healthy men and glorifies emotionally stunted ones.
00:06:45And it leaves women feeling like emotional burnout is the price they have to pay for passion.
00:06:50This is why many guys have little sympathy for the question, where are all the good men?
00:06:55Because whether it's true or not, some men feel like they've shown up ready and able
00:07:00to fully commit to the future, only to have been denied for a real or imagined bad boy.
00:07:06Women set the standards for sex and men meet them.
00:07:09There's this idea from Roy Baumeister.
00:07:10He says, men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex and perhaps not a great
00:07:16deal more.
00:07:16One of us characterized this in previous work as, if women would stop sleeping with jerks,
00:07:21men would stop being jerks.
00:07:22If, in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community or lie or amass riches
00:07:28by fair means or foul or be romantic or be funny, then men will do precisely that.
00:07:34Similarly, if men need to be broken, flaky, non-committal and inconsistent, they will meet
00:07:40those standards appropriately.
00:07:41Now, I want to make it clear, I don't believe that women's mate choices, modern romance culture
00:07:47and girly magazines are responsible for emotionally unavailable men.
00:07:51Some men are just assholes.
00:07:52Those guys suck and I'm sorry that you have to deal with them.
00:07:56But those things aren't totally unrelated either.
00:07:59What is needed is a clearer picture of healthy connection.
00:08:02Alain de Botton has this wonderful insight.
00:08:04He says it can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic sounding
00:08:08realization.
00:08:10We should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us from the
00:08:15start.
00:08:15Without the need for persuasion, without any call for begging or chasing, without strategic
00:08:20withholding of affection, without visits to therapy.
00:08:24Just plainly and simply keen, open and ready from the get-go.
00:08:28We can be forgiven for being deeply charmed by all the others, the coy and troubled ones,
00:08:33those who don't reply to our messages, those whose difficult childhoods render them
00:08:37enchantingly off-kilter.
00:08:38But this is a game we can, in the end, ill afford.
00:08:43It is not love if you need to keep messaging and they rarely reply.
00:08:47It is not love if they are evasive or surreptitiously liking someone else's posts.
00:08:51It is not love if they get defensive or describe your legitimate requirements for attention as
00:08:56too intense.
00:08:58Let's say it again for good measure.
00:09:01The only worthwhile lovers are ones who don't need persuading.
00:09:05Those who like us a lot already.
00:09:07Those who never leave us wondering where they are or when they'll reply.
00:09:11Those whose commitment to us flows so easily that all the focus can be on the difficulties
00:09:15of living day to day.
00:09:17Life is already difficult enough without also trying to convince someone to commit to us
00:09:22in the way we're already prepared to commit to them.
00:09:26The others may be fascinating, beautiful, and about to change their mind in 15 and a half
00:09:30years or after a trip to India.
00:09:32They may generate lots of late night arguments and make for a great movie or a fascinating psychoanalytical
00:09:37case study.
00:09:38They are also just a plain waste of our precious time.
00:09:42Is this everything that's wrong with the modern dating market?
00:09:47Obviously not.
00:09:48Is it a big part of it?
00:09:51I think so.
00:09:52The question we need to ask is what are we teaching people to look for when it comes to
00:09:56relating?
00:09:57And women specifically, because for the most part, they are the selectors.
00:10:01Men are the pursuers and women are the selectors.
00:10:03If you're the one doing the selecting, what rules and advice are you being given about how
00:10:09to choose?
00:10:11I do think there's a lot to this theory.
00:10:13Very intermittent reinforcement gets confused with emotional spark.
00:10:17It results in good, committed men being seen as broken or needy because the subtext every
00:10:22woman has been told is if he's there and ready for you from the beginning, transparent about
00:10:28his needs and his wants, there must be something wrong with him because love isn't supposed to
00:10:33be easy.
00:10:34It's supposed to be effortful.
00:10:35Whether through personal experience, watching culture or hearing stories from friends, men
00:10:41will adjust their behavior accordingly.
00:10:44If the choice becomes, do I buy her flowers or do I ignore her texts to make her like me?
00:10:49Be careful what you wish for.
00:10:51Again, women are not to blame for the way that men show up in relationships, but everybody
00:10:56responds to incentives.
00:10:58So be careful what incentives you give the people you say you want to be emotionally open with,
00:11:03because doesn't it just sound better if love could be easy and honest?