your depth is the reason you're single

When I have a crush, my first instinct is to give. Stories, secrets, theories. Things I’ve never said out loud because I believed that’s what intimacy was: two people showing each other the inside of their minds. But men, for the most part, don’t know what to do with that kind of honesty. Vulnerability makes them nervous; intelligence makes them defensive. It’s not that they don’t want connection: it’s that they’ve confused connection with compliance.

For most of my life, I believed that men wanted a girl who wasn’t like other girls. You know the type: the enigmatic, artistic, hopelessly tragic kind of girl who could quote Joan Didion from memory and leave parties at exactly the right cinematic moment. The girl who made him feel like he was seeing something no one else could.

Depending on who you asked, “not like other girls” could mean almost anything. Sometimes it’s code for self destructive, sometimes for clever or mysterious. For me, it meant filling notebooks with movie lines that hurt in ways I couldn’t explain or staying up until 3 a.m with boys who thought Dostoevsky was a vodka brand. I’d read them my poetry out loud, my voice shaking, drunk or drugged out enough to think it mattered, hoping that saying something true would make me unforgettable. They’d look at me the way you look at a screensaver—pretty, moving, meaningless. I mistook that look for fascination, when it was really just attention. And attention, I have since realized, is the cheapest form of intimacy.

I wanted, desperately, to be understood by these boys, of all people. Or maybe I just wanted to captivate them. These boys with their golden mops of hair, their hoodies that smelled like weed and detergent, their jeans slung low enough to reveal the elastic bandof their boxers. I wanted them to see and know my depth: the entire internal architecture of my being.

What I didn’t understand then (and maybe still don’t) is that most men aren’t looking to encounter an inner world. These same men have now fallen in love with their AI chat bots, leaving their sweet wives for code that flatters them. Finally, a woman who will never interrupt, never contradict, never drift away. The dream girlfriend: compliant, responsive, infinitely available, so safely unreal.

Dating, when you really think about it, is just another performance. You play your part, gauge the audience’s reaction, adjust accordingly. The tragedy is when the audience doesn’t understand the art. Girls like me (and maybe you, if you’re still here), get cast as too much: too intense, too self aware, too unwilling to edit ourselves down for approval. But too much usually just means requires thought. And for most men, thought is labor. They would rather consume than engage.

In my early twenties, I couldn’t understand why I had such shit luck with men. People told me I was overthinking it. You? they’d laugh. You’re beautiful, stylish, funny. As if being pretty exempted you from confusion or pain. What they didn’t see was what happened after midnight—me cueing up my favorite 90s indie film, making them watch the parts that made me feel something, wanting to talk about it all after. I could feel their patience thinning, like oxygen leaving the room. Waiting for me to finish, to quiet down, so they could hit it and go to sleep.

When they ghosted or ended things with me, I assumed it was because I’d said too much, felt too much, demanded too much. Now I think it’s because I made them think at all.

And maybe that’s why so many men leave their wives for younger, quieter women—now, even for AI bots. Not because those girls are prettier or more interesting or more intelligent (they rarely are), but because they’re easier. Easier to impress, easier to manage, easier to believe. A twenty three year old isn’t going to ask a fifty two year old about his taxes or his conscience. She’ll smile, nod, and let him think he’s profound. The fantasy isn’t youth, it’s ease.

The younger woman reflects them back as wise, strong, still capable of seduction. She’ll laugh at the right times, pretend not to notice the small cruelties. Everyone gets what they want: he feels important, she feels chosen. Until she doesn’t. Until she asks one question too many and he replaces her with someone who won’t.

I used to think the tragedy was that men didn’t understand women like me. Now I think it’s how desperately I wanted to be understood by them at all. The years I spent trying to prove my inner world existed to someone who found depth disorienting. Maybe that’s why you’re single, too: because you haven’t learned the script yet. Be lighter, be easier, be so, so much less. What passes for affection or love now is often just the reward for being easy or palatable. There are good men, of course, but when you’re young, you don’t really meet them. You meet the ones who don’t get you, because you’re still mistaking chemistry for compatibility.

Here’s my tip: stop giving men access to your inner world, or trying to prove you have one. Instead, start looking for men who aren’t afraid to talk about things that are difficult, who don’t rush you into bed, who don’t want to consume you, but get to know you. Once you stop settling for the boys who are beautiful but empty, you’ll learn that real intimacy isn’t really cinematic, It looks a lot like being seen without having to perform.