Here’s something I was saying to Greg Guevara (one of the most interesting people in Canada) while we were walking around Ottawa (one of the most boring places in Canada): I write because many things in the world want to make me bitter and jaded and hopeless and I am desperately clinging to the part of me that wants to hope and love. Well, dating advice on tiktok is one of those things.
I have the misfortune of being placed in the part of Tiktok that gives dating advice to straight women, despite the fact that I’m not straight and not a single piece of advice I’ve heard so far has been in line with my morals or, you know, remotely useful. I suspect the algorithm keeps me here because I have a slightly obsessive fascination with the heterosexual dating world, and usually this side of Tiktok ends up being the source of a few jokes with my friends or an idea for a thinkpiece. It’s definitely not the worst thing I get shown, if I had to banish one thing forever from my FYP I think that would be the Destiny debate clips, at least straight people are funny sometimes.
But other times, the twisted logic of this side of the internet gets in the way of my happiness in very real ways. So here I am, writing about it to fan the flames of hope in my heart and -hopefully- in yours too.
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Last Valentine’s Day my Tiktok FYP was covered in romantic grand gestures: luxury hotel bedrooms with rose petals and pink balloons created a wall of content on February 14th that overwhelmed my phone. Many of these short videos were part of a trend called if he wanted to, he would (#ifhewantedtohewould) which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect: it urges women to stop making excuses for the men in their lives, and instead interpret the lack of grand romantic gestures as a lack of good intentions, of care and of love. Why is this man on your for you page buying lavish bouquets of roses and expensive dinners for his girlfried, while your man isn’t? Because he wants to, and yours doesn’t, so ditch the one you have and get yourself a better man. After all, don’t you deserve to be wined and dined like this? Why are you settling?
I think this trend starts with good intentions: I know many women who put up with uncaring, emotionally unavailable, messy men who do not show up for them in the way a partner should, and a part of me wants to yell at them to please, please stop making excuses for them and raise their standards, exactly like I want to tell my male friends who put up with unacceptable behaviour from their female partners that they deserve a lot better. I’m aware I need to raise my own standards for the men I date and ditch my people-pleaser tendencies, for my own health and sometimes for my fucking safety.
But I’m afraid the standards that women are encouraged to raise by #ifhewantedtohewould are the wrong ones: we are shown an endless collection of the most lavish parts of courtship, as if demonstrating love in more private (and less expensive) ways was less worthy. This primes us to interpret the quiet and most real moments of genuine love, the ones that cameras and hashtags could never capture, as not enough. We are taught to want grand gestures not because that is how we genuinely want to be treated, but because it will get likes.