What do men in their 30s want? This is the question that Amy sent to Liveline in the hopes that the men in question would maybe open up to Kieran Cuddihy in a way that they clearly haven't to Amy and some of her friends.
"Last night I was talking to a very good friend of mine who has been – yet again – very let down by a man she felt she had been very honest with from the start about what she wanted from her dating life and her intentions around dating and was just let down very badly and felt very upset and lied to. And, yeah, we would just like to know what’s going on in their heads."
Kieran wanted to know what Amy’s friend’s "intentions around dating" were and Amy didn’t equivocate:
"Like a lot of my friends in their mid-30s, they are dating to find somebody to marry and she wants children – a lot of my friends want children – and I suppose, if, being very clear with them and asking them if that’s not what you’re dating for and if you want something more casual, I’m not the girl for you and yet these men just seem to carry on and date them and give them a lot of false hope."
So it seems to be a problem with being upfront. From what Amy is saying, women in their 30s enter into relationships with clear stated aims and intentions, while men in their 30s aren’t being upfront about their own aims and intentions. It works for a while, but then those men start what Amy calls the slow fade:
"The communication kind of changes. It drops off. They might be texting and calling all the time and then all of a sudden, they're not texting back for hours at a time or you might just get the one tick, so you’re like, 'God, have I been blocked, or have they just turned off their phone?’"
It looks like men in their 30s – some of them at least – have a bit of an issue answering questions in an entirely honest fashion. Once they’ve dived into a relationship with someone who they know wants different things than they do, they employ the slow fade tactic or they just keep on being dishonest:
"Even just asking clear questions like are they seeing other people and being fobbed off with that as well and, you know, it’s just so hurtful and you just don’t know. You know, you just keep putting yourself out there, looking to find the person you want to do those big things with in the future and you’re being let down continuously."
Amy’s frustration is very clear and it seems from her and her friends’ experiences she has good grounds for that frustration. She just wants some honest answers:
"We would just like to know, like, what is the point? What are they doing? Are they doing a bit of an experiment trying to figure out what they want? I would assume if you wanted to figure that out, go to therapy and figure that out, leave me alone."
Given the absence of those answers, Kieran wonders if Amy has any theories about what is going through the heads of these men. And Amy has, well, a few thoughts on the subject:
"For me and my group of friends, we really think about these things, we talk about these things and as women you sit there and you talk, you discuss, you like, really try and dive into how you approach things and then also what women are normally able to do very easily is put your, you know, you step into another person’s shoes and you’re like, ‘God, I’m not ready to do this, I’m not ready to date, so I’m not going to put someone through that.’"
All reasonable and well thought out. Men, on the other hand, Amy suspects, do not approach the subject with such rigour:
"Maybe they’re not thinking that deeply, maybe they don’t really know what they want. And I suppose as well, I guess there’s a lot of talk, you know, generally, about the expectations women now have on men. It’s not just, you know – my group of friends, they all have amazing jobs, they’ve deposits or they’ve property. They don’t need a man like, say, my grandmother would’ve needed a man in the past, so is it just now they’re kind of feeling there’s a different type of pressure on them and they actually have to use their emotional intelligence? Maybe that hasn’t been expected of them before."
This is a huge subject for unattached people in their 30s and Amy and her friends seem like they’ve had enough dishonesty and they’re tired of being messed around. The ball is now in the 30-something men’s court – what have they got to say for themselves?
You can hear Kieran’s full conversation with Amy and some callers chipping in by tapping or clicking above.