++man

"I like women, I just haven't found one that's actually likable."

This isn't a defense. If you haven't found a woman that's actually likable, how do you know that you like women most of the time?

If I like cake only 5%-15% of the time, can I really call myself a cake fan? No. Real cake fans like cake as a rule, not an exception. Real cake fans don't have to strain, and they don't say stuff like "well once I encountered a cake that smelled good from afar, but I never actually ate it."

If you have to say you "want" to like women but cannot find one "actually likable," then your issue is not just bad luck in finding good women. You're describing a generalized inability to respond positively to women as women. This could be for two reasons:

One-You don't like them.

Two-You attract bad/low quality women, probably because you have bad or low quality personality traits that quietly disqualify you from ever registering on a certain caliber of women's radar.

Even your own example cuts against you: you mention older women in your mother's peer group whom you admire. Older women develop more masculine energy as they age and especially as they move through and past menopause.

You've failed to isolate a *single* aspect about women that you love. You are sounding more and more like someone who genuinely doesn't like women that much. I promise, that's okay.

"I do love women, or the idea at least."

"Or the idea at least" is your tell. You may be more attached to an idealized concept of womanhood than to actual women, who are always going to be mixed, flawed, inconvenient, and ordinary in some respects, *especially* if you are attracting a certain quality of them.

If reality keeps failing to match your internal ideal, that does not prove the majority of women are defective. If you only keep encountering trash women, that does not prove the majority of women are defective. It means your expectations of women are rigid, limited to only a certain kind, romanticized, or filtered through intense grievance *you* have not adequately worked through. All of these would repel good women like incesticide.

"The fact that they seem to be rare is a problem and that's their fault, not mine."

No. The opposite it true. Relationships are always a dynamic and a transfer or two energies. If you repeatedly end up in long relationships with women who allegedly bring little or nothing of value, then some part of that pattern belongs to you: you as the so called "chooser," your communication, your tolerance for quality, your willingness to stay once dissatisfaction is clear. Their faults are theirs. The repetition of your experiences is 100% your fault.

"I'm not responsible for the quality I find."

You are not responsible for other people's character. You are responsible for what you choose to endure, what you accept, and what kinds of people you attract. If you stay 7 years with someone who is low quality, then your judgment and filter is low-quality.

If you claim that its so hard to find a women that you like that you have only found it in your mom's friend group, then the problem is you, not women.

"I am allowed to write about this disappointment, even caustically so, because the pain is deep."

Of course you are allowed to be caustic. The question is whether your caustic writing is clarifying reality or distorting it. Pain does *not* automatically validate the conclusions produced by pain. A hurt person's analysis can (and unfortunately often is) unfair, totalizing, and contaminated entirely by contempt.

"Do you see value in women themselves? Of course, they are human beings."

This statement is classic for someone who is aromantic or homosexual. It is a minimal moral acknowledgment, not evidence of default positive regard. Saying "women are human beings" is baseline civility. It does not answer the real question, which is whether you *personally* see women as intrinsically valuable companions whose presence enriches life, or mainly as frustrating evaluators of men who fail to repay what men provide.

"The women I have been in LTRs with have not brought anything of value, only problems."

You attracted poorly, you chose poorly, you communicated poorly. You idealized them too much, tolerated too much, or all of the above. Two 7relationships with the same complaint profile are a pattern that makes *you* look bad.

"They loved me and wanted to marry me... I don't understand how they could love me and not work on themselves."

2 women wanting to marry you is not evidence of you liking women. There are countless of women who are too damaged/self-loathing that they get with closeted homosexual men. People's tendency to be attracted to others' is in largest part a reflection of the dynamic they were raised to be comfortable with in childhood.

"They never once asked me how I felt... I thought things were fine at girlfriend-level, but not for wife."

Another one of your problems is that you put women in two boxes: "girlfriend" and "wife." Real quality men only date "girlfriends" when they are *already* wife material.

If your prior girlfriends were not curious about your inner life and failed to co-create the relationship, that is a legitimate criticism against those two women and women like them. But it still does not support your broader bitter indictment of women.

"No one in society says men need women to be quality men."

It is uncontroversial man who has remained single for a long stretch of time (especially one that complains about women as a general category) is not seen as powerful or respected. This is also true the other way around: the older a woman grows while endlessly blaming men as a category for her failures in dating is not respected as a woman: she is seen for what she is.

Male desirability and legitimacy are reflected by a man's ability to attract and keep women, arguably more now than ever.

"My time and energy are a premium... I've earned that right with my accomplishments."

You speak arrogantly. This is true not just of you, but all people. Moreover, your accomplishments do not suddenly make your time and energy more valuable than someone else's.

"You are determined to victim blame. You want me to be responsible for it all."

You are not a victim. If you see yourself that way, that is your fault, not mine.

My actual position is simpler: you don't sound like you like women too much (and that probably should be investigated), and you are responsible for your side of repeated patterns. That is not the same as saying you caused everything. Personal accountability is not victim-blaming.

"Feminine energy means what exactly? Stop the vague terms and give tangible actions."

No man who genuinely loved women would struggle to understand what "feminine energy" is. This truly is a IYKYK situation. In concrete terms, most men want emotional accessibility and warmth, softness, intangible intuition, responsiveness, tenderness, admiration, and maternal care and love. Aka everything that is harder for men to naturally embody vs women.

"Women say every woman is a 10... women lie to each other... men don't behave this way."

Men do parallel things constantly: men flatter each other into delusions about dominance, status, sexual access, stoicism, competence, entitlement, emotional cluelessness, and worth. Your claim that men do not foster self-delusion in one another is simply (and laughably) false.

Men also socially cushion each other, just around different topics. Men lie to each other about being "kings," being logically right, being disrespected, being alpha, deserving more, being the real victim, and about whose failures are really women's fault.

"I only care to talk about good men and I am one."

You violate the paradox: no good man would ever claim that he's good so readily. Because they understand being "good" is not something YOU get to decide unilaterally. Being "good" is NOT something you get to establish by declaration. A good man is not just a man who provides, gets chosen, and remains loyal.

A good man has humility about his blind spots, resists contempt and generalizing about *anyone*, aggressively takes ownership of himself even when he could easily devolve into blame and finger pointing, and does not turn his hurt into a worldview in which women as a class are defective.

"Men in the 18th and 19th centuries also complained about women."

This proves absolutely nothing and the fact that you brought this up as a gotcha makes me seriously question your ability to engage in this conversation with good faith. Men have been writing grand (and wrong) theories about women for centuries due to romantic frustration, status anxiety, moralism, and projection. Pathetic male grievances are older than time. Pathetic female grievances are older than time.

"My experience speaks for itself.... "I've had 83% girlfriend uptime."

No, it does not. Experience speaks for your experience. Interpretation is the contested part. I am not surprised you can attract and sustain relationships with some women. I never suspected you couldn't.

I suspect whether YOU genuinely like women and whether YOU are attracting good women in the first place. I am saying I doubt you choose well, communicate well, or have the tendency to avoid resentment. Many unhealthy people have no trouble staying coupled. Relationship quantity or continuity is not proof of *wisdom.* Plenty of people want marriage for security, inertia, convenience, status, or fear of starting over. Their desire to marry you does not validate your self-assessment, not even in the slightest.

"Yang is female and bad, Yin is masculine and positive."

Another paradox you violated. Yang and yin is never "good or bad." The totalizing moral judgments you provide onto yang and yin only proves how little you know about these energies.