The Problem With... Men/Women

Part 1: Same Landscape, Different Maps

This essay series is adapted from an evening of conversation I facilitated in November, 2025.

I've spent decades studying, exploring, and experimenting with how humans make meaning and how culture influences our ideas around identity, sex, and relationships. I've done a lot of personal research—as both lead researcher and main subject.

Unlike a majority of relationship experts whose expertise rests on the foundation of one primary long-term romantic partnership, my relationship history maps a varied landscape that includes men and women, casual and long-term. The longest of my long-term relationships spanned 16 years. We started out as a lesbian couple and ended as a straight one (my ex is transgender and transitioned five years into our relationship in 2004). In truth, I was never a girl who fantasized about or wanted to get married, and I certainly never intended to marry a man. Still, I thought a queer marriage would save me from conventional hetero-normative dynamics. It didn't.

After the end of this relationship and two decades of living queer, I re-entered the straight world. The explicit attachment to the gender binary I encountered annoyed me, to say the least. There is an insistence in the straight world, in straight culture, on the binary, on defining roles and characteristics as inherently male/masculine or female/feminine. This rigid view of gender is simplistic, limiting, and denies the nuanced reality of lived experience—mine and that of many others. However, despite what I know to be true experientially about sex and gender, I came to understand that socialization within the binary is real and impacts each of us regardless of identity or orientation.

So when a friend invited me to facilitate an evening of conversation centered on the question What's the Problem With Men/What's the Problem With Women, I was curious what would emerge if I engaged the binary directly. He asked me the question and I answered: "Men lack relational skills and have no interest in learning them. Women lack relational skills and think they already have them.”

I've been working as a therapeutically-informed relationship coach since founding my practice in 2014. In over a decade working with couples, something striking I've observed is that men often end up in my office because their partners want them to be there, or because they expect to resolve a specific problem—typically related to a communication issue, or a real or perceived sexual issue. Rarely are men in my office out of genuine interest in learning relational skills, those "soft" skills so often relegated to the domain of women. I've worked with some partnered women for years whose male spouses or boyfriends don't, or won’t, join a session. I see this as more supporting evidence of who values and carries the load of relational labor, and how that plays out along gendered lines. Men lack relational skills and have little to no interest in learning them.

Because women carry more of the emotional and relational labor (acknowledged social reality backed by decades of research and evidence), the assumption follows that we must also be good at it. But the default position of carrying the load is not the same as being skillful at it. Several women recently told me they didn't need an emotional literacy workshop because they were already emotionally literate. Each time I rolled my eyes internally (or I might have done it externally, I don't actually have much of a poker face). I know these women and I know they are not literate, not in the way I mean it and teach it. What they have is an orientation—'emotion is okay' or 'I meditate so I understand feelings'—which is not the same as literacy. It conflates caring about a subject with being skilled at it. And more insidiously, being relegated to caring about something gets mistaken for mastery of it. Women make this assumption about themselves, and men—even men who genuinely want to do better—make it too, deferring to an expertise that may not actually be there. Women lack relational skills that they think they already have.

I took to the internet to further explore "The Problem With…” researching the top complaints that men have about women and that women have about men. Some were general, some were more relevant to long-term relationships, and some were new. The current climate of polarization is aided and abetted by more extreme complaints than ever (for example, the red pill/incel/manosphere crowd, and the Boy Sober and 4B movements). But for the purposes of this essay, I chose a few that resonate with my own experience, and that of my clients, friends, and family. What struck me wasn't so much the complaints themselves—those are familiar—but the mutuality of them. Not the same, but parallel. Mirrored.

The Complaints

Emotion

Women report experiences of emotional invalidation and dismissal, often hearing things like "you're overreacting," "you're being irrational." Women also report experiencing men as emotionally unavailable. Men's mirrored complaints are that women are "too emotional," want to talk everything to death, and that nothing they say or do is enough.

Women feel unmet; men feel overwhelmed. We are socialized along the classic anxious-avoidant split with women tending to the anxious side and men to the avoidant: women’s emotional expression triggers overwhelm and avoidant withdrawal, confirming her fear of being too much; men’s emotional withdrawal triggers fear of abandonment and anxious escalation, confirming his fear that nothing offered will be enough. Each person's self-protective reaction exacerbates the other's wound.

Sex

Women's grievances regarding sex center the feeling that it's transactional, that men assume availability and neglect other forms of intimacy and connection. Men describe the fatigue of constant rejection and the expectation that they always be the initiator, even with partners who feel distant or disinterested.

These sexual and intimacy dynamics reveal complementary tensions. Women withdraw because they feel reduced to a body, a service position. Men withdraw because they feel unwanted. Each withdrawal deepens the other, contributing to feelings of hurt and resentment that become cyclical.

Labor

The complaints regarding labor exist in the wider context of what constitutes labor and who it's visible to. Women still carry a disproportionate share—the mental load, the domestic work, the emotional upkeep—and experience it as burdensome and taken for granted. Men report that their contributions are also invisible, and their effort unacknowledged. The complaint, stripped down, is similar: I am doing more than you, or more than you see, and it doesn't matter to you. But it's not simply a failure to recognize, it's a failure of definition and value.

Relational labor is ambient and continuous, so routine it hasn't even registered as labor (socially or intimately) until very recently. Labor defined by patriarchy and capitalism is event-based, productive, measurable—a task completed, a problem solved, money earned. These competing frames are a setup for collision.

What emerges from these paired complaints isn't evidence for who is right, who is wrong. It's evidence that our polarizing socialization creates the conditions from which they arise. And the mindfuck is that we are all navigating the same human landscapes—emotional, sexual, relational—only with wildly different maps. Our sense of shared reality is fractured along lines of gender and gendered socialization (among other fractures, along other lines) and we have few meaningful tools to mend, or even bridge, these divides. The dynamics that grow out of this fracture are self-reinforcing. Each person's experience reflects and perpetuates the other's, creating a climate ripe for misunderstanding, defensiveness, and blame.

What is required as a counterpoint, a revolution, is relational skill. Capacity to take in new information and understanding without erasing ourselves or disconnecting. To speak from vulnerable authenticity; to listen in order to learn and to be responsible to that learning. Curiosity, self-awareness, and a willingness to sit with discomfort and be changed by encounter with difference, rather than defaulting to defense or shame (that we may not even know we're reacting from).

Our deficits in relational skill are systemic, and the cost is both social and intimate. Before reading on, I want to leave you with a few questions to reflect on. There is no right answer, only genuine engagement with the thought experiment.

Of the complaints above, which one do you see yourself doing—not experiencing, doing—and are willing to own? Where do you think that behavior comes from? And what might you not know you don't know about how you show up in your closest relationships?

Further reflections: 

• Have you ever dismissed someone's emotional expression as "too much"? Have you ever been told yours was? 
• When your partner withdraws sexually, do you consider your role in that withdrawal? 
• When you contribute to the shared labor of a relationship/family/home, do you notice what your partner does daily—or mainly what you've done?

In Part 2 of this series, I'll explore my experience navigating these dynamics from multiple positions within and outside the gender binary—as a queer woman, as someone who inadvertently ended up in a straight marriage, as a coach who engages with these patterns daily. The complaints scratch the surface; what's underneath them is where we engage with deeper questions.