Name: “Where Are All The Good Men At?”
Uploaded: 2025-12-08T05:04:48.000Z
Duration: 14 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Is pop culture teaching women to choose emotionally unavailable men?

What's the weirdest propaganda that you feel like movies have tried to push on you in your lifetime?

For me, I grew up with tons and tons of movies that kept saying that the worst thing a man could be is a grown up.

You'd see a love triangle of romances where the guy you're supposed to be rooting against, his only sin is that he's kind of normal, he's got a job and stuff.

But then some other guy, a bad boy, would come along and it doesn't matter that he sleeps in his car or if both of the guys are financially stable, you're supposed to root for the one that is less emotionally stable, the one that's more childlike.

Jason Pargan just broke my brain with this insight.

Like modern romance culture isn't just telling stories, it's shaping selection criteria across movies, media, even mainstream dating advice.

Women are being subtly conditioned to seek out emotional unavailability and volatility as signs of desirability.

And the result is a generation of women confusing conflict with compatibility and drama with depth and brokenness with mystery.

Rather than choosing partners based on emotional maturity or shared values or long term compatibility, many are drawn to conflict, aloofness and unavailability.

It's the he's hard to love, but I can fix him.

Fantasy repackaged and repackaged in everything from films to novels.

In the Notebook, Ali chooses Noah, the poor, impulsive, deeply emotional man, over Lon, her secure and respectable fiance.

Stability is boring and true love is obsessive, chaotic and all consuming.

In Titanic, the scene that makes you like Jack more than Rose's wealthy fiance, Cal, is that for fun?

Cal just sits and has quiet conversations with his friends, whereas Jack has fun with big, loud parties.

And the movie portrays this as him living more authentically or living life to its fullest.

But really he's just living like a teenager.

He has nothing to offer Rose in terms of reliability or safety.

Yet this brief, fiery connection is portrayed as more authentic than anything she could have had with a professional fiance.

In In Twilight, Edward Cullen is dangerous and obsessive and emotionally tortured, and

that is precisely what makes him desirable.

Bella's rejection of Jacob, who's warm and grounded, underscores the trope, right?

Beauty and the Beast takes it even further by literalizing the fantasy.

Love turns rage and violence into virtue.

Similarly, A Star Is Born presents Ally's rise and Jackson, Maine's spiral as tragically intertwined.

Her love is deepened, not diminished, by how much he unravels.

This is a twist on something called the Byronic Hero.

It's a literary archetype based on the Persona of poet Lord Byron.

He's usually emotionally isolated or unavailable.

He's often morally ambiguous or anti heroic.

He's at odds with society or authority, possesses a tragic past or trauma.

And women are often drawn to him despite his destructiveness.

Even modern women's advice keeps repackaging difficult as Passionate Teen Vogue runs headlines like Super Bad, why are Smart girls drawn to Bad Boys?

The sun gushes about why the sexiest stars go for the bad men.

The takeaway is if he's cold, complicated or broken, he must be worth it.

There's a neuroscience trick being played on us all here, though.

Things that are valuable are often hard to get.

But just because something is hard to get does not mean it's valuable, which is why scarcity and unavailability are often mistaken for worth.

Romance stories reward the woman who wins the affection of the aloof or emotionally damaged man.

The harder he is to access, the more meaningful his eventual affection feels in reality.

Sure, perhaps there is a noble savage who can be saved by the right woman, but

realistically, this just prioritizes partners who are not capable of commitment over ones who already are put together and ready to go.

It's emotional immaturity masquerading as romantic spark.

The problem is that intermittent reinforcement is the exact mechanism that drives addiction.

Variable schedule Reward is the bullseye of dopamine.

It's how slot machines work and why social media is so compelling.

Our brain says if something is scarce, it must be more precious.

And we take this economic dynamic into our love lives.

So if someone stops texting us or we feel like they're drifting all of a sudden, our brain says they must be important.

If they say, here I am, I genuinely like you and very much want to commit, our brains respond with what's wrong with you?

If you treat me like crap and you're in and out of my life and you text me a bit and then you go cold and I don't hear from you, Many people think they might be the one.

It is no coincidence that so many modern relationships do not begin with mutual understanding, but

We have taught women to interpret emotional inconsistency as romantic tension to pursue the man who offers breadcrumbs of affection instead of consistent support to believe that love is meant to be hard earned, not freely given.

It normalizes dysfunction, it rewires attraction around trauma, it sidelines healthy men and glorifies emotionally stunted ones, and

it leaves women feeling like emotional burnout is the price that they have to pay for passion.

Emotionally mature, transparently keen, and

immediately available men are ignored in place of someone who amounts to little more than an effective dopamine trigger.

This is why so many guys have so little sympathy for the where are all of the good men at question?

Whether it's through painful personal experience or by being subliminally reminded of it in pop culture, men who are ready to commit are fearful of doing so because they've noticed that many women seem to like them more and soften up when they're mistreated and kept guessing.

I saw this comment from a guy on Instagram which encapsulates this perfectly.

He said, I'm trapped in a generation where I don't know whether to buy her flowers or ignore her to get her to like me.

Men will do what women demand of them in order to get laid.

Women set the standards for sexual and men meet them.

He says, although this might be considered an unflattering characterization, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and

One of us characterized this in previous work as if women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.

If, in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community, or lie or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or be funny, then men will do precisely that.

So similarly, if men need to be broken, flaky, non committal, and

inconsistent, they will meet these standards appropriately.

Women's mate choices, modern romance culture and girl magazines are not at fault for emotionally unavailable behavior in men, but

they're not totally unrelated to it either.

What is needed is a clearer picture of healthy connection.

Alain de Botton had this wonderful insight where he said, it can take a very long time indeed for some of us to come to a highly basic sounding realization.

We should only contemplate going out with people who are very enthusiastic about us from the start, without the need for persuasion, without any call for begging or chasing or strategic withholding of affection or visits to therapy, just plainly and simply keen open and ready from the get go.

We may tolerate a prospective partner who tells us that they like us a lot but that they will be only available to see us again in a month, or someone who casually mentions they are presently trying to decide between us and three other suitors, or a compelling career abroad, or someone who can never bring themselves to initiate sex or hold our hand in public.

A bit deeper into our relationships, we may similarly not spot that it might be less than ideal to be trying to convince someone that they should go to therapy so that they'll finally see that they want us or that we are in fact just as much fun to spend Saturday evenings with as their friends are.

To cut through the nonsense, we may be in need of a robust awakening.

The only person we should for a moment ever contemplate being with is someone who at the start of the journey can already be at the table with a conviction to match our own.

We can be forgiven for being for a long time deeply charmed by all the others, those who are coy and troubled, those who don't reply to our messages, and

those whose difficult childhoods render them enchantingly off kilter.

But this is a game we can in the end ill afford it is not love if you need to keep messaging and they rarely reply.

It is not love if they are evasive or surreptitiously liking someone else's posts.

It is not love if they get defensive or describe your legitimate requirements for attention as too intense.

We need to get the wavering, defended ones out of our lives immediately, and

that will mean ejecting the majority of people that we meet.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

“Where Are All The Good Men At?”

commitment

genuinely

guarantee

trauma