“If I Was a Girl, I’d Be Pissed Too”: One Man’s Unfiltered Take on Modern Dating

@amedeo_iasci says modern dating has left men too frightened to approach women, too distracted by porn and too obsessed with performing to form real connections. The result is a dating culture that feels miserable for women and remarkably easy for the few men who still know how to talk to them.

Around 58 minutes into what was supposed to be a 40-minute (tops!) interview, Amedeo and I were discussing the importance of natural scent in sexual attraction… By that point, we had already covered bad first-time sex, beauty standards, male fear, rejection, romance, and why he believes dating has become considerably worse for women. We had moved so naturally from social commentary into intimacy that I was no longer entirely sure whether we were analysing chemistry or quietly demonstrating it.

He was charming, direct, extremely opinionated and veeery Italian. He also seemed to understand the female frustration unusually well. Women are tired of ambiguity, tired of being asked to behave casually while secretly hoping for commitment, tired of men who pursue them intensely, only to retreat the moment something real is expected… Sounds too damn familiar, no?

He speaks about attraction as though it should be obvious, instinctive and almost impossible to negotiate with. You can identify compatibility, discuss principles and debate politics later. First, there has to be something alive between two people.

“For me, the most important agreement is that we’re attracted to each other,” he told me. “We’re crazy about each other. That’s it. That’s the only agreement that I need. For the rest, we’ll figure it out.”

Are you thinking what I am thinking? This is not exactly the language of modern dating, right? Modern dating asks for your politics, your attachment style, your five-year plan, your height, your healing journey, your relationship with your mother... or ehm father... And whether you have ever listened to a podcast featuring a man with a microphone. By the time two people have completed the necessary background checks, neither of them wants to have sex anymore.

Amedeo’s argument is simpler: People are so busy trying to avoid the wrong person that they have forgotten how to experience another human being. And according to him, women are paying the greater price.

“If I was a girl, I would be pissed right now,” he said. Then he clarified it. “I think that in dating right now, it sucks as a girl.”

Women Think the Bar Is in Hell, Men Think It Is in the Sky.

There is a strange contradiction at the centre of modern dating. Women insist that the bar for men has never been lower. They are no longer demanding handwritten poetry, a family estate in Tuscany or a man prepared to cross an ocean on horseback. Many are asking for consistency, emotional availability, effort and perhaps a text message that does not arrive after midnight containing only the word “up?”

Men, meanwhile, insist that women’s standards have never been higher. They see endless conversations about red flags, financial stability, emotional intelligence, masculine energy, communication, ambition, loyalty and physical appearance. They are told to be confident but not arrogant, vulnerable but not weak, successful but always available, assertive but never threatening. The result, Amedeo believes, is that many men have simply become afraid.

“People are not approaching you,” he said. “It’s very performative. You’ve got to be perfect-looking and everything

“Boys are fearful, they’re scared, they’ve got to perform. They think that the standards are very high rather than focusing on the actual relationship.”

Women look at this passivity and conclude that men no longer make an effort. Men look at women’s expectations and conclude there is no point trying unless they can guarantee success. Both sides feel rejected before anyone has actually approached anyone. The difference is that some men are benefiting enormously from the stalemate.

“For me, it’s really fun right now,” Amedeo admitted. “Even just to meet people, it’s very easy. Because when the standard is low, it’s easy to stand out.”

Then came the line that explains more about modern dating than several thousand relationship podcasts combined.

“I’m not saying I’m an amazing man. I’m just saying that the competition has become so embarrassingly weak, it’s very easy to stand out”

There it was…. The brutally honest male perspective women keep asking for, delivered with enough confidence to make the honesty itself slightly suspicious. Amedeo is not merely observing the decline in male effort, he is benefiting from it. When so few men approach women, the man who does immediately appears bold, when so few people can hold a real conversation, curiosity feels intimate, when everyone is terrified of saying the wrong thing, an opinionated man feels unusually alive. When passivity becomes normal, initiative starts to look like masculinity… I know, I know, the bar is really that low….

This is also why men like Amedeo stand out so easily. It is not necessarily that every confident man is extraordinary. It is that confidence, curiosity and the courage to make the first move have become increasingly rare. When so many people hide behind screens, avoid rejection and wait for certainty, a man who speaks directly and knows how to hold a real conversation can feel unusually magnetic. There is something refreshing about speaking to someone who is not afraid to disagree, tease, flirt a little and say exactly what he thinks. 

Men Have Not Become More Sensitive, They Have Become More Afraid of Losing.

The disappearance of the real-life approach is often framed as a victory. Women no longer have to tolerate unwanted attention, men are more conscious of boundaries. Which means, dating apps have supposedly removed uncertainty by allowing everyone to establish interest before speaking, right? Right... Okay, but something else disappeared along with the discomfort: RISK! Now, I know how this sounds, but stay with me on this one.

“Boys are not approaching you anymore because they’re scared,” Amedeo said.

He grew up helping to organise club nights with his sister. From a young age, he became accustomed to speaking to women and, crucially, being rejected by them.

“You go out and you talk to all the girls,” he explained. “Maybe you get a few, but you get hundreds of rejections. So you get used to it.”

That experience matters, rejection has not necessarily become more painful. Many men have simply become less practised at surviving it. And dating apps? Well, they allow people to experience rejection privately. A match disappears, a message remains unanswered, a profile is viewed and discarded. No one has to stand in front of another person and watch their interest fail in real time. Sure, this may protect the ego, but it does very little for courage...

The man who approaches a woman in a café has to accept that she may be unavailable, uninterested or simply irritated that he interrupted her book. He risks awkwardness without the protection of a screen. You get what I mean with risk now? But hey, that does absolutely not mean every woman wants to be approached everywhere by every man, some men have treated the phrase “shoot your shot” as permission to launch a fucking military campaign...

But there is a difference between respectful initiative and entitlement. The disappearance of one has not automatically eliminated the other… It has simply left many women wondering why the men they actually want to speak to are standing silently on the other side of the room, waiting for certainty. Women may give signals, but someone still has to move, right?!

Amedeo described it as almost biological. A look, a smile, a moment in which both people know an approach would be welcome.

“There are moments that you know you can approach a person and it will all be all right,” he said. “And you feel it.”

The problem is that modern dating has trained people to mistrust precisely that kind of instinct. Everything must be confirmed, declared, optimised and made safe before it begins. But the reality is, seduction has never been particularly interested in safety.

We Have Turned Dating Into a Performance Review

Amedeo repeatedly returned to one word during our conversation: Performance.

People are performing desirability online, men are performing confidence, women are performing indifference, couples are performing happiness, singles are performing empowerment while secretly wondering whether anyone will ever know them deeply.

Sex has become another category in which everyone feels watched, assessed and expected to succeed immediately.

“In a society that is performance-based, admitting what you like or what you don’t like is telling the other person they’re not doing a good job,” Amedeo said. “When in reality, it takes two to dance. Let’s make this a fun thing.”

Even intimacy now arrives with the pressure of a five-star review. If the first kiss is awkward, there is no chemistry, if the first date contains a silence, the connection is wrong, if the first time having sex is not immediately transcendent, the person is dismissed as sexually incompatible.

“The first couple of times, it will not be perfect,” Amedeo said. “Also, the whole thing of if the first time isn’t good, it never will. Bro, I don’t know who the fuck you are. Give it a second.”

This may be the most reasonable thing anyone has said about sex in years, didn't real intimacy always require a period of translation? Two people have to learn each other’s rhythms, boundaries, desires and bodies. That process is not evidence of failure, it might just be the point!?

But if we look closely, or let's be real we don't even need to look that closely... Modern dating treats initial imperfection as a warning sign. We have become so obsessed with spotting red flags that we have started interpreting normal human awkwardness as incompatibility on the spot! Patience has been replaced by options, why give a person a second chance when another profile is already waiting, right??! Why explain what you enjoy when you can assume the right person should somehow know? Why become vulnerable when you can simply label the connection wrong and move on?

Attraction Is Not a Checklist

Much of modern dating advice is built around the fantasy that attraction can be managed rationally. Choose someone aligned with your values, avoid anyone who activates your wounds, know your non-negotiables, establish compatibility before becoming attached... All of this is very useful until the perfectly compatible person sits opposite you and makes you feel absolutely fucking  n o t h i n g .

Amedeo is not arguing that principles do not matter, he is arguing that people often confuse principles with identical opinions. Political compatibility has become particularly sacred, people eliminate one another based on ideological labels before finding out whether those labels reflect how they actually treat other human beings. He grew up with relatives who held completely opposing political beliefs and still remained deeply connected.

“The problem is that people associate principles with politics,” he said. “It’s two different things, the distinction matters."

Two people may vote differently and share the same fundamental values around loyalty, family, kindness and responsibility. Two people may vote the same way and treat each other terribly. Yet modern dating encourages people to select partners through external categories: politics, lifestyle, profession, income, education and appearance. The person becomes secondary to the profile, this is especially visible in the obsession with beauty.

“If men and women focused a little less on beauty standards and more on the person, this would be a better society,” Amedeo said. “You’ve got to find a person who is beautiful for you. Subjectively beautiful. Not objectively. Not from societal standards.”

That sounds almost idealistic coming from a man whose content, confidence and appearance make him extremely well suited to a visual platform. But he is also realistic about the fact that physical attraction matters. When I asked whether he truly looked beyond beauty when first meeting a woman, he answered immediately: yes, he notices it. Then he added:

“I met models who, the moment they opened their mouth, my ears fell off.”

Beauty may attract attention, but personality determines whether that attention survives. A person can become more attractive through humour, warmth, intelligence or presence. They can also destroy the illusion within seconds. This is what dating apps cannot properly communicate, a photograph can show you a face, it cannot show you how someone looks at you when they are listening. It cannot reveal their energy, their voice, their smell or the strange physical ease that appears between two people for reasons neither can explain.

Near the end of our conversation, I mentioned that natural scent can completely determine whether I am attracted to someone. Amedeo called it biology and then we started talking about aura, energy and the invisible quality that draws people together before either of them has found language for it. It was around this point that the conversation stopped feeling entirely theoretical, if you know what I mean...

The Problem Is Not That Women Want Too Much

Women have spent years being told to raise their standards. Do not accept inconsistency, do not chase, do not tolerate emotional unavailability, do not mother a grown man, oh and my personal favorite: Do not settle merely because you are afraid of being alone.

Now that many women have actually listened, they are being told that their standards are the reason they are single. But perhaps the problem is not that women expect too much, perhaps too many men have become accustomed to offering too little. Not because they are inherently lazy, incapable or malicious, but because contemporary dating rewards avoidance. Porn offers sexual gratification without vulnerability, dating apps offer romantic possibility without commitment, social media offers attention without intimacy, therapy language offers respectable terms for running away.

Fear of rejection can now be reframed as protecting one’s peace. Lack of effort becomes “letting things flow.” Ambiguity becomes “not wanting to force anything.” Emotional absence becomes “being avoidant.” We have developed sophisticated language for behaviour that previous generations would simply have called not being serious.

And in this climate, the man who approaches, speaks clearly, expresses desire and accepts the possibility of rejection looks extraordinary. He may not be extraordinary, he may simply be participating… That is the most uncomfortable part of Amedeo’s argument. Men like him do not need to be perfect to stand out, they only need to be present in a culture built around withdrawal.

Maybe that is why the conversation with him lingered, believe me, he didn’t say anything revolutionary, but he did say everything directly. He wasn’t trying to be flawless, but he was willing to show up without guarantees. And maybe that is the real tension at the center of all this. Women are being told to want more, while men are being quietly trained to risk less.

Until those two realities meet somewhere in the middle, dating will continue to feel like a negotiation between people who are playing entirely different games.

So perhaps the question is not whether women expect too much, it is whether we have built a culture where expecting anything at all has started to feel unreasonable? But then again, what the hell do I know....

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Photo © Enfants Riches Déprimés A/W 2024 / Lucas El Bali For L´Uomo Vogue / Tess and Margaux Photographyed by Rico Reinhold