Or, men are lost and women are tired.

I came across this sentence in a youtube video: “We have a harsh dating climate in today’s society where men have become spoiled and women have become desperate,” Anna Bey.

I personally think men are lost and women are tired.

I’m not apt to speak about the experience of homossexuals and other sexual orientations, but I’m not sure that the feelings of loss and confusion regarding dating and relationships are exclusive to heterosexuals.

From where I’m sitting, there seems to be a misalignment between the sexes. It’s not only women who can’t find what they’re looking for, men are coming out frustrated and empty.

There’s a rising number of US adults living without a spouse or partner. Women are increasingly turning to sperm donors and men to surrogates or adoption to have babies on their own.

Young people are having less sex than ever before.

The unofficial dictionary of romance gains a new expression every day: ghosting, benching, stacking, woke fishing, love bombing, soft ghosting, caking, cloaking, zombie-ing, orbiting.

More and more relationships break apart at the first sign of trouble. Heartbreak is a genuine fear, so much so that everyone enters a relationship like a lake on a gelid winter morning, one toe gingerly lowered to test the water before the rest of the body is allowed to plunge in.

There’s so much to dissect about the current state of our relationships, it’s hard to know where to begin, especially since, just like in politics, extremism seems to be gaining terrain at dizzying speed.

Women blame men for their immaturity, inability to commit, and supposed interest in only having sex and bailing.

Men accuse women of only being interested in money, having unrealistic expectations, and always having one foot out the door, ready to trade their relationship for a better one the moment the first difficulties arise.

There are plenty of platforms where you can find examples of these extreme mentalities, but Youtube might be the best example. Youtube is slowly turning into a hotbed of extremism. A place where the more you can throw “truth-bombs,” the more views you have and the more money you make. These supposed “truth-bombs,” however, are an assorting of generalized, misconstructed concepts that being with “men never,” and “women always.”

These “truth-bombs” are sexism and misogyny packaged to sound like deeply thought revelations that keep viewers glued to the screen and cash pouring into the pockets of the content creators.

To be clear, I’m not saying Anna Bey is part of the problem. I’m talking about much more extreme creators, a lot of whom don’t show their faces in their videos and edit the sound of their voices so that they can’t be recognized.

Nothing spells bravery quite like hiding your face and voice while you “open other people’s eyes to the truth” with “red pills.”

Meanwhile, men continue to feel lost and women, tired.

Despite the fact that we can clearly see how frustrated both sexes are with the state of our relationships today, the conversation we’re having isn’t helping. Men and women’s genuine grievances are being pushed aside by a parade of unfair generalizations that paint all men as useless and immature, and all women as heartless gold-diggers.

We need to do better.

We need to start talking about respecting each other instead of being cautious of each other’s “traps” and “games.”

We need to start talking about how to trust each other and, more especially, how to earn each other’s trust.

We need to start talking about how not to take each other for granted instead of how to always be on the lookout for arbitrary red flags.

And above all, we need to start talking about how to treat each other as mature adults, not as spoiled children.

Men are lost, and women are tired.

Women are tired because they’ve been left to take charge and do all of the emotional heavy-lifting by themselves.

There has to be a way to change that.

There has to be a way to meet in the middle. To listen to the legit grievances of both men and women without blindly returning to a past of male dominance and female submission. But for that to happen, first we need to learn how to talk to each other again.

We need to stop generalizing. To stop with the “men always” and the “women never.”

We need to recognize how lost and tired we all are and have compassion for one another. If there’s any place to start the conversation, this is it.