Have men and women fallen out of love?

When you’re in love, nothing feels cringe. I mean when you’re in the full flush of first attraction — nothing about the other person can possibly be annoying. Or else it’s only annoying in the “oh, you” sort of way. “She’s always on me about my old T-shirts.” “He’s the worst at texting back.” You roll your eyes. But you also kind of think it’s adorable.

Then, if the relationship turns sour, something ugly happens. The words stay the same, but the tone transforms. When you fall out of love, the very same quirks that once seemed endearing now fill you with disgust beyond all rational measure. “She’s always on me about my old T-shirts.” “He’s the worst at texting back!”

Today this is called “getting the ick.” In Tom Stoppard’s play "The Real Thing," two reckless paramours named Henry and Annie blow up their marriages to be together. Henry keeps finishing Annie’s sentences, which is cute until it’s not. When they finally have each other, the romance curdles into mundanity, then contempt: “For Christ’s sake, will you stop finishing my sentences for me?!” That line, so apparently simple, goes off like a grenade. Once she’s said it out loud, it becomes real: She’s got the ick.

These days, I get the disturbing impression that men and women in the aggregate have the ick for each other.

Everyone can cite some things about the opposite sex that they find mystifying and a little silly. “Is it really so hard for men to pick up after themselves?” “She’ll tell you about her problems, but she doesn’t want you to fix them.” These complaints, when made with affection, are actually part of love. Who are these mad and maddening creatures, we are saying, who complicate and yet complete the world?

But recently those very same sentiments have become bywords of intersexual warfare. “Is it really so hard for men to pick up after themselves? They’ve cheated us out of trillions of dollars!” “Women don’t want to fix their problems; they just want to drain men dry.”

This sounds to me like a society-wide case of the ick. A couple of weeks ago, basically every single person on the internet watched a young woman explain that after enough minor disappointments, a girl will simply shut down toward her boyfriend overall: “The problem now is that she’s unattracted to you and just simply does not like you any more.”

I suspect that video went so astronomically viral because it seems to describe not simply one failed relationship but an entire failed social arrangement between the sexes. Online, at least, we have spiraled into making hideous caricatures and impossible demands of one another: Never, ever flirt (you slut). Never talk to other women alone (you filthy animal).

Maybe it takes an outsider to see this, or maybe it’s all too easy for a gay guy to diagnose dysfunctions in the straight dating world (we have plenty of our own, I promise). But it does strike me that decades of angry grand pronouncements about “what men are like” and “how women act” have turned charming foibles into bitter accusations. The preposterous excesses of late 20th-century feminism — “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle!” — and the lock-jawed tradwife/manosphere reaction in this century have teased men and women apart by stages. Is anybody happy with this state of affairs? It seems not.

In a real-life relationship, I propose, the cure for the ick is as follows. Spend less time grumbling theories about the other person to yourself in the shower and more time face to face with the other person, listening with charity. Because the secret is that he or she is neither the unblemished demigod you made when you were doe-eyed nor the incurable reprobate you make of him or her now that things have gone south. Love — real love, not infatuation — will mellow out slowly in the negotiation between you two as you are: quirky and obnoxious, elegant and strong, trying sincerely to know and be known.

Is it possible that a similar approach might work at the social level? I’m heartened to see people getting sick of capital-T theorizing about the opposite sex, be it trad or rad. I suspect the remedy lies in turning instead to seek actual community with people of both sexes. As Lane Scott wrote recently, the domestic bliss of the future won’t look exactly like it did before all this Sturm und Drang. Some things really have changed. That’s okay. We’re still the same species we were when we first fell in love. Lay your weapons and your tweet threads down. We can patch things up.

Spencer A. Klavan is a is a scholar, writer, and podcaster. He is the author of the book"How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises."How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises." This essay originally appeared on hisSubstack.