Why men aren’t asking questions

I’ll bet most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering when on earth the man is going to get round to asking them a question. The man gets home. We ask about his meetings, his lunch, his colleagues, showing empathy and imaginative curiosity. Then we wait in vain for our turn. That sounds too passive. “Waiting in vain” doesn’t begin to summon the way mild pique turns first to incredulity, then actual rage and despair at the man’s apparent lack of interest. “Tears are pooling on your collarbones again,” my husband used to observe quite regularly on date nights in our courting days. “Is it because I should be asking a question?” I soon learned not to say yes.

In the years since then I’ve asked countless women whether they find that men ask them interesting and satisfying questions – whether they reciprocate. Almost all report versions of the same dismal experience.  One of the brightest and best Gen Z women I know told me that she recently used a stop-watch to record how long it took her boyfriend to return the favor and ask about her day. That clock’s still running.

Last week the American celebrity blogger Aella, a 33-year-old who combines sex work with doing Kinseyesque research into 21st-century dating habits, wrote an interesting, sad article detailing the same frustration.

The piece was called “The difficulty in dating good men” and in it, Aella (who looks as you’d expect her to) describes her quest to find a proper partner and a series of recent encounters.

“I want to understand him fast. I am paying close attention, looking for novel words to toss at him.” She writes of one date she thought promising. “It feels playful for me, like wrestling, or leaning into tension. I want to see the green under his bark, the places where he’s unpracticed. I slip in fast, arrowhead questions, ones that carry intensity or exploration. ‘Are you smarter than your co-workers?’ or ‘When your ex broke up with you, did you deserve it?’ or ‘So when your mom died, did you feel bad about it?’” He answers all of these with surprise, like he is a child riding on the back of my hay wagon…” I’ll bet he did. But not once did that date hop off that hay wagon and ask Aella a question back. “As time passes, it becomes rapidly clear that he is not paying much attention to me,” she writes. “I decide to count the amount of questions he asks me, and I eventually realize with growing disappointment that he just… isn’t asking any questions at all.”

Think of all the women out there, waiting to be asked caring, insightful questions by a man. Counting the questions, counting the seconds. I find it heartbreaking.

“I don’t know why this is happening,” wrote Aella. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

Think of all the women out there, waiting to be asked caring, insightful questions by a man. It’s heartbreaking

But of course there’s nothing wrong with her (except the sex work). And there’s nothing remotely wrong with any of the men either. It’s just that we children of the sexual revolution have forgotten what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew: that men and women are different, differently evolved. It’s like octopuses dating cats. Women have come to expect men to behave like women, for no good reason, and we become tearful when they don’t.

Aella describes herself as a rationalist, an “effective altruist.” She’s slept with hundreds of men, maybe thousands, so she should have some sense of what they’re like. 

But like the rest of us, she’s been brainwashed by the cult of the individual into forgetting how significant the divide between the sexes is.

It’s not that men forget to ask questions or (Aella’s theory) that they’re too hung up on appearing decent, it’s just that asking and answering questions is not their idea of fun. Please correct me if I’m wrong, male readers, but I just don’t think men get the same profound satisfaction from interrogation. You only have to listen to men talk to each other to see that. I can’t pretend to make sense of it, but what men seem to enjoy is communicating like Jack-in-the-boxes, each one popping up in turn to have their say with almost no cross-examination at all.

 “Why don’t I ask questions? I assume that if you want me to know something, you’d tell me,” says my husband, perplexed.

“Have I been misled by some romance-movie ideal of becoming As One,” asks Aella, “where two people deeply understand each other down to their cores, where the fibers of their minds get woven together?” Yep. I’d say so. Absolutely. Also, you’re reading the wrong romances.

In the strange days before dating apps and before the mad idea that men and women were basically the same, we all understood each other much better. We women used to know that it was the awkward, taciturn types who were the keepers. Take Mr. Knightley, for centuries England’s idea of the perfect man. Do he and Emma spend days exchanging “fast, arrowhead questions, ones that carry intensity or exploration?” No they very much do not.

“I cannot make speeches, Emma… If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” I’m not sure G. Knightley ever asks Emma a thing about her inner life, yet he knows her extremely well. Conversely, the man I can best imagine persuading Aella that he’s woven himself into the fibers of her mind is that arch-predator Gilbert Osmond, the anti-hero of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. He’d ask insightful questions, make her feel “seen,” lean into the tension all right. But that’s exactly the problem.

We think we crave a man who asks the most insightful probing questions, who enjoys plumbing the depths of our fascinating psyches. But that man isn’t appreciating the complex interplay of personalities in the way a woman would. He’s just deploying a successful strategy, enjoying the chase.