Men Not Talking

Men fail to ask women questions in the pick-up line as much as on dates. It’s not because they don’t know how to.

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According to a psychologists’ dating paradigm and New York Times lore, there are thirty-six questions you can ask a person to make them fall in love with you: your dream dinner guest, what you feel most grateful for, your greatest accomplishment to date. Recently, it’s emerged that it may be less the content of these questions, or even the particular topics canvassed, that leads to this happy outcome. It might just be that, without specific prompts, straight men on dates typically fail to ask questions of their female companions whatsoever.

In Logan Mahan’s piece, “Men Aren’t Asking Women Questions on Dates. It’s a Problem,” she recalls a useful piece of advice given to her by a friend when she began dating again after a breakup. “Did you have a good time because he’s fun, or because you are?” She writes of playing back the date and asking herself: “Did that man ask me a single question about myself the entire time? More often than not the answer is no. No he did not.” It is, for Mahan and many others, a common and bleak realization. These women are having fun on dates only and inasmuch as they keep the conversation going, like a “tiresome jester who is being paid in Dirty Martinis.”

I haven’t dated in nearly twenty years, thankfully, but I’ve noticed I experience a version of this in my own life: men not talking in the context of parenting practices. Birthday parties, extra-curriculars, school pick-ups, and parent-teacher nights: I find myself asking pleasant question after pleasant question of the dads who I find myself sitting or standing next to. And yet, unlike the moms, they mostly don’t reciprocate, even by asking the same question of me after answering mine. And I’ve begun to think of this as more than a minor annoyance: in fact, it’s a lens into a much bigger problem.