In her June 20 Modern Love essay, “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back,” Rachel Drucker lamented an absence of men in the dating arena. At a restaurant with a longtime male friend, she noticed that hardly any men were out with women, a retreat from intimacy she already had observed elsewhere in public and in her personal life. Why, she wondered, are so many men no longer showing up for relationships?
Rachel brought professional insight to the issue, having worked at Playboy for more than a decade, where she learned about the monetization of men’s desire, what drew them in and kept them coming back. “It wasn’t intimacy,” she writes. “It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to stimulation — clean, fast and frictionless.”
Her essay led to an extraordinary amount of reader email, nearly all from men. Here is a selection, edited for length and clarity.
Rachel Drucker’s essay captures a real and painful longing — for presence, reciprocity and emotional connection. But if men are retreating, it’s not out of indifference. It’s often out of exhaustion and confusion.
Dating today places enormous and conflicting demands on men. We’re still expected to pay for dates, take the lead and demonstrate confidence — while also being emotionally available, deferential and self-aware. The goal posts shift constantly, and women’s expectations are often unstated or contradictory.
Emotional openness in men is encouraged in theory but penalized in practice. And the risk of being misjudged, misquoted or shamed online makes genuine vulnerability feel dangerous. Many of us want connection, but not at the cost of constant anxiety about saying or doing the wrong thing.
If we’re to “come back,” as the essay pleads, it has to be to a space of mutual grace and clarity. The new normal hasn’t been defined yet. We need to create it together.
Jonathan Stowe
Charlottesville, Va.
Perhaps men and women are in a holding pattern, and we don’t know what’s next. But as a white, urban, married father of two late teen boys, I can say it’s an increasingly daunting task to meet the ever-changing expectations of what a man should be. According to women but, more important, according to ourselves and our self worth.
No one should feel sorry for us — but nor should they complain when we become introspective and quietly check our guts when deciding how to proceed.
Morgan Clark
Studio City, Calif.
I think what’s going on is that for the past 10-20 years, men and boys have been marginalized, probably in response to women being marginalized before that. It feels like punishment but for something that current men never did, at least not consciously or intentionally. Everything in the culture says: women good, men bad.
What I think Ms. Drucker is asking for is leadership and confidence in men. But we’ve been told that those are toxic traits. So, here we are.
Justin Hornburg
Bloomfield, Mich.
There has been a concentrated message, especially over the past decade, that masculinity is toxic. The Marlboro Man persona is misogynistic. Acting like a “guy” means you are guilty of sins against the current social norms and open to all the consequences those sins merit. Whether that’s true or not is at least how it seems.
The younger generation has been cowed into submission. The age-old dance of courtship and self discovery has taken on a more ominous tone, where men understand (rightly or wrongly) that a wrong word, phrase or action, however innocent, can have devastating effects on their lives. Their social faux pas are no longer private. Indeed, there are social media pages (such as, “Are We Dating The Same Guy?”) that post reviews of dates and name names. It was hard enough impressing a woman to keep her interested in a second date, but men have no desire to be contestants on a social media game show.
Brandon Collins
Detroit, Mich.
I have spent the past year trying to show up differently — to prioritize presence in both dating and friendship. I quit drinking for 75 days this spring and early summer, hoping to reconnect with a version of myself I could stand by. In that time, I approached dating with more intention and less performative energy. But what I found was a strange paradox: The more I showed up with presence, the more disposable I felt.
So much of dating feels transactional — a quick scan for red flags or a test to see how efficiently someone might fit into a curated life. I get it. We’re all protecting something. But I’ve started to feel like connection isn’t something we build anymore — it’s something we sample. And if it doesn’t provide instant validation or stimulation, we move on.
We talk a lot about men disappearing — emotionally, physically — and that’s valid. But I also think there are men out here trying to appear, fully and without pretense, and not finding much space to land. The script has flipped in some ways. Control over commitment, detachment as armor. These aren’t limited to men. They’re a symptom of something broader.
Kyle Kernan
New York City
Darling, we’re everywhere. Some of us are straight, some gay, some amorphous, some macho, some fragile, some funny, some depressing and some just plain in person and style. But we’re here. Let loose. Start with a hello!
Gilbert N. Garcia
Pipe Creek, Texas
This lament felt a little like men complaining about where all the happy housewives of the 1950s disappeared to. “Women used to love to do our laundry, cook our food, raise our kids and greet us with a smile. What happened?”
Of course what happened was that women woke up. And now men have too.
Dating has always been a lousy deal for men. It’s fantastically expensive and getting more so all the time. Drinks, dinner, a show, maybe a weekend away. And despite the progress of women, the expectation is that men will pay most of the time.
Men are expected to take the initiative from the first greeting to the first date, the first touch, and many, many more interactions before real intimacy ever happens. Statistically most encounters will end in failure. It’s exhausting.
Tim Goncharoff
Fairfield, Calif.
Rachel Drucker’s essay is powerful and evocative, but it draws its force from a one-sided idealization of women’s roles in today’s dating landscape. Throughout the piece, women are portrayed as emotionally mature, open, resilient and consistently willing to show up for real connection. Men, in contrast, are depicted as avoidant, uncertain or emotionally absent.
This narrative overlooks important realities. Emotional unavailability, fear of vulnerability and even passive or ambiguous communication are not exclusively male shortcomings; they are human ones. The challenges of modern dating — commitment issues, avoidance, superficiality and “ghosting” — are experienced and enacted by both women and men.
By casting women as ever-present and hopeful and men as those who must return or evolve, the essay creates an imbalance that hinders honest dialogue. True connection requires everyone to acknowledge their own limitations and shadow sides, not just their hopes and virtues.
Let’s move beyond idealization. What we need is an honest, nuanced conversation — one that recognizes that both men and women are navigating the uncertainties of intimacy in our time, both are capable of presence and absence, courage and hesitation.
Claus Stirzenbecher
Munich, Germany
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