The anxiety around dating—and finding the “right” partner—is a common contributor to unhappiness. The challenge is described in a recent article, “Mating Season,” in The New York Times Magazine. (The online version is titled, The Trouble With Wanting Men.”)

A competition for dominance is a major factor.

The article’s author, Jean Garnett, describes her anguish trying to find a man willing to commit to an intimate relationship. The article says women are increasingly fed up with men, to the point that male reticence or passivity deserves the recently coined psychological term, heterofatalism. That ugly word certainly gives a mean outlook on one’s mating prospects.

Garnett describes leaving her marriage, falling in love, and having an 18-month relationship with a man who “continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit…” From her research and talks with others, she concludes, “It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds.” Men who are superficially nice and sincere seemed unable, she says, to transform their sexual partnerships into intimate relationships.

Garnett struggles for answers to this apparent emotional impotency. She suggests that men may be overwhelmed by the cognitive effects of dating apps that “project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines.” She notes that modern times are so unlike the culture of arranged marriages: Now she and the men in her life must deal with “the anxiety of choice.”

So much inner passivity and inner conflict are involved in all of this, with both men and women. People are hurting from disappointment, disconnection, and indecision. They’re reeling from not knowing their own mind, and from fears of making the wrong choice, not living up to expectations, and being held accountable.

The underlying source of all this misery and self-alienation are inner passivity, inner conflict, and the compulsion to replay and recycle the first hurts of childhood. (These first hurts are feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned). I have written a great deal about this, particularly in my two most recent books. The great tragedy here arises from our considerable resistance to acquiring the knowledge of our unwitting propensity for self-sabotage and needless suffering.

Garnett suggests that much of the dysfunction involves men and women’s competition for dominance. She quotes a psychoanalyst who advocates the need to “recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance.” The solution, the psychoanalyst suggests, involves the acceptance of a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission.

This is a vital point that requires more explanation. We need to recognize and work out our inner passivity, a biological heritage from childhood and a main element in inner conflict and relationship disharmony. This deep passivity in our psyche causes us to be easily triggered. Because of it, we tend to interpret challenging moments with our partner as if we are somehow being forced into a passive corner. This impression, however, is usually a false interpretation. Unconsciously, we go looking for the passive feeling because, as part of inner conflict, it remains unresolved in our psyche.

We can easily experience this unpleasant feeling of submissiveness even when our partner has no intention of being dominant or requiring us to submit.

Garnett says she finds it difficult to grasp the distinction between a surrender that is distinct from submission. Perhaps, she concedes, “I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose.”  She adds, “I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here.” This is a candid acknowledgment on her part. Indeed, we are acting masochistically in our unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle inner conflict and the first hurts of childhood. And that fine distinction between surrender and submission is hard to grasp when we’re lacking knowledge of inner passivity and inner conflict.

Read either one of my most recent books for a full understanding of all of this.

Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025, 240 pages).

Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society (2022, 316 pages).

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