There is a version of every man I meet who exists exclusively in my head, and, almost without exception, he is the version I prefer. Perhaps it’s something I tell myself to make sense of the distance between who I meet and who I imagine he could be. He is more articulate, more emotionally available, considerably more romantic than the man standing in front of me. He remembers the little things and makes an ordinary conversation feel like something I will think about later. Most importantly, he understands that romance is not a grand gesture performed for an audience or a few personality points, but a series of small, thoughtful acts that make another person feel considered. He makes me feel worth paying attention to, even when I am not asking for it.
He is, in every conceivable way, a wonderful man. Unfortunately, he is also imaginary.
The real man might possess some of these qualities. I have seen a few. He might be attractive, charming, endearing, interesting, all those wonderful adjectives I could think of. He might say something during a conversation that makes me pause and think there is something worth exploring here. And that is usually where the trouble begins. The moment I find something that sets him apart from everyone else, my imagination takes over. Nara Smith has nothing on my ability to take a handful of ingredients and turn them into an entirely different creation.
Suddenly, I am wondering what he might be like when he is comfortable around me, what he might say if we were talking at two in the morning, whether he would remember something I mentioned in passing or understand why a particular song makes me feel the way it does. I am imagining our next meeting before I even know when it will happen, mentally preparing for conversations we have not had and supplying answers to questions he has not asked. In reality, we might have exchanged five sentences over the past 48 hours. In my head, we have practically developed our own language.
The next date might not even be planned. He might cancel it, or we might never get around to making plans at all. None of that stops me from imagining what it could be like. I am not just thinking about what I might say to him. I am thinking about what he might say back, because I have already decided, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, what kind of person he is.
I have not fallen in love with him, exactly. I have fallen in love with the possibility of who he might be. Somewhere along the way, I begin to mistake that possibility for something he has actually offered me.
And then, inevitably, I get to know him.
It is a strange kind of disappointment because, more often than not, the man has not done anything wrong. If you put the facts down on paper, he has not promised me anything. He has not led me to the edge of a cliff and pushed me off it. Sometimes, he has simply failed to do the things I imagined he would. The conversation I thought would be interesting turns out to be ordinary. The thoughtfulness I assumed was inherent in him turns out to be something I inferred from a fleeting gesture. He is still the person he was when I first met him. I am the one who has to confront the distance between what I know about him and what I had hoped to discover.
And yet, it hurts. There is something embarrassing about grieving a person who has not actually been taken away from you, or a relationship that never quite existed. He never agreed to the version of himself I had constructed, never promised to be the man I had quietly decided he could be. Even when there have been hints of interest, the ambiguity of it all can hurt more than a clear rejection. You are left trying to make sense of what happened, when part of what you are mourning is something you created yourself.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time imagining where things could go. It is part of how I understand the world, how I make sense of people and the possibilities they represent. So perhaps I should know better than to get carried away. But the imagination is not always a conscious decision. Sometimes, it is just what happens when you meet someone who interests you. You start filling in the blanks, and before you realise it, you have built an entire world around a person who has barely had the chance to introduce himself.
When I started talking to my friends about this, I realised it was not just me. A lot of women seem to know exactly what I mean. We talk about the men we like, the men we are seeing, the men we cannot stop thinking about. We discuss the potential of a relationship with an enthusiasm that sometimes exceeds our enthusiasm for the relationship itself. We imagine what it would be like if he liked us back, if he finally said what we hoped he would, if the almost-something between us became something real.
There is a particular thrill in nurturing a relationship in your head. You create an emotional ladder, each rung a new possibility: the first proper conversation, the first date, the first confession, the first moment of feeling understood. Every little interaction becomes a benchmark, a reason to keep climbing. You put on some music and let yourself get carried away. There is nothing quite like a well-curated playlist and a situationship that exists entirely in your imagination.
In some ways, I think it is a perfectly harmless exercise. It is fun to fantasise or to be excited about someone, to wonder what might happen and to let yourself imagine a little happiness before it arrives. But the same imagination that makes the possibility so intoxicating can make reality feel like a let-down. The person you eventually meet is being compared with someone who has been edited, revised and perfected without his knowledge.
Music does not help. Women like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Mitski and Lana Del Rey have made entire worlds out of longing, heartbreak and the strange intimacy of wanting someone who may never be yours. Their songs understand the emotional life of an almost-relationship, the way you can spend an entire evening thinking about a conversation that lasted two minutes. You can listen to a song and suddenly have a whole relationship to mourn, even though the only thing that ever existed between you was the possibility of one.
You can miss someone you barely know, not because you had so much of them, but because you had imagined how much more there could be.
And perhaps this is where the idea of men written by women enters the picture. Over the years, we have found a name for the fictional men who seem to possess an almost supernatural understanding of what women want. They are emotionally mature, attentive and vulnerable. They remember the little things, ask questions and take a genuine interest in the women they love. They understand that being attracted to someone is not the same as being curious about them, and that loving someone requires more than simply enjoying their company.
What makes these men so appealing is not necessarily that they are handsome, wealthy or conventionally masculine. It is that they pay attention. They have been imagined by women who understand the nuances of being a woman, the small gestures that make us feel safe, seen and understood. They are not perfect, but their flaws rarely come at the expense of the women who love them. Someone has taken all the little things women wish were easier to articulate in real life and made them the very things that make a man worth falling for.
There is something funny about this, too. Women are writing men they would like to fall in love with, while men are often writing women they would like to have sex with. Obviously, this is a sweeping generalisation, and there are plenty of exceptions. But the contrast is worth thinking about. In so many stories written by women, desire is inseparable from emotional intimacy. The fantasy is not just about being wanted. It is about being understood, about being known in all the little ways that make intimacy feel real.
And once you have spent enough time with these fictional men, it becomes difficult not to notice their absence in your own life. You start recognising the difference between a man who thinks you are attractive and one who is genuinely interested in knowing you. Between someone who enjoys your attention and someone who pays attention to you. Between a man who likes the idea of having a girlfriend and one who is curious about the person he is in a relationship with.
Of course, fictional men have an unfair advantage. They are written by women who know precisely what they are doing. Their silences have meaning, their gestures are deliberate, and their emotional breakthroughs arrive at exactly the right moment. Nobody has to wait three business days for them to communicate something they could have said in a sentence. Real men are not afforded the same narrative convenience. They are complicated, inconsistent and sometimes spectacularly bad at expressing themselves. They have their own histories, insecurities and limitations. They cannot be expected to replicate a character whose emotional development has been carefully plotted to coincide with the moment a woman needs reassurance.
But I do not think this means we should abandon the standards these stories have helped us develop. The point is not to demand that men become fictional characters. It is to ask why attentiveness, emotional openness and genuine curiosity still feel so exceptional that we celebrate them as extraordinary romantic achievements when we encounter them in a man.
Perhaps the problem is not that women have imagined men too well. Perhaps imagination has simply made certain absences harder to ignore.
I also wonder whether we sometimes become so invested in a person's potential that we mistake it for a promise. There is a difference between recognising someone's potential and treating it as a guarantee. A man can be interesting without being emotionally intelligent, charming without being thoughtful, attracted to you without being capable of loving you in the way you want to be loved. A brief conversation can reveal something wonderful about a person, but it cannot tell you everything you need to know about who he is. The rest is information we sometimes supply ourselves, filling in the blanks with the qualities we hope to find.
I am a firm believer in not backing down on your standards. I do not think wanting emotional maturity, thoughtfulness, or reciprocity makes you unreasonable, nor should we have to convince ourselves to want less because the people we meet cannot offer more. But there is a difference between holding someone to a standard and expecting him to fulfil a fantasy he never knew he was part of. Not everyone will match every quality we desire, and no one person can be expected to embody every good thing we have ever encountered in fiction. The trick, perhaps, is learning to recognise what is genuinely there without writing the rest of the story for them.
There is nothing inherently foolish about looking at someone and wondering what might be possible between you. The trouble begins when we become so attached to the possibility that we stop paying attention to the person.
Maybe the men in my head will always be better than the men I meet. They have an unfair advantage, after all. They are assembled from the best qualities I have encountered in other people, the most romantic things I have read, the most moving things I have watched and everything I have spent years learning I want.
I want to like someone without having to write the best parts of him myself.
For all the time I have spent imagining what it might feel like to be loved, I would like to know what it feels like when someone else is doing the imagining, too. When someone is curious about me in the way I have been curious about them. When I am not the only one quietly building a world around the possibility of another person. When romance is not something I have to create alone, but something we discover together.
I want reality to be as interesting as the possibility.
And perhaps that is what we have all been looking for all along: not a man who can live up to every version of himself we have invented, but someone who makes us want to stop inventing versions of him altogether.