I Thought I Met the Exciting, Passionate Man of My Dreams. Then He Said Something That Made Me Pine for Something … Else

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Where have all the good men gone?

This is a question women have been asking for years, especially those of us who have spent any time on dating apps. We’re tired of the low-effort messages, the uninspired dates, the men whose idea of flirting is asking what we do for work. We’re begging them to distinguish themselves from the pack. To show a little initiative. A little imagination. A little romance. In response, dating apps have introduced new A.I.-powered tools to help users flirt, initiate conversation, and distinguish themselves from the millions of other singles struggling to do the same.

But effort is a slippery thing to measure. On TikTok, people debate whether a man buying flowers constitutes “princess treatment” or “the bare minimum.” We are eager to evaluate romantic gestures, but divided over what they reveal about the men making them.

A few summers ago, I met a man who made the effort.

We matched on Hinge while I was at the airport, about to leave for the French Alps with some friends. When he asked me out, I explained that I would be unavailable while serving as the eleventh wheel on a long group vacation.

“But let’s do something when I get back,” I offered. “Take my number?”

“No,” he replied. “Send me a postcard from France with your number and the day I should call.”

A fun idea, I thought. It acknowledged something I’d told him. It proposed a small adventure. It involved international mail! After years of downloading and deleting dating apps, answering dead-end questions about my weekend, and enduring one disappointment after another, the postcard made me hopeful that dating could be exciting again.

I smiled at my phone as I dropped it into the TSA bin.

By the time I touched down in Europe, this small romance had done wonders for my mindset. I slept like a princess on the single cot shoved inside a converted closet. I whistled my way up grueling hikes and voluntarily photographed my friends kissing in front of historic landmarks. “Now one with just you two in it!” I was generous. Patient. Optimistic. All because somewhere in California, a man was waiting for a postcard from me.

On the fourth day, I found it: a vintage illustration of the Mer de Glace, the largest glacier in France, sweeping like a sea of ice (per its name) between pink and yellow mountains. I bought it, borrowed a pen, and wrote down my number, and the date I’d be back.

My friend Tom emerged from the French McDonald’s holding a McBaguette.

“Who are you sending a postcard to?” he asked, mouth full.

I told him.

“Oh brother,” he said, with the disdain of a critic forced to sit through another predictable rom-com.

“It’s romantic!” I protested. “And novel! And God forbid a man do something other than ask me how my weekend was.”

“Take it from me,” Tom said: “A professional bullshitter. This guy is full of it.”

Tom was an actor, which gave his appraisal some professional standing. But he was also frequently wrong. That very morning, he had been wrong about what time the gondola opened.

Still, his accusation bothered me. I wasn’t some hopeless romantic, waiting for a knight in shining armor to come sweep me off my feet. In fact, I hated flowers and Valentine’s Day, and grand declarations of love. In my day job, I adapted fairy tales for a kids’ podcast, which often meant making them less sexist and, incidentally, less romantic. More fun, adventurous, and whimsical. I suppose that’s what I’d wanted from a relationship, too. And that’s what this postcard was. Besides, it’s not like I had written my social security number on it.

I shook off Tom’s comments, walked to the post office, and got on with my European adventure. By the time I landed back in California, I’d nearly forgotten about my match. Then a text from an unknown number hit my phone.

It was a photograph of the postcard. It had successfully made its voyage across the ocean and was now propped against a mantel, beside a tiny jar of Nutella.

A message followed: “I love my postcard.
I think I’ll always keep it. No matter what.”

I sat down on my bed, grinning into my phone. He’d actually done it. He’d waited for my postcard, just as he’d promised.

“When’s a good time to call and say hiiiiieeeeee?” he asked.

“Now?” I wrote.

And right then, my phone rang.

For a moment, I just stared at it. A man I’d never met, whose voice I’d never heard, had somehow made the past two weeks feel like a movie. At last, Act 3.

“Hello,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible.

“Hey,” he said, with a nervous laugh. “I got your postcard.”

We quickly started pitching ideas for our first date.

“What about a museum?” I suggested. “I’ve never been to the Getty Villa.”

He thought for a moment. Then he replied: “Have you ever had sex in a museum?”

I thought I’d misheard him. I laughed it off and proposed the L.A. County Museum of Art instead.

“Yeah,” he said, “I feel like we could have crazy sex at LACMA.”

I stared up at the ceiling. A few cobwebs suddenly came into focus. I felt incredibly tired, but it wasn’t jet lag. In movie terms, this was my “Dark Night of the Soul.” The moment where the hero must reckon with her own mistakes, with reality, and learn an important lesson.

I drew a sharp inhale and tried to change the subject—and him—back into the thing I wanted. “Yeah, I’m sure the acoustics would be interesting,” I said quickly, “How about mini golf?”

“Or how about real golf?” he replied.

Mini golf was windmills, plastic animals, and the possibility of a first kiss beside a fake waterfall. Real golf, as I understood it, was ugly polos, retirees, and douchebags. Still unwilling to abandon the man I’d invented, I agreed to golf the following Wednesday.

After we hung up, he sent me a photograph of his clubs.

“Game on,” I wrote. “Do I need to buy a 9-iron?”

“Haha. You’re cute. No. But maybe for our second date we can teach each other circular breathing. And by our third date we get arrested for having sex in the stairwell of the Broad.”

My lip curled. I deleted his number and tossed my phone behind me.

It wasn’t that he’d brought up sex. I wasn’t opposed to sex, or even to having it in unusual places. But we’d never met. He didn’t know whether I was attracted to him, whether I wanted to sleep with him, or even whether I was interested in discussing it. And when I tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, he seemed more interested in continuing his own than joining mine.

A couple of days later, I third-wheeled Tom and his girlfriend to dinner, where I wallowed in self-pity and admitted that Tom had been right: “That guy really was full of it.”

I recounted my conversation with the Postcard Man. Tom made a valiant effort to conceal his pride.

“How did you know?” I asked. “How did you know he was full of it?”

“Think about it,” Tom said. “If you’re thoughtful, emotionally available, reliable, funny—all the things that actually make someone a great partner—why would you need some elaborate gimmick to impress a woman? Why not just let her get to know you?”

His girlfriend nodded in agreement. Tom continued: “Romance is for guys who are trying to distract you or apologize for their shitty personalities.”

I sighed. Tom’s theory seemed a little extreme, but it resonated. Romance does have a long history of making questionable behavior look sweet.

Take Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox, whose public relationship seemed to operate entirely in the language of grand romantic gestures. They called each other twin flames. He wore a vial of her blood around his neck. Their relationship inspired songs and albums. And when Kelly proposed in 2022, he presented Fox with a custom engagement ring featuring thorns that he said would cut her finger if she removed it. The following year, Fox published a collection of poetry titled Pretty Boys Are Poisonous, exploring the darker sides of this romance, as well as others.

Or consider Kanye West, who, on his second date with Julia Fox, surprised her with an entire hotel suite filled with designer clothes. Fox called it a “Cinderella moment.” But in her 2023 memoir, she described how West’s involvement in her appearance became increasingly controlling, with stylists hired to dress her in clothes he had preapproved. Looking back on their brief relationship, Fox said she’d felt like his “little puppet.” What had initially seemed like an extraordinary effort to make her feel special had become an effort to make her into the person he wanted.

And then there are the movies. Romantic comedies have practically written the rules of modern courtship. But what makes The Notebook truly romantic is not Ryan Gosling threatening to jump off a Ferris wheel unless Rachel McAdams agrees to go out with him. It’s his caring for her decades later, reading her the story of their love even as her memory of it disappears. And when Billy Crystal races through Manhattan to declare his love for Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, it isn’t the running to her doorstep like a madman that makes the scene so moving. It’s what he says when he finally gets there: all the little things he’s come to know and love about her over years of friendship.

The trouble isn’t that men lack the willingness to make an effort. It’s that effort alone tells us very little about their capacity for love. Romance, I’ve realized, can be extraordinarily elaborate without being particularly thoughtful.

And perhaps that’s the trouble with dating apps, too. So much of the process revolves around making an impression that we’ve come to value the people who make the biggest ones. But a clever opening tells us little about the qualities that matter in a long-term partnership—curiosity, consideration, emotional availability. These qualities take time to discover, and, for some of us more than others, even longer to appreciate.

When I shared my thoughts on the virtues of “boring” men with a friend, she looked at me as though I were stating the obvious. “Well, yeah,” she said. “I married a boring guy and it’s the f-ing best.” They’d met at work, where she had plenty of time to discover his appeal. He wasn’t one for flashy gestures, she explained. He was just a really kind person. Apparently, she’s not alone in her preferences. In Match’s 2026 “Singles in America” survey, 40 percent of women chose peace and emotional safety over passion and excitement, compared with just 9 percent who chose the reverse. Johns Hopkins University’s list of “green flags” includes respecting each other’s hobbies and listening to understand (rather than simply waiting for a turn to speak). None of it makes for a particularly romantic story.

So where have all the good men gone? Maybe we’ve been dismissing some of them as boring. They might not ask you to mail a postcard from France. They might just ask you for your number. To get coffee. They might even ask you how your weekend was.