As my friend once remarked: “gay men get something very right about sex.” While everyone is free to have their own attitudes towards dating and sexuality, and “gay men” are hardly a monolithic entity, it is interesting that such strong archetypes can emerge about the romantic lives of a particular demographic.

Some of my closest friends, who happen to be gay men, engage in the most outrageous amount of fun and flirtation. Their stories are at times genuinely the highlight of my week/life, even if their outlandish antics sometimes come with the downside that I can’t take them out anywhere in public in case one of their misdemeanours tracks them down.

However, realistically my game is at least as strong as theirs, so why am I in the library trying to find out what item of furniture I am on Buzzfeed while they go out and cause havoc?

I think a reason that men feel free to behave like this is that ‘shame culture’ hasn’t affected them in the same way that it has affected me. They are seemingly less hesitant about approaching people that they find attractive, asking them out, or messaging them on dating apps. It appears there isn’t the same embarrassment about putting themselves on the line and potentially getting rejected for them as I’ve experienced, and as I’m sure other women have (or maybe I’m just a huge drama queen).

As a non-male, romantic rejection is a taboo topic. Within a heterosexual framework, there is often an expectation that the man acts first. Are we expected to just sit up in a tower and bat our eyelashes, waiting for the person we matched/danced/shared eye contact with to do something so that a relationship can progress? If it’s not a man you’re looking for (amen!) then you might be in your tower for quite a while.

"I feel this embarrassment comes not only from being rejected, but from the fact that I was never 'meant' to try in the first place"

Lots of women I know declare things like: “I never make the first move.” It’s one thing to say that you prefer not to act first, or that you haven’t done so before, but there is something inherently problematic about setting this out as a rule, and reiterating it with pride. Another pet hate of mine is the phrase: “hard to get” (what the hell does that even mean?), where the semantic fields of romance and theft collide, with all the grace that you might expect from that arrangement. Who else doesn’t want women to have agency? Oh, yeah, misogynists!

Yet, in same-sex dating, you can’t both have that mentality or you would never get anywhere, and it would all be fairly dull. For heterosexual readers this is just a fabulously-written gendered behaviour discussion, but for me this is potentially a pressing practical concern if I don’t want to live forever alone, with my caffeine addiction and 70 cats.

Someone has to make the first move; I usually time this to perfection – just before both of us die of old age. In doing this, the challenge is overcoming the internalised misogyny sometimes called ‘pride’. Contrary to media representations, who that person should be is not black-and-white clear, or at least never is in my experience. It’s an exciting and liberating arrangement, where ‘assumed’ behaviour goes out the window, and social conventions are broken whoever makes the first approach.

Can you watch porn and be a feminist?

But if this fails there is an added and, I suggest, female-specific embarrassment of having put yourself in a conventionally ‘un-feminine’ position, and being turned down. I feel this embarrassment comes not only from being rejected, but from the fact that I was never ‘meant’ to try in the first place.

I’m sure there’s a right and a wrong way to deal with rejection, but I’m also sure I’m not the person to give advice: someone once sent a message from my Tinder to a friend-of-a-friend saying ‘Ur septum piercing is rad’, and it was brutally ignored. I decided it would be funny to send the exact same message to them for three consecutive days at 4:20 pm. While I absolutely don’t recommend that stupid behaviour, if you don’t think that story is objectively funny you have serious re-assessments to make. Alternatively, you could deal with rejection by writing a Varsity article about it; I hear that helps some people.

Obviously men experience rejection, and I’m sure they don’t enjoy it, but how they respond to it seems different – men are often the ones who do the asking, and by necessity, the ones to be rejected. When women are turned down, there is something jarring and awkward about it; it is rarely discussed openly, and there is a sense of embarrassment unlike the fairly practical and business-like way that men often discuss dating or sexuality.

Queer women, surely, must get rejected (or maybe it’s just me…) and it seems ridiculous that we can’t laugh it off as easily. Last term, according to an Independent article I recently read about dating terms, I was ‘ghosted’ and then ‘haunted’ by someone who I went out with (look it up!). If we don’t learn to address and laugh about these things, it makes failure more difficult to confront, but it also more worryingly contributes to a fear of trying. 

I think these attitudes are one reason why I find it so difficult to approach relationships in the same fun, confident, and wonderfully short-sighted way as many men. The fact that even today we have these discrepancies between the sexes is incredibly harmful. They are more noticeable in same-sex relationships, and also in a community as small and insular as Cambridge, where it can feel like literally every student knows every other student. Recognising this, we should try to call bullshit on these pressures. Get rejected for feminism