On social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, the comments under clips from contemporary romantic television series often read like an archive of unmet expectations. “Where are men like this?” someone asks. “They’re actors. They’re paid to act like that,” another replies. 

Behind the longing and irony lies a philosophical problem. Romance, as it is staged today, may already be better at imagining reciprocity between men and women than everyday heterosexual life is at sustaining it. Contemporary culture has become increasingly articulate about what women should no longer endure: being objectified, treated with condescension, or judged against narrow standards of beauty. It is far less articulate about what such reciprocity would positively require once those older terms have lost legitimacy. Equality, in other words, has taught us refusal better than reciprocity. In heterosexual romance, status has changed more visibly than desire and recognition. Men and women may reject older hierarchies while continuing to approach one another through familiar expectations. Romance still often begins with prescribed roles rather than persons. 

There is a palpable hunger for another kind of recognition. That hunger sends us back to Simone de Beauvoir. In the first volume of The Second Sex, she examines the inherited images through which women have been perceived—as myth, complement, and intermediary between man and nature. In the second volume, she turns to the conditions of women’s freedom: work, action, economic independence, and participation in a common world—and, more radically, the possibility of standing beside a man as a friend and an equal.[1] 

Women may be educated, economically independent, sexually self-determining, and publicly articulate but still find that romantic interest first takes shape around familiar codes: softness, beauty, receptivity, the promise of emotional depth or erotic charge. Equality has not dissolved the difference between being acknowledged as a subject in public life and being recognized as a person in desire. 

No one enters intimacy as a pure person. We arrive surrounded by inherited meanings: what counts as attractive, reassuring, masculine, feminine, serious, promising, safe. Those meanings are often most powerful when they do not look like ideas at all, but simply like what one does.  

People rarely meet the whole person at once. What comes first is a signal that someone can be placed, trusted, wanted, or relied upon. The full opacity of another self comes later, if it comes at all.  

Male desire still rarely greets a woman as an inward life. It responds first to what her appearance, affect, or style of presence seems to promise. 

In heterosexual romance, women, too, tend to read men through function—through what they can initiate, secure, absorb, or make happen—rather than encounter them as persons. 

These two reductions follow different logics and carry different historical burdens. What they share lies elsewhere: women and men too quickly reduce one another to what each is expected to provide. 

A woman who appears luminous, warm, and responsive can be wanted without anyone having to reckon with the full difficulty of who she is. A man who appears capable, stable, and intentional can seem like the right kind of man without anyone knowing much about who he is beyond what he can do. We may claim to want persons and still look for a familiar pattern in them — something that already makes sense to us. 

These arrangements survive partly because they tell people what to do at the uncertain beginning of intimacy. But that is not their only attraction. Beneath these social scripts lies an older heterosexual bargain: it tells men and women what to value in one another. The familiar signs of masculinity such as taking initiative, providing, and offering stability can still signal seriousness and protection to women. For men, a desirable woman can still seem to promise admiration, erotic reward, and a devotion that may shade into submission. 

That bargain spares people from having to invent a relation as they enter it. It offers choreography where reciprocity requires improvisation. Reciprocity asks two people to spend time learning who the other person is before they know what shape the relation will take. 

This is why equality may end old obligations without making new arrangements equally compelling. We may no longer believe in the bargain, but we still crave its simplicity: a clear erotic logic and a ready answer to who does what. Intimate life can sound modern and still feel old. Manon Garcia, a contemporary philosopher working in Beauvoir’s wake, begins from a striking absence: submission itself has been studied far less than domination. Power is usually examined from above, from the side of those who exercise it. Garcia reverses the angle. She asks what submission looks like from below: how it is lived, what makes it tolerable or even attractive, and why “a passive acceptance of the way that is paved for oneself” may feel easier than a freedom for which there is no familiar form.[2] 

This helps explain why relations between women and men may remain unequal even without explicit coercion. People may accept such asymmetry not only because they are forced, but because it offers a familiar way into relation and demands less vulnerability than its alternative. Reciprocity has not yet become as emotionally plausible or as readily available as what it is meant to replace. 

This spring brought another major romantic success: The Other Bennet Sister, a BBC adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s novel about Mary Bennet, the overlooked and bookish middle sister in Pride and Prejudice. Its ratings climbed steadily, making it the BBC’s biggest drama launch in twelve months.[3] It would be easy to dismiss its appeal as simple nostalgia for Austen. But what, exactly, are viewers responding to? 

Mary is not the obvious romantic heroine within the older grammar of charm and social ease. Yet she attracts interest not by presenting herself as polished femininity, but through the way she speaks, thinks, and responds. Her openness, seriousness, kindness, conversation, interests, and lack of calculation do not merely earn her an eventual reward. They enter into the male characters’ desire itself. The story makes her inward life romantically active. 

Part of the appeal lies in the reciprocity between the main characters. Mary is not merely chosen by a man who sees her properly. She, too, becomes drawn to him, not simply to his status, money, or masculine assurance, but to the person he reveals himself to be in conversation and action. The fantasy is mutual: each becomes curious about the other. Perhaps that is why the story resonates with viewers who want another person to take the same interest in who they are. It imagines not only being seen, but wanting to see. 

Fiction can hold this mutual interest in a beautiful arrangement. Life is less obliging. There, the question quickly becomes practical: who moves first, who waits, who risks appearing too eager? 

We already have a language for women’s refusal of intimacy on unequal or demeaning terms: boundaries, self-protection, the right to leave. What would an equally familiar language of female initiative sound like? What does it mean for a woman to move toward someone—rather than merely respond, choose, withdraw, or say no—without appearing desperate or too available? Can she act from her own desire without the gesture being read as flattering him, indulging his ego, or placing him above her? 

In heterosexual intimacy, men are still more readily expected to ask, invite, pay, risk rejection, and give the relationship direction. Women may be independent, discerning, and in theory free to make the first move. But being allowed to act is not the same as having a recognizable way to do so. A woman may no longer be condemned for taking initiative. That does not mean her initiative has become as appropriate, attractive, or easy to read as a man’s. The result is a strange half-modernity. The old prohibition against women making the first move has weakened, but the cultural permission to do so remains uncertain. 

One result is that female agency is often redirected into self-presentation. Beauty, clothing, and style can be forms of taste, imagination, and action. But they also allow a woman to become visible without fully crossing into relational risk. She can attract attention without having to say where her own desire is taking her. 

That is part of the appeal of self-presentation and part of its trap. The culture of femininity offers many ways to become visible and far fewer ways to move toward someone. This route to visibility is encouraged and trivialized at once. Women are told to cultivate themselves, to remain attractive, interesting, composed, and easy to desire. The same labor can then be mocked as vanity or dismissed as superficial. Direct initiative has no equally familiar form. The old expectation of female service may sound archaic when stated openly, but its residues remain. Women are still expected to manage the atmosphere and emotional life of a relationship more readily than to give it direction. 

A popular social-media reel made this cultural reward structure especially visible.[4] A woman reaches for the bill at a cafe and is met first with confusion, then with condescension, from both her date and the server. The man proudly pays. The server looks at the woman with pity. Her gesture is not read as equality, generosity, or freedom, but as evidence that something must have gone wrong before: she must have dated the wrong kind of man or learned to expect too little. 

The scene then offers its reassurance. Whatever happened before, she now has a man who will take care of her properly. Many viewers celebrated his response as the return of the right kind of masculinity. 

The woman’s gesture is not allowed to stand as an initiative of her own, shaped by the situation or by her interest in another person. Instead, it becomes evidence that a man has previously failed to perform his function. The answer is not to ask how two people might act and respond to one another, but to restore the man as provider. Even female initiative becomes another occasion for measuring masculine adequacy. 

The desire to be respected, cared for, and met with tenderness and generosity is real. But at what point does being treated well require a woman to return to the familiar position of the one who receives and waits? 

The deeper problem is that we continue to ask the question as if it required a fixed answer: who should pay? The issue is not only which answer we choose, the man, the woman, or an equal split, but that we still look for a rule about who is supposed to do it. Reciprocity may begin where the gesture is no longer assigned in advance, but is shaped by circumstance, initiative, capacity, and the particular history unfolding between two people. 

On a first date, I said, “The next round is on me.” We had a few drinks, and each of us paid for a round. The next day, over dinner, he paid. For the next few days, he paid for everything, including meals, entertainment, and small expenses. Then one morning I suggested breakfast at a place I liked. It was my idea, my invitation, so I paid. The gesture did not feel like a correction or a performance of equality. It felt like movement: a way of saying that care and initiative did not have to come from only one side. 

This is not a call to turn female initiative into another duty of care. The point is that the gesture arose from the situation and felt entirely ordinary. 

The difficulty goes deeper than the lack of familiar forms of female initiative. Women may want to be seen as persons while still desiring men through older signs of masculinity, such as provision and protection. Wanting recognition for oneself does not automatically mean seeing the person one desires beyond the role he is expected to perform. 

Part of the reason is material. Reciprocity cannot be separated from equality of resources, security, and real room to choose—conditions that remain unevenly distributed. Where they are fragile, the fantasy of provision is not simply nostalgia or a shallow preference. Under such conditions, a woman’s aspirations may be redirected away from expanding her own freedom and toward securing it through a man. Even where economic dependence has weakened, however, provision can still function as a test of masculinity, a measure of how convincingly a man performs what is still expected of him. 

Provision is not an empty sign. A man who pays may indeed be showing care, generosity, good manners, and serious intent. The point is not that women should expect less of men, but that these qualities do not by themselves settle the separate question of compatibility. 

Within this logic, female initiative remains caught in a double bind. It can be read as diminishing a man by denying him the chance to prove himself, and at the same time as indulging him — flattering his ego, giving too much too easily, or placing him above her. 

In some contemporary conversations among women, suspicion toward men in general can precede curiosity about a particular man. After a long history in which women were expected to give more, understand more, and endure more, that suspicion is understandable. But reciprocity cannot emerge if he is asked to carry the accumulated debt of men as a category. It requires curiosity about who he is, not only vigilance for signs that he will repeat a familiar pattern. 

This does not mean inventing depth where none exists. It means refusing to let historical suspicion decide in advance what there is to see. 

Men face a different difficulty. They have long been expected to act, but within a narrow repertoire: earning, deciding, protecting, taking control. The older heterosexual arrangement privileged men, but it also narrowed the forms their care could take. A man could appear serious, reliable, and mature by organizing the situation and making it secure. None of this necessarily taught him how to remain open to his partner as a person. 

Contemporary intimacy asks men for more: to listen, remain present through discomfort, and respond without immediately trying to solve the problem or withdraw from it. Across his work on men and relationships, family therapist Terrence Real examines how conventional masculinity can distance men from vulnerability and emotional intimacy. In How Can I Get Through to You?, he writes more specifically that men are socialized to “mistrust feelings, particularly difficult feelings,” experiencing them as “threatening, overwhelming, and of little value.”[5] This helps explain why men may sincerely believe in equality and still fall back on familiar forms of competence — providing, organizing, reassuring, fixing. These can be genuine forms of care, but they can also become substitutes for recognition. 

A man may be dependable and well-intentioned, yet struggle to remain open in the face of uncertainty, criticism, or another person’s unmet needs without taking control or closing himself off. Competence can support a relationship. It cannot, by itself, create mutuality.  

Love requires democracy. It is not about splitting every gesture in half, dividing every cost, or treating every asymmetry as suspect. It means equal voice and the capacity to hear it—a relation in which no one has to speak from above or below, or disappear into function, myth, or a gendered role. 

The unfinished task is not to abolish romance or to treat every inherited gesture as suspect. Love needs signs. Care needs forms. Desire needs ways to become visible. The question is whether those signs can become rich enough to carry recognition rather than merely reproduce a role. Can initiative show interest without conquest? Can care appear without patronage? Can provision, when it happens, be care rather than certification? Can beauty be seen without standing in for the whole person? 

Non-heterosexual relationships often make the contingency of conventional heterosexual arrangements easier to see. Where initiative, care, provision, and emotional labor are not assigned in advance by sex, either partner may take the lead, plan a surprise, or choose a gift in response to what the other person actually values—flowers, tickets to a favorite band, sports equipment. None of these gestures belongs naturally to one side; their meaning can instead be shaped by circumstance, temperament, desire, and the particular relationship. And with that, the familiar heterosexual script begins to look less inevitable. 

Reciprocity is not only a fairer way of relating. It may also be a better bet over time. Relationships built around familiar roles depend on continued performance. Once that performance falters, the other person may be left unsure of what remains. 

Knowing another person takes longer than recognizing a familiar type. But what develops more slowly between two people may prove more durable, allowing intimacy to survive change: the loss of confidence, beauty, money, strength, certainty, or any other quality through which someone first became recognizable. 

The promise is not perfection. It is the possibility of being loved without having to remain the same convincing version of oneself forever. 

Equality has changed the terms on which people meet. Reciprocity asks whether they can continue to meet as they change.