The Rise of the “Bratty Man” Has People in the Dating Trenches Exhausted

In a perfect world, gender roles wouldn’t exist, because there wouldn’t be a patriarchy to uphold them. But in this reality that we’re a part of, women earn significantly less money, are much more at risk of emotional and physical harm by partnering with men, and still do more of the unpaid work that keeps a household running. So, yes, in this unfortunate reality, I personally do expect more of a man when it comes to heterosexual dating. It’s not exactly about wanting to be spoiled (though yes, yes I do), but rather wanting a partner who understands what women risk when we show up, and who meets that with effort instead of entitlement.So, you might understand why it’s frustrating that these days, men are showing up a bit differently in the dating trenches.Online, I’ve seen countless women sharing their experiences with what I’m now calling “bratty men.” They’re demanding to have their meals paid for, that women drive them around, and whatever this is. They’re announcing that they’re “the prize” and that a woman, or a date, should be spoiling them.“Princess treatment” started as a rebrand of old-fashioned courtship and basic manners, and gained a large presence online with Gen Z women posting their gifts, flowers, and love notes and teaching others how to land or “train” a more chivalrous partner. It was controversial from the start. Critics tied it to tradwife content and rigid gender roles. And while I think flowers and notes are bare minimum acts for someone who’s into you, some of the content did veer into very unrealistic expectations of men—mostly because it involved them spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on every date or gift.Now the script has been flipped. Straight men expect to be pampered and emotionally prioritized, reversing the traditional chivalry norms. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to be taken care of, I suspect this isn’t rooted in just wanting to have “equal” treatment with women. I think men invoke this “I’m the prize” mentality to avoid taking initiative in dating. And a big part of where they’re getting it is the “high-value man” slop coming out of the manosphere.Dr. J.J. Kelly, a licensed clinical psychologist, says manosphere content does to young men’s dating lives what too much porn can. “It hands them a script that has nothing to do with how real people truly connect, and they walk into the dating scene with unrealistic expectations from the jump,” she says.So men end up asking themselves: What can she give me? Is she hot enough, impressive enough, compliant enough? “It treats women like a scoreboard or a reflection of a guy’s status,” Kelly says. The question that never gets asked is: What can I give her?“High-value” ends up meaning “entitled to your effort.” Kelly says many of these young men are lonely, anxious, and desperate to feel like they matter, and she gets it. But, she says, “‘high-value’ isn’t a rank you hit by ‘maxxing’ yourself and ‘extracting’ from women. It’s about being someone who’s good for the partner next to you.” A guy who can name his feelings, take accountability, and give without keeping score is worth far more than the “alphas” dominating men’s feeds.Nobody is tracking the “bratty man” as a statistic, and I’m not claiming every man under 35 is sending ultimatums by voice note, like at a the link at the beginning of the article. But the pattern is certainly coming through when women discuss their dating experiences online.Kelly sees part of the root in how boys are raised. They get “a tiny emotional menu,” she explains, with anger as the one feeling society sanctions, “and then we act shocked when grown men can’t name what they feel.”But of course, this doesn’t excuse any of it. “Respecting women… isn’t a lot to ask, and women respond to it just fine,” she says. “If a woman saying ‘no’ sends you into a tailspin, that’s your work to do.”Women working full time, year-round now earn about 81 cents for every dollar men earn, per Census data. That’s down from 83 cents a year earlier and 84 the year before, the first back-to-back widening in decades. An AP-NORC poll found that roughly 60 percent of employed women believe men have more opportunities to earn more at work, compared with about 4 in 10 employed men.The gap isn’t only about money. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest time-use survey, 87 percent of women and 75 percent of men did household activities on an average day, and on the days they did, women spent 2.8 hours on it versus 2.1 for men. Men also logged more leisure time, 5.6 hours to women’s 4.8. Among parents of kids under 6, mothers spent about an hour more per day than fathers on primary childcare.A relationship built on one person’s constant need for validation and entitlement leaves the other person working as staff.“If we examine time-use data—particularly the division of labor among couples—we continue to see women, including women employed outside of the home, doing the lion’s share of the labor,” sociologist Jess Carbino says.There’s also the risk. According to the CDC, nearly 1 in 3 women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Dating men is not a neutral act for women, and every woman I know has a mental checklist for it, from sharing her location to texting a friend when she gets home.Even the culture we consume hasn’t caught up. “While gender roles have changed in some ways, the overwhelming majority of cultural content, films or books about romance, continues to frame gender roles in a traditional way, where men pursue, women should not initiate, etc.,” Carbino notes. “Despite strong differences at an institutional level related to women’s roles, such as women’s occupational attainment, there is still a great deal of distance in terms of achieving equality.”Think about what the traditional “princess” bargain was. The man paid, planned, and protected, and in exchange, the woman was granted a “pedestal.” (And let’s be real, that “pedestal” was very wobbly.) It was an unfair deal with real strings attached, but there was at least a rationale for it, since the person being courted had less money and less safety.The “bratty man” wants the pedestal and none of the rationale. He wants the deference and the spoiling with no history of being locked out of the economy, no second shift. And it arrives in the middle of a dating culture that still leans on tradition at the exact moment it’s convenient. A NerdWallet survey found that 72 percent of Americans think the man should pay on a first date in a heterosexual couple, and men were more likely to say so than women. A man who picks up that check, and then demands to be doted on afterward, is playing both sides of the script. A man who doesn’t pick up the check and then demands to be doted on is just plain selfish.“Reciprocity and longing to be prized are quite distinct,” Carbino says. A relationship where two people actively look out for each other is not the same as one where somebody needs to be treated as the prize.“The language ‘I am the prize,’ ‘I deserve princess treatment,’ ‘he should spoil me’ is concerning,” she says. “It speaks potentially to broader ego deficits in an individual. It represents more substantial issues an individual has in terms of their sense of self and sense of others.” And she adds, “Being treated like a prize in my mind is indicative of a need for considerable validation, arguably an unhealthy amount, [and it] is problematic for both men and women.”I feel the need to say that women who build their whole dating identity around being the prize get the same critique, and plenty of people have leveled it at Gen Z women’s version of the princess treatment trend. The issue is that a relationship built on one person’s constant need for validation and entitlement leaves the other person working as staff.Kelly says that dynamic takes a toll in the bedroom, too. When she’s managing his schedule, his feelings, and his laundry, “no one wants to date their mom and no one wants to date their son.” The result, she says, is that sex becomes something a woman does out of obligation rather than desire, and resentment builds. “That’s the truth of the cost of being catered to: you lose the partner and gain a caretaker.”Whenever this conversation comes up, someone inevitably says the problem is that men are getting “soft” or “acting like women.” I want to be clear that this isn’t my point, for two reasons.First, it’s insulting to women. It treats wanting affection, expressing feelings, or caring about how you’re treated as inherently lesser, something a man should be embarrassed to do. Women are, once again, the standard for what a man shouldn’t be.Second, it misses what’s actually going on. Men crying, asking for reassurance, saying they feel hurt, or asking to be cared for is not bratty. Carbino notes that many men “are now expected to show increased vulnerability,” and that’s a good thing. Wanting to be cared for is human, and so is wanting to be wanted.What makes someone a brat (and definitely not the Charli XCX kind) is when they view dating as a transaction. There’s also a sense of (unearned) entitlement behind it. A “masculine” man can do that and so can a “feminine” woman. A sensitive man who texts “I’m having a rough day, can we talk tonight?” is nothing like the one sending a six-minute voice note about how your late reply showed that you don’t value him.Kelly draws the line in the same place. In a healthy partnership, you can ask for whatever you want or need, but you also have to be able to tolerate a “no.” “No one is responsible for regulating your emotions except you,” she says. “The moment a need turns into a demand, it’s no longer vulnerability (it becomes control).”This holds outside straight dating, too. Plenty of queer couples negotiate who plans, who pays and who gets taken care of without a gendered script at all. The point of a script is that it’s supposed to tell you who owes what, and the “bratty man” is using the old one without agreeing to the obligations.I don’t want men to go back to being stoic and unreachable. I don’t want the princess treatment either, for me or anyone else. What I want is a balance between empathy and strength. Men have plenty of places to look for it, including the good men in their own lives and, frankly, the women they borrowed the princess idea from in the first place. Reciprocity, people!In practice, that looks pretty simple. It’s offering to pay because you invited her, then letting her cover the next one without keeping score. It’s asking about her day and genuinely being interested in the answer. It’s taking on your share of the emotional and logistical work, and being able to say “I’m sorry” or “that was on me.”If you’re a man reading this and you’ve ever called yourself “the prize,” I’d ask you to consider what the people dating you are actually receiving.