No, it's not you, Christina. I feel pretty confident about that.

In my own experience, I found someone "perfect" for me, who looked like my future, but she felt that she was "losing herself" in ways that I couldn't understand, and she had to leave. (We've reconnected and are currently seeing whether we have a path forward--but I hear now what I couldn't then.) I think that my experience is writ large in society. We men don't realize how much space we take up and air we breathe, and women do not want to shrink, or lose their voices, or themselves. Nor should they.

I don't think relationships have to be this way, of course. Love, respect, trust, mutual support, freedom: those ingredients can make relationships feel liberating and enlarging to everyone in them. But that's not the way we think, and I'm not sure why.

I have nothing to say about the manosphere, and I'm not casting all blame on all men. I suppose I'm less interested in who it is than in what it is, and I know that I was listening but not hearing, despite all my love and willingness, and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

All that to say, it's probably me.