Although the term “fuckboy” has been around for almost two decades, it wasn’t until this year that it started to pop up with any frequency in my psychoanalytic practice. Thankfully, I’d already looked it up a few years back when my Gen-Z kid had described my then boyfriend as “a total fuckboy”. He was somewhat older than me so the “boy” element took me by surprise, but I could see what my kid was getting at. There was no other word that quite captured his seemingly inexplicable lurches from exciting presence to icy absence, nor his radical incapacity for having anything much to say about it. In contrast to the (possibly mythical) mature, seasoned seducer, he seemed to have no idea what he was doing. My observant kid also pointed out that, in true fuckboy style, he was fun – a show-off, excellent at performing being a man.
Now, again and again, the word comes up in sessions as women describe their dating experiences with charming, flaky men; men who vanish for weeks after sex, who fail to so much as text, and then reappear as if nothing happened. Or men who imply the promise of a relationship in their initial seduction only to snap into casual sex mode the minute the deed is done. I sympathise with these women – I’ve been there – but there are complications that mean I can never fully join them in their indignation and contempt. Of course, I may be trying to help the women work something out about themselves: What might they secretly like about this story of woe? Maybe we get to keep our independence, not to mention our image of ourselves as “good”, in contrast to the “bad” person who’s messing us about? But then again, I’m also aware that, later in the day – perhaps even the very next hour – I will find myself hearing the other side of the story; fuckboys suffer too.
I’ve yet to hear a fuckboy describe himself as such, but they certainly know that they piss women off. They often describe feeling deeply alone, in spite of the fact that they can seemingly command endless female attention. The problem, for them, is that they’re at a total loss as to what to do about it. They adore women and crave their love, but once the craving has been sated they need to retreat back inside the safety of their own skin. They are like people who bid fiercely in auctions knowing full well that they have no intention of paying. When the auction house finds out, they might very well go into hiding. And so it goes with dating.
For a fuckboy, it seems easy enough to find attractive women to sleep with (go you!) but then how can you know what’s best to do next? Women are kind of scary and it can be hard to tell what they want from you. Would they actually like you if they got to know you? Do they really want to live happily ever after? Isn’t that just a euphemism for a life of boredom and frustration? Will they drop you or cheat on you the minute you show vulnerability by getting attached? Intimacy is a potential vortex of pain and shame.
Women describe dating experiences with charming, flaky men… who vanish for weeks after sex
These, to me, are proper questions indexing the vertiginous difficulties of relationships. Can you ever really know what you’re getting yourself into? Is it really more honourable to fearlessly steam in than to prevaricate? Perhaps it’s a little obtuse to imagine that a few lovely nights together should lead naturally to many lovely years. It seems a throwback to the days when a woman’s virtue was a vital bargaining chip in the marriage market; a throwback to the days when sex and pregnancy were much harder to disentangle. What on earth do generic “nasty boys” and “nice girls” have to do with modern life?
Women’s limited fertility is certainly one way of understanding why the term fuckboy is currently so popular with millennials. You can’t be dealing with time-wasters when the outer edges of your fertility window are looming. This focus and determination on the woman’s side might understandably have a knock-on effect on a man. Perhaps especially when the woman was, until very recently, just a pretty face on Hinge. Does she want you for you, or for your fathering capacity? And which is more scary? At least if it’s the latter you know what you’re up against. In either case, it case be alienating to be wanted with such certainty by someone you barely know. (Just to be clear, procreation seems so core to our notion of intimate relationships that the ideas that stem from it readily seep into relationships involving trans people, older people, and the young, who may have little interest in, or fear of, pregnancy. Non-binary people, too, might find themselves on either side of a fuckboy scenario – in this case spelled “fuccboi” – depending on the dynamics of their relationship; one wants to trap, the other to escape. (Fuckgirl and fuckperson have totally failed to catch on. Perhaps, like “mansplain”, the original term lands too perfectly…)
To get to the heart of the matter, there isn’t a fuckboy I know who didn’t have some kind of trouble with his mother. To narrow it down a little, who didn’t have a mother who wasn’t somehow a bit much. Maybe she was too sad, too sexy, too mad, too loving, or too lonely. Whatever it was, she seemed – directly or indirectly – to demand something from him that he was unable or unwilling to give. (And who can blame mums for being like that? So often children have been the main place women could look for satisfaction – which isn’t much fun for children either.) Now, whenever a woman sets her sights on him, he has a little freakout. Suddenly he’s reminded of that terrible, familiar feeling; he needs to break free of this uncanny, enveloping demand. Anxiety is the fuckboy’s go-to emotion, and distance his emergency cure.
Fuckboys in therapy also tend to have a lot to say about their absent/angry/selfish/weak dads. Gradually, they may even begin to see how the foibles of their imperfect parents have a direct bearing on their own innermost selves – an unsettling fact that it’s easy to pay lip service to but notoriously hard to grasp. Thankfully, fuckboys often love to introspect. Not only do I meet, and like, them in my practice, but many an angsty, slighted woman has told me that her annoying marque is seeing a therapist and has high hopes of finding relationships easier at some unspecified point in the future.
I guess you could say that fuckboys are a symptom of our times. While flighty men have always existed, there’s something about the combination of new rules, new roles, and new technology that frequently makes men anxious and women upset. So much so that we need a shorthand way of saying it. The problem is that it’s a shorthand that puts all the responsibility on the man, dehumanising him and cutting him loose from the web of ideas and relationships that made him that way in the first place. Not only that, but it often makes the woman (and, more so, her friends) hate him when she might be better off cutting him a bit of slack.
If only for the sake of self-interest, it makes sense to be patient with fuckboys, to let them be from Mars, to text us when they’re ready, and never to pin our own exacting demands for love on them. Then we may find they can be more relaxed with us in turn.
Anouchka Grose is a psychoanalyst and writer based in London. Her latest book, “Fashion: a Manifesto” (Notting Hill Editions), is out now
