“A woman rarely goes quiet without giving you plenty of chances to hear her. The silence comes when she realises you heard her perfectly well, you just chose not to listen.”

Azalea Tailor

I went on a date recently with a man I actually liked (well on paper anyway). I know. Nobody panic.

The chemistry was there, the conversation was great, he was interesting, attractive (well if you turn a blind eye to the denim shorts he showed up in) and there was enough between us to make me curious about what could happen next. Which, as anyone who has read my recent dating escapades will know, is practically cause for a national celebration. I’d finally met a man I fancied who could also hold a conversation. Somewhere, a small choir of angels was warming up.

Except something had been niggling at me before we’d even met…I was doing most of the initiating. He always replied. Properly too. He wasn’t giving me three-word answers while apparently being held hostage by his own thumbs. But if I didn’t start the conversation, there often wasn’t one. And after a while, you notice these things. Not because you’re sitting there counting messages like a lunatic, but because there’s a difference between someone being responsive and someone actively reaching for you.

So I told him very clearly and calmly, “communication is very important to me and it feels like you’re very good at replying, but not great at initiating.” Perfectly reasonable, I thought. No accusation. No games. No disappearing for four days to see whether he’d notice I was missing, because I’m fifty-three, not thirteen, and I have neither the time nor the battery life for that shit.

He explained that he wasn’t big on messaging before meeting someone and preferred getting to know someone properly in person. Fair enough. He suggested we pick up the phone and talk more in the meantime, which sounded like a perfectly reasonable and mature compromise.

Great, I thought. Except nothing really changed. Then, on our first date, he casually mentioned a woman he’d previously been talking to had just stopped making the effort with him because, according to her, he didn’t communicate enough. And there it was. The moment I stopped trying to explain away what I had already been seeing. This wasn’t simply a difference in communication styles between us. Another woman had already told him the same thing and eventually walked away because of it. There had been customer feedback. He knew. He just hadn’t done anything with it.

And that changed something for me. I didn’t storm off. I didn’t announce that he’d failed to meet my communication needs and therefore his application for the position had been unsuccessful. I didn’t start deliberately taking longer to reply because he took too long, or post myself looking fabulous somewhere in the hope he’d realise what he was losing. That’s not matching energy. That’s emotional Sudoku and I can’t be arsed. I just stopped initiating as much. Not because I wanted to punish him. Because I’d already told him what I’d noticed, he’d understood what I was saying, and then I sat back and watched what happened next.

That’s the bit I think gets lost in all this talk about women matching a man’s energy. It makes us sound ridiculously calculated. You go cold, so I’ll go colder. You take four hours to reply, I’ll take six. You pull back, I’ll pull back further. Everyone pretending not to care while staring at their phones wondering why dating feels like psychological warfare with some nice cocktails, i’ll have a lychee martini if you’re asking.

I don’t think emotionally intelligent women operate like that. Or at least, I don’t think we should. We notice. And yes, sometimes we notice far too fucking much. A change in tone. Fewer calls. The kisses disappearing from the end of a message. Plans becoming vague. The little things he used to do without prompting somehow now requiring a calendar invitation and three working days’ notice. Women can detect a shift in energy with the accuracy of airport security, then spend another fortnight convincing ourselves we imagined it because he’s “probably just busy”.

But eventually, we notice the pattern. If something is important to me, I’ll tell you. I’m not expecting a man to rummage around inside my head with a torch looking for clues. If you don’t know there’s a problem because I haven’t opened my mouth, I can hardly execute you for failing to solve it.

Sir Datesalot aka Hugo once told me about a woman he’d been seeing. They got on brilliantly, everything appeared to be going well, then one day she sent him a message saying he wasn’t making enough effort, it wasn’t working and goodbye. According to him, it came completely out of nowhere.

Now, there are two possibilities here. Either she’d been showing him in seventeen different ways that she was unhappy and he’d missed every single one, which is not exactly beyond the realms of possibility. Or she’d had an entire relationship crisis inside her own head, reached a verdict, sentenced him and forgotten the minor administrative detail of telling the defendant there was a trial. Sorry ladies you don’t get a free pass on communication simply because you’re a women. Say what needs to be said and let the other person show you whether you matter.

Once I’ve said the thing, that’s where I think it gets interesting. Because I’m not going to keep saying it. There comes a point in life where you realise repeating yourself isn’t communication. Sometimes it’s just you desperately trying to persuade another adult to care about something they’ve already shown you isn’t important enough to them to change. I won’t lie, in the past that lesson has taken me me a lot longer to accept than I’d like to admit.

It’s a misconception that women give less when a man first gives less. We don’t, we give more. We make the plan because he’s busy. We send the message because perhaps he’s had a difficult week. We excuse the silence because work is manic. We tell ourselves he’s tired, stressed, distracted, overwhelmed, scared of intimacy, emotionally avoidant, traumatised by his ex, possibly abducted by aliens, anything except the fairly obvious possibility that we’re putting more into the connection than he is.

We compensate. And because we compensate, sometimes the other person doesn’t even notice there’s a gap. Why would he? We’re filling the bloody thing. Until eventually you get tired. That’s when your behaviour changes. Not your personality. Not your capacity for affection. Not your softness, humour, sexuality, warmth or generosity. You’re still exactly the same woman who sent the ridiculous memes, remembered his important meeting, suggested the restaurant, kissed him like she meant it and wanted to know he’d got home safely. You just stop pouring all of that into somewhere that has started giving increasingly little back. He changed the energy. She changed the access.

And access is probably the word I’ve been looking for, because I don’t think women suddenly become cold nearly as often as men claim they do. I think men sometimes experience the absence of what a woman was previously giving them and call her different, without stopping to ask what changed before she did. Let me tell you. You pursued her, she responded. You called, she answered. You made plans, she made room. You showed interest, she relaxed enough to show hers. Then somewhere along the way you stopped pursuing and started assuming, but still expected the same woman to turn up with the same enthusiasm. Get a life. You can’t switch off half the electricity and then complain the room feels darker.

I’ve seen the other end of this too. Years ago, an ex and I were on a break when he reached out and asked if we could talk. So we talked. Then we talked again. And again. And again. Five conversations circling essentially the same issue, each one somehow ending with us standing in exactly the same emotional spot we’d started from. By conversation number five, I wasn’t angry anymore. I simply said, “I’m done. We’re clearly getting nowhere. I wish you a happy life.” And I meant every word.

I think men sometimes misunderstand female anger. They think the arguments are the dangerous part. The questions. The frustration. The “we need to talk”. The woman who wants to know what’s wrong, why something has changed, why you’re not communicating, where the relationship is going. I’d worry far less about her being angry than I would about the day she stops asking. Anger still has something invested in the outcome. So does disappointment. So does frustration. She’s making noise because some part of her still believes there’s something worth making noise about. Worry when she stops.

Because silence should never be a tactic. Deliberately withdrawing to make someone chase you isn’t emotional intelligence, it’s manipulation. I’m talking about something entirely different, the kind of silence that arrives when you’ve already said what needed saying and genuinely have nothing left you want them to hear. She isn’t waiting for you to chase her. She isn’t trying to make you jealous. She hasn’t read some ridiculous dating strategy telling her to withdraw so you’ll activate your masculine pursuit instinct and gallop towards her carrying commitment and a bunch of fucking peonies. She’s just stopped caring whether you understand.

That silence isn’t dramatic. If anything, it’s unnervingly calm. The thing you spent weeks or months trying to fix suddenly stops feeling like something you want to fix at all. And once that happens, good luck resurrecting it.

Men assume interest has some sort of indefinite shelf life. An ex once called me more than ten years after we’d split up. ten years. We’d dated more than two decades ago and by then we had both very much moved on, or so I thought. He called to tell me he was getting married…the following day, which was unexpected enough, but apparently that wasn’t the main purpose of the call. He wanted to ask me, one last time, whether ‘I wanted to give us another go‘…the night before his wedding.

I mean, where do you even begin with that? “Congratulations? Have a lovely day tomorrow? Perhaps stop phoning ex-girlfriends and go and check on your fiancée?” No. No, I did not want to give it another go. That ship hadn’t merely sailed. ten years later, it had crossed several oceans, changed ownership and was probably operating as a small cruise liner somewhere off the coast of Greece.

But it does make me laugh when I think about it, because somewhere in his head there was apparently still a door marked Suki that he thought might open if he knocked hard enough. It didn’t.

Just because a woman once gave you access to her doesn’t mean she left the key under the mat. And perhaps that’s what age has changed for me. I used to spend much more time trying to understand behaviour.
Why has he pulled back?
Why has the communication changed?
Did I do something? Is he scared? Is he busy?
Should I say something? Should I give him space?

Christ, the hours women have collectively lost trying to translate men who were communicating perfectly clearly through their behaviour. Now I’m far more interested in what happens after I’ve said what I need to say. Not whether you agree beautifully. Not whether you tell me you understand. Not whether you give me a thoughtful explanation and use all the correct emotionally intelligent words. What you do.

Because words can keep you hanging around a connection long after behaviour has started showing you the exit. And maybe that’s what I’ve got wrong about the whole match his energy thing. I don’t want to match anybody’s energy. If you become cold, I don’t want to practise becoming colder. If you take three days to reply, I’m not setting a timer for four. If you become inconsistent, I’m not interested in beating you at inconsistency.

The older I get, the less interested I am in allowing somebody else’s behaviour to change mine. I don’t want to become guarded because you became inconsistent, or colder because you stopped making an effort. I actually like the woman I am when I care about someone. She’s warm (shocking I know), affectionate, communicative, interested, slightly inappropriate and occasionally impossible. I’d rather protect her than train her to love badly.

But being those things doesn’t mean everyone gets unlimited access to them. If something changes between us, I’ll notice. If I care, I’ll probably say something. If you hear me and show me differently, wonderful. Humans get things wrong. Relationships wobble. Nobody needs to be executed at dawn because they had a shit week and forgot to send a good morning text.

But if I tell you, you understand, and nothing changes? Eventually I’m going to believe you. Not because I’ve changed. Because I’ve stopped filling in the distance between what you say and what you show me. And by the time you notice you’re getting less of me, I will have realised I’m perfectly happy giving more of myself to the things that actually value me back.

You changed the energy. I just changed the access.💋