Kay Hymowitz has a perceptive City Journal article on the “chaotic postfeminist dating scene, where only the strong survive.” She calls it “Love in the time of Darwinism” — an age when decent guys are shedding their nice guy images to compete for women who have no idea what they really want (besides casual sex):

The dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs [single young males] of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional. And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion. Under these harsh conditions, young men are looking for a new framework for understanding what (or, as they might put it, WTF) women want. So far, their answer is unlikely to satisfy anyone—either women or, in the long run, themselves.

Hymowitz is always thoughtful, always fair. (Read her earlier essays on the Single Young Male and Single Young Female and all her other City Journal essays). One of her most cogent points relates to the Christian dating scene as I’ve seen it. She quotes a “Recovering Nice Guy” who answers women’s perpetual whine, “What happened to all the nice guys?”

His answer: “You did. You ignored the nice guy. You used him for emotional intimacy without reciprocating, in kind, with physical intimacy.” Women, he says, are actually not attracted to men who hold doors for them, give them hinted-for Christmas gifts, or listen to their sorrows. Such a man, our Recovering Nice Guy continues, probably “came to realize that, if he wanted a woman like you, he’d have to act more like the boyfriend that you had. He probably cleaned up his look, started making some money, and generally acted like more of an a*****e than he ever wanted to be.”

This happens all the time with Nice Christian Guys and Nice Christian Girls. I think some Christian girls want the equivalent of the gay best friend so patronizingly portrayed in modern pop culture — an always supportive, caring, uncomplicated, completely asexual male friend. The problem is that they treat their nice straight Christian guy friends like they would their gay best friends, assuming they can have emotionally intimate, asexual relationships with them.

Guess what? It doesn’t work too well. The girls do exactly what the Recovering Nice Guy says — use the guys for emotional intimacy without “putting out” and giving some love and commitment in return. And the Nice Christian Guys become Bitter Angry Boys, and everyone is sad and single.

Hymowitz’s overall point is that feminism has produced a chaotic ambiguity in relationships. I think that this ambiguity is simply part of living in a modern age — an ambiguity better than returning to an age when men wooed women who were not “their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually,” and an ambiguity that is not impossible to resolve.

Also, romantic chaos is nothing new. Maybe there were clearer rules and “do’s” and “don’ts” before, but women have always been a little hazy on what exactly they want. (Don’t ask me, for instance. There’s no way I could tell you.)