Ime it's the opposite - a lot of men seem to think that by not putting the expectation of mother-to-children on you, they are automatically asking less of you and are therefore entitled to take up all that free not-mothering time demanding your emotional/domestic labour be directed at them.

Believe me, guys care. Almost every man I've dated was very explicit about wanting a woman who worked; I have made more than everyone I've dated. Casual relationships want me to contribute equally or more to dates etc; serious ones expected me to take care of them financially with no reciprocity.

Even in school decades ago my psyche teacher explicitly taught us this; with women it is so ingrained in them to think of others first, esp if they live with children, they will pick methods that are "less" traumatising to others. Men use guns, but also things like trains & other "public" methods.

Emotional gold-digger! What a fantastic turn of phrase, it's exactly what I've been looking for. Many thanks for putting it into such apt words.

And my second caveat in response to a lot of responses—this isn’t an argument that men being lonely isn’t happening. This is an argument that loneliness is not exclusive to men and that the reigning discourse around MALE loneliness is really about unmet expectations for women

Am I drunk, you ask? That's between me and the empty bottle of sale prosecco acquired during today's venture outdoors

Is this related to my theory about how everyone is a little attracted to Hannibal Lecter because he's terrifyingly competent? Maybe. Shut up. Don't you kink shame me.

It's linked to the demand for "men's spaces" and services. Other people don't have these things because they were gifted to us out of pity, we had to work for them because we had nowhere else. No-one told us how to grow up. We just... Had to.

If you suggest they help out, they say but you haven't told me to! And if I try, you tell me I'm doing it wrong! Because they were never expected to just... Figure it out. So they don't realise that they even could be an adult without a woman's support or instruction, and constant emotional labour.

I don't even identify as a woman, they don't even realise they're coming to me asking me to fix their life. They just see tits and the patriarchal messaging kicks in: I feel bad, make it better.

I can't change the settings because I wasn't the person who opened it so don't have admin rights, because you now need an Outlook account to turn the damn thing on. What's the option here, every workplace builds their own computers & runs Linux? Are we forced back to pen, paper, filing cabinets?

It genuinely worries me that the publicity around glorified chatbots has been so effective it may already be acting like a tower of Babel. Prescriptivism isn't the answer, but if we don't have an understanding of language we can't communicate effectively.