Zoe Strimpel - The Man Diet - One woman’s quest to end bad romance

Back at the beginning of 2010, when I became single again, I was all about the fast-food style of love, and warmly embraced the ‘many fish in the sea’ idea. I was a bit manic, going after men and saying yes to them as if it was my job to do so now that I was single, and – as I said above – supposedly ‘loving it’.

It was psychologist and relationships expert Dr Cecilia d’Felice who first recommended that I go on a ‘Man Diet’ after I told her about my experience of being single.

‘With each failed encounter – a man that doesn’t ask for a follow-up date, a guy that is rude, or a date you didn’t enjoy – there is the potential to lose self-esteem. Too many negative experiences will chip away at your self-worth leaving you feeling low and anxious about your date-ability.’

Dr Cecilia d’Felice, clinical psychologist and relationships expert, author of Dare to Be You

So, I hear you all ask, what is a Man Diet? Well, pure and simple, it’s a diet, in which you take a break from chowing down on men – literally and otherwise. You let them go. Forget about them. Instead, you focus on building up your sense of self-worth, your interests, your personhood. Your ‘you’. You relax, and give yourself a time out on dating, romantic timelines and so on.

I thought more about this brave idea. Could I do it? And ultimately, did I want to do it? I had to admit it sounded tempting and challenging in equal measure. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but equally, I sensed I’d benefit massively if I did. The Man Diet smacked of a path to somewhere good, not without its tiring uphills but generally pleasant and with interesting scenery along the way. It seemed like the kind of ride whose uphills would leave you with excellent, enviable glutes and thighs at the end of it.

I started not only to pay close attention to where I was going wrong, but to quietly observe my single friends’ behaviour, rather than just urging them to keep going in order to erase the bad taste of one unsatisfying encounter with another one. Of course we were all roughly going wrong in the same ways: giving ourselves away too much and to too many people, for no particularly good reason. Great men – potential life partners – don’t grow on trees these days (did they ever?) and you know them when you see them. We weren’t seeing them, so instead we channelled a Samantha from Sex and the City-style quantity-over-quality approach, and guess what: it wasn’t making us happy. Nor did it appear to be increasing the chances of meeting someone worthwhile – the types of guys we were attracting never really improved or changed.

And if we weren’t getting action – if we were in a ‘drought’ – we talked about that, using up our emotional energy. Follow-up dates with guys we didn’t particularly like spending time with – whether we met them online or elsewhere – bruised and eroded our self-esteem, too. With men or without them, we seemed to be defining ourselves in relation to men.

Who fancies you, how many hook-ups, shags, suggestive texts, Facebook come-ons or intrigues you can run up seem to be the single girl’s bread and butter (or rather, her high-carb fix). I began to see that, in reality, they’re our poison. Not because they are bad in themselves, but because they so easily become like drugs: without them, we feel crap, and when we have them we can only think of our next fix. Are we ever left feeling satisfied? Of course not.

Identity and the single woman: am I hot enough?

Hotness, like gold (only not nearly as solid), has become society’s most sought-after social and sexual currency.

In Female Chauvinist Pigs, a brilliant book, Ariel Levy states in no uncertain terms that the image-generated, ‘overheated thumping of sexuality’ in the West is far more about consumption than real human connection. Indeed, people spend a large amount of cash acquiring this glossy form of hotness.

As Maria, 31, puts it: ‘Everything comes down to: “Do you think I’m good looking or not?”’

Somewhere, nestled deep inside our brains, is the childhood idea that good things come to pretty girls. Namely: knights in shining armour; doting attention; popularity. So, lacking her knight as well as a range of good options, the single woman feels she has to prove to herself and others that she’s not single because she isn’t attractive. While being considered hot is a huge motivator for women of every romantic status, I think it’s an even more emotional concern for the single woman. We feel a bit like this: ‘Show me I am pretty enough so that I know I really am. Otherwise I’m afraid that people – myself included – will see my singleness as a function of subpar hotness. And that will crush me.’

The false promise of shagging like a man

We want to show we’re hot, and sex is one way we do it. But it has to be easy, breezy casual sex because we’re independent women and are led to believe that a good way to show independence is to shag a lot or outrageously.

Getting notches on the bedpost has become a widespread symbol of empowerment, but in my view a false one, because the quantity over quality equation doesn’t add up to happiness for most women. This conviction is based partly on my experience as a single person – numerous generous offerings of my body with little repayment of the friendly, caring or (God forbid) emotional variety. (Random Italian men with sub-zero IQs in hasty encounters in borrowed flats and drunken German cheaters in broom closets at parties may sound like rollicking fun but they lose their appeal very quickly.) It is also based on a whole host of research, some convincing, some not. After all, the last thing you need is male researchers saying that science shows women should be chaste while men should continue to enjoy rampaging the field because it’s in their DNA. And authors such as Natasha Walter in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism and Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender are excellently enraged on the topic of biological determinism and will convince any thinking woman to take prescriptive biological arguments with a rigorous pinch of salt. But there are grains of useful, fair evidence about women and sexual profligacy that can help substantiate what I have learned from experience and observation, of which more later.

The idea of ‘throttling up on power … and having sex like a man’ seduced a whole generation of young women through the delicious portal of Sex and the City. We thirsted to see Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and, of course, Samantha, the show’s proudest sexual figurehead, hilariously and frankly discussing, then actually having ‘sex like a man’ (their stated goal in the first episode). There was a kind of competitiveness to it, and many of us watching this and numerous other episodes in which the girls indulge in purely utilitarian sex (the norm for Samantha) felt an urge to chant ‘yeah!’ and fist pump the air. After all, it looked an awful lot like feminism – indeed, the casual and experimental sexual ideal presented in SATC helped define the kind of feminism known as ‘third wave’. US magazine Bust co-founder Debbie Stoller has said that in their quest for sexual fulfillment , the ‘lusty feminists of the third wave’ are leaving no stone unturned. Toys, techniques: we’re trying them all.

However, I think a friend of mine called Kristen, 32, presents a picture that’s closer to reality than the powerful one of clacking Manolos and perfectly coiffed just-had-sex hair in SATC:

‘There’s this expectation that we’re supposed to be having casual sex, that it doesn’t touch us – but it does. We see casual sex as empowerment. But when I was having “casual” sex with my flatmate, I would lie there sobbing in my room while he had sex next door with someone else. It didn’t feel all that empowered.’