What Men Need to Be Ready to Talk About on a Date

Source: Pexels | Alex Green

Rejecting stigma and embracing mental health is on the rise for daters based on a national survey from the dating app Bumble.

Some 55 percent of respondents agreed that openness to talking about therapy experiences was important when dating.

The app sees self-care and mental health as a trend in attraction and has included “badges” that users can pin to their profile, a therapy badge included.

In a relationship landscape where competition is fierce for single men, should going to and talking about therapy be a new standard of valuing personal growth?

It’s not that simple.

Of many caveats to the general premise, here are two:

1. Most people don’t have access to high-quality mental health care. There are significant shortages of providers, from therapists to psychiatrists.
2. There are varying degrees of how normalized psychotherapy or counseling is across sociocultural and economic dimensions.

Therapy Is Becoming More Accepted in Dating

Yet, something is changing in the way men are showing up in dating. Masculinity is evolving. Men are challenging gender norms that are widely understood as one of the biggest barriers to therapy.

In a separate survey of over 14,000 worldwide Bumble users, almost 3 in 4 (74 percent) of men reported being focused on behavioral awareness and 52 percent said they embraced emotional expressiveness. Just under half indicated that challenging traditional masculine norms would be beneficial to them in their relationships—suggesting room for improvement.

Rates of therapy utilization by men still lag behind women, though both have increased since 2019. Men (from 13.1 percent to 17.8 percent) and women (from 23.8 percent to 28.6 percent) aged 18–44. There remains a significant gap in other countries, like the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere (Sagar-Ouriaghli and colleagues, 2019).

Men Are Challenging Traditional Masculine Norms

And while some may be concerned about shallow virtue-signaling, trying therapy at all has some baseline value given how few do it.

If you were dating someone who had gone to therapy, what might it suggest?

1. The effort to successfully find a provider covered by an insurer or one can afford and attend even short-term psychotherapy is evidence of initiative around self-growth.
2. The ability to establish a therapeutic relationship that requires a degree of comfort with self-disclosure and vulnerability, are both strengths in any healthy relationship.
3. Some practice identifying and more effectively communicating internal states (such as thoughts and feelings). Perhaps they'd even be more emotionally available.
4. The possibility they'd better understand their personality development and any problematic patterns in their past relationships, so as to not repeat them.
5. Awareness of any mental health challenges and their real impact (i.e., post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and so on).

Dating someone who has done therapy may also mean dating someone with a more serious mental health condition. In the first 6-12 months of dating, it is reasonable to share meaningful health concerns like these with a partner.

What Does It Mean if Your Date Has Been to Therapy?

In all, the trend toward self-care and mental health appears to be growing in the dating scene. Attending therapy is attractive to some, and at the very least, illustrates an inclination toward personal growth.

Standards around emotional expression, communication, and psychological mindedness continue to exert influence over an evolving masculinity and relationship landscape. Men can turn to therapy as a way to improve these skills and simultaneously become more desirable partners.

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