Men are looking for love in the wrong places. I write about what women really want

September 20, 2026 — 4:30pm

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Recently, I spoke at the inaugural Readings Romance Festival in Melbourne, which sold out in 48 hours. One of my favourite Australian romance writers, Anita Heiss, opened by talking about why she writes about love. Authors and readers talked about sex, relationships and, on my panel, the “meet-cute”: the moment when two future lovers collide.

There was barely a man in sight.

Earlier this year, I spoke at Brisbane’s Blussh Romance Festival and saw the same thing: hundreds of women discussing exactly what they want from the people they date, and almost no men there to hear it.

It’s not that straight men don’t want to know what women want. I think they really do. They’re spending hours looking for answers in dating podcasts, watching YouTube videos promising to explain women and in the corners of the manosphere that don’t seem to like us very much.

I distinctly remember learning at school that when a boy insulted me, he might actually be “negging” me, a pickup technique popularised by Neil Strauss’ 2005 book The Game. Now we have “sexual market value”,........

© The Age