can we trust our male friends?

What makes us think our male friends are better than the guys we’re dating?

It’s the end of 2024, and I just realized I’ve lost two male friends this year. I’m not sad about it; it’s probably been overdue for a while, but it recently came to mind again as I was contemplating about … life.

It’s been a year of tremendous growth for me as a feminist, and my bullshit radar has sharpened further. Before 2024, I was mostly a woman who gave men the benefit of the doubt, especially when it came to my male friends and no, I’m not proud of it.

I thought: Since they were my friends, they could do no harm to women, right? I never dated any of them, so I couldn’t say how they treated women from firsthand experience. I’d only seen it through their words, descriptions of fights, and what I had observed.

I saw the avoidant text messages he’d sent to his girlfriend while she was on her way to an artist residency. I heard the “Oh, but I never said we were monogamous” bullshit. And I heard him complain about her being “mentally unstable”. I’ve heard all these things from different guys, all at once and in varying orders. All these things happened right in front of me, and still, I kept being friends with the men in my life. Because I needed friends, and I liked them—as people. At least, I thought so. Until this year, when I spent more alone-time with them.

Candidate #1: the polyamorous soft-boi

Candidate #1 always had some shady fuckboy vibes that I couldn’t fully grasp, but I also found him intellectually stimulating. We could vent about each other’s situationships; he could tell me everything, and I could tell him everything—without judgment. Yet this year, he spilled some information that made me wary. “You know, T. was so angry when I went to this seminar with another woman,” he said. “But we didn’t even agree on being monogamous. Why is she acting all jealous then?”

I knew the woman he was talking about. She’s a kind-of-famous actress, and she definitely doesn’t give off “jealous girlfriend” vibes. Quite the opposite. She’s funny, confident, and I like her social media presence. While my “friend” kept badmouthing her, complaining about her blocking him after some unresolved arguments (he didn’t go into further detail), I wondered: “Hmm. Is it really the woman’s fault? Or did she just call him on his ENM bullshit?”

Candidate #1 was the quintessential polyamorous soft-boi—the type who wore his “ethical non-monogamy” label like a badge of honor, all while quietly collecting the emotional labor of every woman in his orbit. He was the guy who insisted he was clear about his intentions, yet somehow, the women he dated kept ending up hurt, confused, or just plain … done with him. And when they finally walked away or set boundaries, he acted like it was some inexplicable betrayal. As if they owed him an endless supply of patience just because he was “honest” about seeing other people.

But let’s be real: there’s a huge difference between transparency and accountability. Just because you tell someone you’re poly doesn’t mean you’re treating them with respect or consideration. This guy treated his “clarity” as a free pass to emotionally coast through relationships without ever checking if his behavior was sustainable for the women involved. He expected them to be chill, open-hearted, and perpetually understanding, but did he offer them the same grace?

From the way he treated me as a friend: I doubt it.

Candidate #2: the flaky boss type

The other candidate is a whole other caliber. He was in a relationship with a woman from Colombia for four years. They went back and forth for a while until she said she needed more stability and wanted to move in with him. He was fine with it—for a while.

Until it was actually time to move in and find a flat. Suddenly, he said he had fallen out of love and felt restricted in his “life choices.” I told him I was a bit surprised. In his case, I knew the woman personally, and to me, they looked like they’d been in love. “I can’t stand her nonsense anymore,” he said, already planning his exit in my presence. He broke up with her a month later. Is this really a coincidence? The moment she asked for stability, he suddenly realized he was out of love? Or was it the idea of commitment that terrified him, forcing him to find an excuse to escape?

People can fall out of love, and yes, people don’t always have the same expectations about a relationship. So why does this even bother me?

First of all, it’s how they badmouthed their partners. Candidate #1 made me think they had a clear agreement, yet certain things about the story didn’t add up. Also, I later realized he had badmouthed another woman I knew, whom he dated five years earlier, making her look like a complete lunatic. Candidate #2 screwed up his girlfriend’s plans (and life) because he suddenly fell out of love the moment she requested stability, safety, and a long-term prognosis. She would have married him! He, in his mid-thirties, thought it was too early and that he might find something better (he really said that to me!)—a woman who was more educated and didn’t get on his nerves with her “bipolar disorder.”

Yes. He said that. #RedFlag #RedFlag #RedFlag. Actually, both of these men tried to pathologize their ex-girlfriends, diagnosing them with all sorts of mental illnesses. They started googling symptoms and calling them “unstable” when their lack of stability probably stemmed from being with non-committal, flaky men.

How can you expect a woman to be happy and easy-going when you’re giving her such a hard time?

It’s wild how quickly some men resort to pathologizing their exes instead of taking a good, hard look at their own behavior. They go from “she’s amazing” to “she’s mentally unstable” in less than a few weeks. It’s like they think if they put a label on her, they get to erase all the ways they failed to show up, commit, or be honest. Instead of admitting, “Hey, maybe I was flaky, maybe I made her question her sanity by being inconsistent, avoidant, or downright disrespectful,” it’s easier to say, “She’s just crazy.” And just like that, they absolve themselves of any responsibility.

But here’s the thing: this pattern is so common it’s almost a cliché. It’s a tried-and-true method of deflection.

If she’s “unstable,” they don’t have to deal with the guilt of stringing her along or the consequences of their emotional immaturity. By calling her unhinged, they paint themselves as the reasonable one, the victim of her supposed irrationality, when really they’re just hiding behind a lazy narrative. The irony is, half the time, the behavior they call “unstable” is a perfectly rational reaction to being gaslit or misled. If you pull the rug out from under someone enough times, yeah, they’re going to stumble. That doesn’t make her unstable—it makes her human.

And let’s be real: it’s also about control. If they can convince others—and themselves—that she was the problem, they get to maintain their ego. They don’t have to confront the fact that maybe they’re the unstable ones, the ones incapable of making a clear decision or sticking to their word. These guys weaponize mental health terminology like it’s a shield, tossing out terms they barely understand, just to avoid admitting they hurt someone.

I couldn’t help but observe how they treated the women in their lives and realize how they also treated me. How I was often the one who reached out, the one who made time, despite not even sleeping with them. How I tried really, really hard to make those friendships with these complicated men work, for whatever reason, because we’d known each other since our early twenties.

And suddenly, I became disgusted. Just as disgusted as I was when I had dated those men—in different bodies, but with the same mindsets. Those guys could have been my non-committal boyfriends, my ENM-practicing situationships, my mental-health-breakers, if we had met at different points in my life.

2024

If I met them now, none of them would be sitting here with me. Not as a friend, not as a boyfriend, not even as a situationship. I can’t keep calling myself a feminist while defending them, standing in their presence, and allowing their one-sided shitshow to go unchecked, without acknowledging the voices of their victims.

And then I realized: I can’t trust my male friends. No.
Not after everything they’ve told me.