This is one of those trainwreck personal essays that I can't let go of, despite it being a 35-minute podcast episode about a middle-aged women describing how she's bad at dating. Part of it is the fascination of it being honest enough to tell on its author while still omitting key details, part of it is wondering about the craft of writing in the year of our lord 20 and 25 when folks are out writing 14,000 word thinkpieces instead of taking the less embarrassing option of seeing a therapist (there is a therapist quoted in the article but it's her friend and she talks about "justify[ing] the phallus," so maybe it's not a given that it'll help).
The tl;dr:
- She and her now-ex-husband opened up their marriage (no details on how that conversation got started)
- She caught feels for her boyfriend despite him being up front about not committing
- She divorced her husband
- Boyfriend still didn't want to commit
- She started dating before the ink was even dry on the divorce papers
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I haven’t been dating long (just the other day my ex-husband and I received our Judgment of Divorce as an email attachment), but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.
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- The guys she dates either ghost her or beg off with lame excuses rather than "man up and [expletive] [sic] her"
- There's an aside where a former lover explains what's wrong with the essay and she ignores him
This isn't to say there isn't a lot of deserved frustration directed at heterosexual men in particular (hi, cishet dude here currently signaling my exemption from the tainted category of "men", please let me know if I'm doing a good job in the comments 
) and the dating scene in general, but resorting to "heterofatalism" seems like a rejection of having to do the work to create and sustain a relationship.
"you're doing a good job of signaling." - me, another cishet guy
I struggle to read articles in this genre, but I appreciate that they remind me it's often worse to feel lonely when you aren't alone.
I don't know what exactly it is that fascinates me about them but I was glued to the "Cat Person" controversy when it happened. I had kind of a rough go of dating after ending my first relationship, which lasted 6 years, in part because I just hadn't accumulated the necessary experience and in part because it seems like app-based dating is a recipe for messiness. I eventually met my current partner and things are going well, so it might be a little "there but for the grace of god."