‘You’re so clever,’ they said. ‘Bright as a button, so mature, a pleasure to teach.’ I could do anything if I set my mind to it. I was top of the class, queen of the heap. My mission in life? Do well at school. Please parents and teachers. Succeed.

At what? Or why? I never asked myself.

My currency was my mind. This valued me, ranked me high. I was smart. A good child. I would have a good life.

They never tell you about the gnawing emptiness of being alone, pushing thirty, your hyper-intellectualism a major turn off for every guy who gets close. They never explain that as a girl child, one of the most important phases in your life is the reproductive phase, when your body goes questing on a mission for a man, and without one you’re anxious, lost, hopeless, alone, a failure — stunted like a child. Something kicks in in a profound bodily way — it didn’t happen to me until I was 27, but now it won’t go away.

The quest for a man is silly to me intellectually. Don’t need no man, am strong, smart, independent — alone, scared, I need a man. I am so miserable without one. It is eating away at me because I have felt the fulfilment of having a loving partner in life, and that swelling sense of a shared future, of building something together, of a greater oneness, a strange kind of hormonal harmony, and without it there is such emptiness.

Coupling is life’s mission and I’ve cultivated the wrong skills. I’m assertive, have a masculine personality, insist on splitting bills, am rational, ambitious, call a spade a spade and have no time for flattery or beating about the bush. Blunt to a fault. This is not the woman men want. I also hate the thought of being pregnant and don’t want to be a mother. As the partner of a man this is your role. I don’t want to play it and they don’t want me.

You’ve set me up to fail.

Why didn’t you tell me it was going to be like this? Why tell me that the world was my oyster, and that being smart and educated was the way forward in life at the expense of being social, pretty, feminine? I have valorised my masculine traits and with them I have pushed away every great man I’ve known. I unsettle them, emasculate them, the script is violated. They don’t like this.

And it’s not realistic to expect them to change. Just as it’s not realistic to expect me to settle for someone less intelligent with nothing going for them in life. It defies evolutionary programming.

Why did they never teach us?

Girls and boys are equals. Yes, under the law. But we are not the same and the differences matter. We need each other. It is a marketplace. Value is exchanged. My value is not in my mind — some is, but not much. It is in my face, and my skin, and my womb, to be traded for status, security and love.

They never said.

To have a mind is good of course, but no need to go overboard. It is a hindrance. Should have thought more about how to be less driven and more congenial, bright and supportive. This is what the market demands.

I am so unhappy.

The traits are so ingrained. Can one overhaul one’s entire programming and personality? Become a proper woman? Have a place in a world where nothing is stable and loneliness is crippling?

I would have to have their babies and I won’t do it. Why should I? It’s a stupid, raw, goddamned deal. And for men too, who can’t find their Madonnas either because they’ve all turned cocksure feminists and because they only want the best men — the rest are trampled on like garbage. It’s truly awful that we don’t want so many men and send them on their way to the sexless scrap heap. An average man has to work very hard to get a woman to take him seriously and a below average man is the subject of scorn. This is awful for us and awful for you.

The feminists were wrong. They lied. Nobody gets to have it all. The manosphere’s gone warped. Women aren’t shallow as fuck bitches. But they’re both right, it sucks on both sides, can’t you see that? The young, the rich and the beautiful are the only winners, and even then, only up to a point.

Tell your children the truth next time. Our gender and sexual orientation will define our lives in major ways. Our attractiveness to the other sex (or same sex as it happens), whether physical, or status bound, will have one of the biggest impacts on our happiness and wellbeing in life.

‘Don’t need no man schtick.’ That’s utter bullshit. Women need men and men need women and the world needs men and women to be together otherwise shit gets ugly. Men without women are not a good thing. Women without men are less dangerous, but they are sad, bitter, lonely creatures.

Don’t be alone.

Sure, but it’s a numbers game and not everyone has a choice. They never mentioned hypergamy. They never said being a doctor’s great and all, but how exactly will you ‘mate up’ from there? Female doctors have it tough because many of their male comrades marry down. Engineers and physicists the same. They are intimidating women and this will be a hindrance to them in the mating game. Maybe in the end a partner and kids will matter more to them than some reinforced concrete, or protons in a particle accelerator? At the very least this is worth considering early on.

I never considered it and now I find myself frantically rewriting my expectations late in the game. I put all my eggs in the smarts basket. This wasn’t smart because the eggs are rotting. I am not going to pretend I don’t care and that I’m happy just as I am.