Blythe Roberson > Quotes

“Crushes are basically love energy within yourself that you use the idea of another person to access.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“men like to look down, blink a lot, and say in an extremely pained way that “You deserve better” because they’re trying to act like you’re both victims. He’s the one breaking up with you, which is his choice and what he wants, but by saying it’s for YOUR good he positions himself as deserving of sympathy. He can’t even let you have your pain because THIS IS FOR YOU and HE’S BEING SELF-SACRIFICING. It’s really fucked up and a little gaslight-y.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“To feel joyful about love, you have to feel that you’ve opted into it, not that you’ve been forced to participate in it through your decision to be born.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“Like, Plato’s Symposium contains a story about soul mates: human beings were originally four-legged, four-armed, two-faced beings who had immense strength and were always cartwheeling around, perfectly content. To prevent these powerful humans from taking over, the gods split each human into two, who then wandered the earth looking for their soul mates. That is … the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“But what is life but fifteen to one hundred years of becoming cocooned in societal bullshit, followed by zero to eighty-five years of sloughing off that bullshit through reading, therapy, and sitting on the edge of a lake thinking about your life and choices?”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“Even more than I hate commodifying myself, I hate men judging me as a commodity. For thousands of years, women have been throughout their lives reduced to their worth as sexual objects (slash domestic workers). We learn very early on to go to great lengths to increase our sexual value in the eyes of men, without even realizing that’s why we’re (for example) agonizing over whether our one snack for the day should be a pear or a seventy-calorie sugar-free yogurt. For years—much of my childhood and early twenties—I spent the largest portion of my conscious thought on food and how much I hated and was terrified of my body. It has taken a lot of work to divorce my view of my body and my feelings of romantic worthiness from outside sources. I’m afraid apps would undermine that effort.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“(And just like jam, men can be very sweet and are basically pointless on their own.)”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“The thing that, for me, triggers a realization that my life is hollow without [insert man] is the release of a new movie in a franchise or a season in a show that I had watched with some dude.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“Not every guy who is "hot" to me is going to be perfect, or even slightly good for me. In fact, the large majority are not. Even when they seem to be because they are 6'3", have a British accent, and also like the song Thunder Road by Bruce Springsting- I know, that's three whole things, how could this not be the person I'm meant to spend the rest of my life with?! As it turns out, the most important sign that someone is not right for you, isn't how they feel about Harry Styles or whether they have glasses that make them look like a professor, but whether or not they're interested in you.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“You don't need to be in love to count as a human”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“I now know that true chillness can also come from being so demoralized by American politics that you cannot care about men.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“It would entail eleven hours of driving all told, roughly equivalent to the amount of time I spend conscious in one day when I am feeling seasonally depressed. But I could do it, and I was energized by the realization that I would not have to drive through Nebraska.”
― Blythe Roberson, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled

“I was fed up with spending so many hours driving, an activity that is both very high stakes and also so boring.”
― Blythe Roberson, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled

“Honestly, it’s not the responsibility of the oppressed person to constantly explain the details of their oppression to their oppressor, and it’s not like oppressors don’t have the same Google everyone else does.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“Just as every billionaire is a policy failure, I see every person of any gender identity on top of a truly dangerous mountain as a failure of toxic masculinity.”
― Blythe Roberson, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled

“But just getting rid of negative thoughts isn’t the same as being joyful. Being devoid of negativity is more like successfully “being chill,” a relationship stage that inspires not spontaneous dancing and smiles but a lot of lying completely still on the couch next to but not looking at your phone.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“If there’s one thing I learned studying English for four years, it’s that you can interpret any text any way you want, and if you interpret it through a Marxist lens you will get an A.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“When you've had the kind of breakup where only 51% of you wants to split, looking at photos of you person on Instagram can be a healthy way to manage the 49% of the time that you want to get back together with them.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“But I found that eventually it becomes clear that they broke up with you because they wanted to, and it wasn't a mistake, and by giving them another chance, you're just causing pain for yourself and for everyone who has to deal with the two of you.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“As Lady Gaga said, “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“It sometimes feels like men feel the need to assert their dominance over nature. Rich white men, who have no problems, climb mountains to see what having problems feels like.”
― Blythe Roberson, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled

“One time I Facebook friend requested a crush and he used that as an excuse to text me; I almost fainted. Conversely! I once followed on Twitter someone I had hooked up with, and he did not follow me back until I directly told him that he had an obligation to. If you frenched someone THAT WEEK then you have to follow them back on Twitter! It’s protocol!”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“To feel joyful about love, you have to feel that you’ve opted into it, not that you’ve been forced to participate in it”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“I was doing my absolute favorite thing, and since it was cold enough to wear a jaunty red beanie, I even got to look like a hot Steve Zissou while doing it. I hauled ass down the trail, completing my Junior Ranger activities along the way, listening to the sounds of nature and looking at plants and writing about my experience.”
― Blythe Roberson, America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled

“Everyone in the world secretly believes, if they are not the best person in the world, then one of the best. "No," you protest, "I'm a lazy piece of shit!" Maybe you truly think so, but in your most, inner soul, you also, incorrectly, believe that there is a realer, better version of you that only you know about because only you have access to your intentions and thoughts and to the whole universe inside of you.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“I am a goblin, sure, but only because I am small, mischievous, and greedy for gold and jewelry.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“Ideally, I want to write and think about MANY things over the course of my life,”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“It’s an especially essential skill in straight culture: women attracted to men have to selectively ignore the fact that their partner benefits from a culture that oppresses women and that he probably actively participates in that culture in many ways.”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men

“It seems to me that the meaning of life is to treat everyone with kindness and to be as joyful as possible”
― Blythe Roberson, How to Date Men When You Hate Men