In a World Full of Performance, What Does It Mean to Truly Show Up?
- Amy Elkhoury
- Jul 5
- 4 min read
The Illusion of Closeness
Proximity is not connection. Sometimes, the loneliest seat is the one beside someone who cannot or will not truly meet you. In a world full of conversations, so much remains unsaid.
Recently, I have been hearing echoes of the same ache in different stories.
A friend told me about his new relationship. Only four months in, and already restless, he was scanning for faults. He texted me from their vacation. Later, over drinks, I asked how things were going.
“She’s great,” he said. “Maybe too into me.”
I reminded him how excited he had been in the beginning. He shrugged.
“I am not sure it is a long-term thing. She sleeps early. She complained during the trip.”
But I could sense it: the discomfort with closeness, the familiar push-pull. The nearer someone gets, the more he pulls away. I care about him, but I have seen this before, warmth, then retreat, interest, then hesitation, emotionally present only in glimpses.
Another friend told me that dating apps leave her more depleted than being single. “Everyone feels disconnected,” she said. “It is like they are performing interest but offering nothing real.”
Someone else I know has been dating a kind, attentive man for almost a year, but something is missing. Despite his gestures, his emotional presence stays out of reach. Intimacy feels like a room with the door half open, no matter how often she knocks.
These conversations linger. They point to something larger than personal experience. We are not just struggling with dating. We are struggling to connect.
Something in us is pulling away. Something in the culture teaches us to guard ourselves instead of relate. In that space of protection, something essential is quietly lost.
The Manosphere: Disconnection in the Name of Control
The manosphere includes online male communities like MGTOW, Red Pill, incels, and pick-up artists. Outwardly, they offer advice and male solidarity. At their core, many of these spaces revolve around grievance, especially toward women, feminism, and shifting gender roles.
Men often find these communities after feeling dismissed or directionless. Traditional masculinity no longer ensures belonging. The manosphere promises clarity, but often delivers control instead of connection.
Recommended:
The Femosphere: Empowerment that Becomes Strategy
On the other side, the femosphere has grown: from Female Dating Strategy forums to soft-life influencers and Divine Feminine spaces. These communities encourage women to raise their standards, protect their energy, and prioritize self-worth.
Many offer real healing, but some mirror the same rigidity they were born to resist. What begins as empowerment sometimes hardens into armour.
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What Both Sides Share: Emotional Distance
The language may differ, but the result is often the same: emotional disconnection.
We are taught to guard instead of open. We perform roles instead of reveal truth. Love becomes transactional. Vulnerability becomes a liability.
These digital subcultures act like modern rites of passage. Instead of guiding us toward maturity and intimacy, they lead us deeper into defense. As real-life rituals fade, the internet becomes our mirror. We trade presence for performance and start to mistake curation for connection.
The space between us is not empty. It is crowded with everything we do not say.
A Cultural Shift in Connection
Recently, Bumble announced layoffs affecting nearly 30 percent of its workforce, around 240 people, as part of a strategy that prioritizes user experience over growth. Many view this as a turning point: perhaps the era of endless swiping is beginning to fade.
For all their promises of connection, dating apps have made real intimacy feel disposable. The belief that the “next best person” is just a swipe away has made us more restless and hesitant to commit. Ghosting and breadcrumbing have become normalized, quietly shaping how we show up both on and offline.
Screens have given us convenience, but often at the cost of courage. The courage to risk, to approach, to be seen. The muscles we once used to connect face to face have grown weak.
Maybe it is time to meet differently. To risk awkwardness. To rediscover the joy of being approached and the power of approaching others with sincerity.
The Cost of Armour
The more we strategise how to win at relationships, the more we lose what makes them meaningful: presence, empathy, softness.
Loneliness is rising. Suspicion is growing. What is most needed, emotional courage, feels further away than ever.
Sometimes longing becomes obsession. The more connection is withheld, the more the mind circles the ache, hoping presence will resolve what absence cannot.
A Different Path
Perhaps what we need is not another strategy, but more sincerity.
Real strength might sound like this:
I do not want to perform connection. I want to feel it. I want to be met as I am.
Both the manosphere and femosphere are born from pain. Not all pain needs a solution. Some pain only needs to be witnessed.
Perhaps that is where connection begins.
You can be seen by many and still not feel known.
Obsession is the mind’s attempt to solve what only presence can heal.
Further Reading
🔗 The Reactionary Turn in Popular Feminism – Feminist Media Studies
🔗 Discursive Gender Constructions on Twitter – Feminism & Psychology
📘 Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
📘 The Incel Rebellion by Lisa Sugiura
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