Female friendships form the architecture of our expectations, cultivating a standard of constant care that often goes unnoticed. A scroll through TikTok is no longer just mindless entertainment; it moves with an almost psychic precision, reflecting, amplifying, and predicting the crises simmering beneath the surface of your life. The algorithm senses the storm before it hits.
A scroll no longer exists outside the warping of your mind—it is a co-conspirator shaping what you feel, what you worry about, and what you notice. Through memes, mantras, and micro-narratives, it becomes a whimsical, humorous, and uncomfortably prophetic space.
And now, TikTok has a new mantra: “A good man is an average woman.”
Six words land like an unnamed revelation. TikTok compresses centuries of relational imbalance into one shareable truth, both funny and exasperating. Women laugh and nod, recognizing that the care, consistency, and empathy they’ve long practiced in friendships has suddenly become the bare minimum for men. TikTok names this realization, creating a phrase that crystallizes women’s frustration, humor, and resilience.
Decoding the digital mantra
Frustrations about relationships and the impulse to share them publicly are not new; their ancestors show up in gossip sessions, late-night venting over iced lattes, diary entries, and even love letters folded into school notebooks. What is new is the scale, immediacy, and digital choreography. TikTok turns private exasperation into a collective, scrollable experience where millions can witness, react, and riff in real time.
The latest mantra, “A good man is an average woman,” is the culmination of this evolution: a viral insight that names centuries of relational imbalance. It gives women a public space to exhale, nod, and laugh at what they’ve long known.
On the surface, it’s funny—a meme-sized punchline that gets a collective ugh, finally from women everywhere. The mantra spotlights a clear discrepancy in the qualities typically exhibited by men and women. Women have long performed tasks and exhibited thoughtful behavior–remembering birthdays, checking in on friends, smoothing conflicts, and offering empathy and consistency. These are the baseline behaviors that women cultivate and celebrate in their friendships. They are small but vital acts that keep relationships alive and thriving.
The “A good man is an average man” mantra captures a quiet, long-brewing dissatisfaction that women have felt for years. It calls out an imbalance: Society normalizes women’s effort while praising men for the same behavior.
Before dating, there’s friendship
Female friendships function like a primordial pouch: They hold us before we can articulate what we feel. They assemble our firsts, tuck them away, and return them to us again and again, carrying them forward as permanent fixtures beyond their moment of creation. What we gather here does not dissipate; it accumulates and shapes how we recognize and express intimacy.
If female friendships are the tethering and attunement of love—teaching us how to aim, land, and carry care—then these skills follow us into every romantic encounter. A meta-analysis of adolescent relationship research found that while friendship quality does not determine whether adolescents enter romantic relationships, it does carry into them. The patterns formed early—trust, reciprocity, emotional steadiness—tend to resurface in how intimacy is experienced later on.
Adolescents also report more conflict and emotional turbulence in romantic relationships than in friendships, where care is often more consistent and less conditional. Youth, in this sense, becomes a deposit of marvelous things and early intensities—a space where firsts accumulate and emotional ways of being with others are quietly stored through friendship, even as they are later tested in romance. The articulation of love in adolescence, then, should not be considered absent or inauthentic; instead, it belongs to the very fabric of how youth learns, misreads, and rehearses closeness.
Friendships are not simply a prelude–they are the training ground. They are the repeated practice of noticing, responding, and remembering. They teach us how to hold space for one another, calibrate our gestures, and carry connection forward. Before dating, female relationships shape how love is performed, felt, and recognized.
Female friendship as a laboratory for love
The growing sentiment that “a good man is just an average woman” doesn’t emerge in a vacuum; it stems from the intimacy of female friendship. Women consistently practice emotional literacy, attentiveness, and care with one another, setting the standard by which they judge heterosexual relationships. Against that baseline, what people celebrate as exceptional in men appears ordinary within female friendships.
Pop culture siphons what people have cautiously articulated and turns it into something legible and hard to dismiss. Dove Cameron’s song “Boyfriend” encapsulates this dynamic in deceptively simple language: “I could do it better.” The line does not express arrogance so much as recognition; it names a feeling of emotional competence that has already been learned. It reflects lived experience and a familiarity with standards of care established in women’s friendships, where listening is mutual, care is consistent, and emotional labor is shared rather than rationed. The lyric’s force lies in its simplicity: It does not explain care, but it assumes that you know what it feels like when it is done correctly.
This is where bell hooks’ framework in All About Love becomes useful. Hooks defines love not as an abstract feeling but as a sustained practice built through attentiveness, responsibility, commitment, and the ongoing maintenance of emotional presence. Within this framework, what appears in pop culture as a passing lyric or aesthetic sentiment is not merely surface-level expression but a translation: the conversion of lived, practiced forms of care into something publicly discernible.
In female friendships, the blueprint of intimacy is drafted quietly, rigorously, and unapologetically. Here, the ordinary is exceptional—and the exceptional, unnoticed elsewhere, is baseline.
Inside the circle
In the modern dating scene, women typically occupy the periphery—helping friends decode texts, offering perspective, and supplying voices of reason as they navigate apps and dates.
I spoke with Emily, a 21-year-old English and American Studies major at the University of Texas at El Paso. A creative writing enthusiast and frequent open mic attendee, she is active on dating apps and surrounded by a large group of female friends she calls the “puppeteers of expectations.”
Despite being part of a tightly knit circle dominated by women, Emily acknowledges moments when women—including herself—have faltered or found themselves in precarious or compromising situations. She emphasizes how her friendships step in to course-correct, providing perspective and support that prevent small mistakes from becoming lasting setbacks.
“I think I would still be with men who didn’t love me. A lot of men I’ve been with mostly sought me out when they wanted to sexually relieve themselves, or relied on me to praise them and feed their ego.”
Romantic relationships, then, have become an archive– not of men’s efforts where they have excelled, but a site for identifying the fundamental role of women’s friendships. They reveal the potential that has long existed in platonic bonds, now finally visible within the context of dating.
“[Standards] stem from womanhood. Oftentimes the standard for a man is rooted in actions: opening doors, buying flowers, paying for the date. Anybody with access to money can do these things, granted it may look differently depending on their social class. It takes a specific man to be there emotionally, to listen intently, [and] to show up when needed.”
The praise gap: where bare minimum meets exceptional
Praise moves like currency—circulated, exchanged, and often expected. Yet the labor that sustains intimacy rarely enters that economy. The unacknowledged work women devote to sustaining friendship—the checking in, the remembering, the quiet, persistent act of preservation—becomes the ground on which others stand. What remains is a kinship that appears effortless, distributing care with ease, its architecture obscured by its own seamlessness.
Sociologists Candace West and Don Zimmerman remind us that gender is not a fixed state, but an ongoing performance—stitched together through the rituals of everyday life. Care, attentiveness, and emotional responsiveness are gestures that accrue meaning over time. Shaped by expectation and consistently assigned to women, these gestures begin to feel natural, inevitable, and unremarkable.
But no performance exists without an audience. Gender is read, interpreted, and measured in real time. The same gestures—checking in, remembering, offering care—shift under the weight of whoever is performing them. In women, they dissolve into the background, absorbed into expectation. In men, they surface, sharpened into evidence of effort and recast as something worthy of note.
This is the praise gap: Women’s labor establishes such a high baseline that it becomes invisible, while ordinary behavior in men is recast as exceptional.
The invisible benchmark
If TikTok were a professor, it would grade emotional labor on a curve. Scroll through your For You Page, and the lesson is unavoidable: Basic decency in men is headline-worthy, while women performing the same behaviors are taken for granted. And somewhere between the text overlays and stitched reactions, a phrase appears, delivering a syllabus for modern dating: “A good man is an average woman.”
Imagine dating in a world that recognizes relational labor, care, and emotional attentiveness equally. Applause goes to anyone fluent in your inner life—not people who are bound by timelines or surface gestures, but who are attuned to your emotions and able to validate your perspective.
