"Help! I've fallen in love with a guy with a mullet who is afraid of commitment!"
Why do so many men claim they’re ‘looking for a long-term relationship, but open to short’ these days—and what does it reveal about their reluctance to commit?
I started this piece as a casual rant in my Notes app—the place I always go to vent—but it quickly spiralled into a full-blown exploration of one facet of modern romance that’s been bothering me lately: men’s ambiguity when it comes to their dating app bios—and, more generally, commitment. I’ve centred this essay on indecision, FOMO, vulnerability, the necessity of honesty in dating, and, of course, the enigma that is ‘Tim from Hinge’. If you’ve ever wondered why so many guys seem ‘open to short’, read on.
FALLING IN LOVE WHILE EATING PAD SEE EW
Picture this: It’s Sunday night. You’re prone on your sofa, getting the occasional whiff of lemongrass and peanuts from the half-empty Thai takeaway container resting beside you on the floor as you scroll Hinge. “Ugh,” you say to your housemate. “Why are all the good ones taken? Be honest, am I going to die alone?”
But then—WHAM!—you have a match! And oh, what a match it is. As if God Himself has heard your pleas and finally decided to bestow upon you a favour, there he is: your dream man, a man probably named Tim, coming to you live from the depths of your cracked iPhone screen.
Tim’s got that perfectly tousled, just-rolled-out-of-bed hair, maybe even a bit of a mullet, a couple of strategically-placed tattoos peeking out from under a loosely buttoned linen shirt that hangs off his frame just so, and a pair of well-worn Doc Martens Oxfords that have definitely seen the inside of every bathroom stall in every DIY music venue in Dalston.
His profile says he’s six-foot-four, includes one strategically-placed meme to show that he’s funny, but in a cool, down-to-earth, and culturally relevant kind of way, and woven into one of his prompt answers is his love for ‘80s synthwave, mentioned casually enough that it’s as endearing as it is mildly pretentious. Bingo. This guy is the whole indie package.
“He’s perfect,” you say as you trace an oily finger over his pixelated face. You’re intrigued—no, you’re more than intrigued. Is this—do you even dare think it?—love at first scroll?
You at once start to imagine you and Tim’s future together: there you are in the front row of his shows, swaying to the songs he’s written about you for his bootleg Tame Impala-sounding band, sharing rollies in pub gardens as you argue over whether The Talking Heads or The Cure had a bigger influence on the current music scene, getting married.
But before you go to ‘Start the Conversation’ with Tim—the conversation that will be the first step in a lifelong commitment to your future husband and his vinyl collection—you read over his profile again, taking in the photos of him looking rugged but in a way that screams “Yeah, I’ve read David Foster Wallace—but I’ve also skimmed some Joan Didion”. There, you see something shocking. So shocking, you nearly fall off the sofa.
There in Tim’s bio, below his height and age, it reads: “Looking for a long-term relationship, open to short.”
Gasp! Cue the record scratch. You wipe the shrimp pad see ew grease from your screen and turn up the brightness so you can reread Tim’s profile again.
“O God!” you cry. “Why hath thou forsaken me?”
But no, your eyes have not deceived you, and neither has God. (Okay, maybe God has a little.) It’s still there, plain as day, what Tim’s looking for in a relationship, spelled out for you and every other woman on Hinge: “Looking for a long-term relationship, open to short.”
No, it can’t be — O! What agony! O! What misery! You probably won’t be heading to Tim’s gigs or down the aisle after all. Your indie house of cards has come tumbling down.
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” you ask yourself as you reach for the pad see ew and stab a shrimp with your fork.
I’m sorry to say it, but your perfect artsy softboy dreamboat just committed one of the most subtly devastating crimes against both dating apps and modern dating today, the kind that dashes your dreams of having an Alex Turner/Alexa Chung romance of your own, but he’s not the only one.
No, it is an offence that seems to plague the majority of the Hinge profiles and minds of twenty- and thirtysomething men today—the vague, ambiguous, succinct description of their relationship wants: “Looking for a long-term relationship, open to short.”
TIM FROM HINGE WHY WON’T YOU ANSWER ME
How I detest the “long-term relationship, open to short” self-description. To me, this kind of vague, noncommittal statement feels like the ultimate hedge, a way to seem serious enough for those who want commitment, while still being available for something more casual. It’s like ordering a salad but being ‘open’ to fries on the side—eventually, you’re going to have to decide if you’re sticking to your diet or not. To put it in simpler terms, the line is just confusing as hell.
Whenever I see this statement on a man’s profile or hear it in real life, I imagine myself in one-sided conversation with him: “Really, Tim from Hinge? What does that even mean? And, be honest, are you actually trying to plan a future or are you just seeing how your weekend goes? What kind of sick and twisted mind games are you playing at right now?”
Obviously, as this conversation is taking place wholly in my head, I can never get a straight answer from the elusive, sexy, and unknowable Tim who lives rent-free in my mind. Maybe he won’t answer because he can’t explain himself, or, that my imaginary conversations with Tim mean I have probably gone insane from having dated one too many ‘long-term, open to short’ types of men, these Tims from Hinge. Or perhaps it’s because he’s ghosted me—and in my own head at that! the cheek of him!—as he “isn’t really looking for anything serious right now” and wants out of my brain. Who knows why he won’t tell me anything? Jury’s out.
But, okay—hang on. Maybe we can figure out what these men are trying to tell us without having to ask the Tim from Hinge who lives in my head questions he likely won’t ever answer. Let’s break it down.
NURSE, HE’S SUFFERING FROM ACUTE FOMO AGAIN
One reason men might say they’re looking for something long-term but are ‘open to short’ is because they’re afraid of missing out. (We are living through the Age of FOMO, after all.) Perhaps men think that, by saying they’re open to a short-term thing, they won’t scare off someone who’s just looking for something casual, but by saying they’re looking for a long-term relationship, they won’t miss out on a potential girlfriend. By being open to everything, the Tims from Hinge think, they won’t miss out on anything.
Oh, I can hear the Tims from Hinge now: “I’m down for whatever,” they say. “Just as long as I don’t have to decide right now, because I don’t know what I want. And, as long as I don’t feel like I’m going to miss out on something else—well, someone else, ha ha—it all works out.” In their ‘I’m-serious-but-not-too-serious’ justifications, they’re trying to play it cool whilst still keeping their options as open as possible, just in case.
But that’s not how it works, really, is it, guys? No, instead, this reaction to dating FOMO has a more twisted final result: by being open to anything, in the end, you just wind up missing out on everything. (Like me, or the girl on the sofa who also happens to be me! The potential love of your life!)
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO ORDER AT THE STEAKHOUSE AND I’M MAKING IT YOUR PROBLEM
Let’s put aside the FOMO argument for a minute, and consider that the reason for this indecision could be that, in its current landscape, modern dating has made it hard for us all to figure out what we really want. With endless swipes and options, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by choice and get distracted from the person in front of you.
It’s easier to not know what you want when you’re never quite forced to interrogate your desires due to this constant bombardment of choice, which, in turn, makes it even easier to simply not think about what you want as you forge ahead in the dating world, because you assume you’ll simply be able to figure it out someday down the line with the help of someone else—someone more assured than you—who’ll make it make sense to you. For now, all you have to do is simply live in the disjointed excitement of the present moment, flying by the seat of your chocolate brown corduroy Carhartt pants.
But here’s the problem with that logic: if you don’t know what you want, how can anyone else? It’s like walking into a steakhouse, deliberating over the ribeye or the T-bone, and then, instead of choosing something, you tell the waiter you’ll just have whatever she recommends. You can’t get angry and skip out on the waiter’s tip when she serves you a side-plate of boiled asparagus for dinner because the waiter’s a vegan. And, even if the waiter wasn’t plant-based, how would she know you wanted that plate of medium-rare ribeye with a side of creamed spinach you saw her serve another diner? She doesn’t know you or your life! Look at the menu, figure out if you’re even hungry, and then decide what you want. This way, you get your ribeye with creamed spinach, and the vegan waiter gets her tip. Everyone’s happy. Isn’t that better? Easier?
This kind of ‘indecision-at-the-steakhouse’ mode of thinking leaves the rest of us—well, the rest of me—guessing. Suddenly, it’s on you, the waiter, to figure out if they’re in for sides or steak, a fling or a future, while they casually shrug their way out of making a decision. I want to ask these Tims from Hinge if they’re genuinely open to different possibilities, or if they’re just afraid to say they’re actually looking for something serious? Or worse yet, are they simply too lazy to really think about—and then stick to—what they want? This ambivalence and ambiguity doesn’t do anyone any favours. Like I said, it’s confusing and, frankly, feels a bit disingenuous.
BECAUSE MEN’S HEARTS BREAK TOO
Okay, let’s get empathetic for a second. Modern dating isn’t exactly a picnic, and it’s not just women who feel the sting. The reality is, men’s hearts break too—and maybe more often than we think.
It’s easy for many of us to believe that most men are little more than strange, wishy-washy freaks, but maybe, like us, they’re actually just scared. Maybe Tim from Hinge’s ex left him because she didn’t want to date the guy whose band SOUNDS like Tame Impala, she wanted to date the guy whose band IS Tame Impala. Maybe he got rejected by one woman because she wasn’t into the mullet he’d just grown in and then ghosted by another who hated when he talked about The Talking Heads versus The Cure because she only listens to Chopin. You don’t know, and definitely I don’t know.
While we’ve made recent progress in addressing this issue, we still today don’t often speak about the pressure men face to “man up” and not show their feelings. When they do let their guard down and then get burned, maybe they feel hostage to their vulnerability and the requisite sadness that comes with being dumped or spurned. Maybe the Tims from Hinge sit on the fence of commitment because they really are just scared of getting hurt again, scared of putting themselves out there only to have their feelings tossed aside, scared of getting their little man hearts broken. But, instead of addressing it—their fears, their feelings—they instead stoically, “masculinely”, push them away.
As we sit there, open and trying to connect, they’re across from us but a million miles away, too busy preemptively avoiding heartbreak, building walls around themselves taller than the Tower of Babel—mysterious, aloof, and impossible to scale. Perhaps to them it feels easier to say they’re ‘open to short’ than to admit they’re terrified of what will happen when the walls finally come down and someone gets close enough to hurt them again, I don’t know. When you really think about it, it comes as no surprise as to why the Tims of Hinge often opt to play it safe by being ‘open to short’.
This isn’t to say it’s still not frustrating trying to decipher their mixed signals. But maybe there’s something softer behind them, like a bruised heart that’s just trying to heal. Maybe these Tims from Hinge are just as lost and vulnerable as the rest of us, and “Looking for a long-term relationship, open to short” is their way of saying, “I want love, but I’m terrified of getting hurt again.” Though maybe hard to believe, the Tims of Hinge are human, too, just like you and me.
So yes, men’s hearts break too. And sometimes, that’s why they’re hanging out in this grey area, even if it leaves some of us feeling like we’re stuck in some kind of ‘dating-but-not-really-ugh-I-don’t-know’ purgatory.
I’M SORRY, I CAN’T—DON’T HATE ME (BUT YOU SHOULD’VE GUESSED)
Though men might suffer from acute symptoms of FOMO or anxiety over the prospect of a broken heart just like the rest of us, there is a final, more common, and, if I’m being honest, most likely reason for men’s “Long-term, open to short” line: some men are just not that serious about dating at all.
Maybe they’re on Hinge for the easy ego boost and the validation that comes with a match. If they can get sex after a second date too, then great, that’s the ultimate bonus, the cherry on top of a casual dater’s sundae—because, in the end, these Tims from Hinge are not actually looking to invest time or emotions in someone.
Indeed, for the men unserious about love, dating, and romance, the ‘open to short’ part of their line is like an escape hatch, a way to keep things light and non-committal without having to explicitly say, after a couple of dates or a few months of seeing someone, “I’m sorry, I can’t—don’t hate me. But also, while I have you, I did say that I’m not looking for anything serious right now, so, uh, it’s kind of on you.”
WE ALL WOULD BE HAPPIER IF WE ALL COULD BE HONEST
In the end, the “long-term, open to short” line leaves the rest of us—the women considering these men and their romantic potential—wondering what they’re really after. Their ambiguous, milquetoast declaration suspends us all in that weird grey area I mentioned before, and only leads to frustration for anyone who knows what they want and is looking for someone on the same page. Something has to change, or, at least, some people do.
“But how?” ask the twenty- and thirty something Tims of Hinge living in my head and in this “looking for long-term, open to short” limbo.
Well, I’ll tell you. While you likely won’t take it, here’s my advice anyway: to change your Hamlet-esque “to date or not to date” ideas on commitment, figure out what you actually want before you put it in your bio—or start dating altogether.
“But how can I just ‘figure it out’?” they wonder aloud. “And besides, doesn’t my saying that I’m looking for something serious but still open for some short-term fun make me seem irresistible and chill?”
To put it bluntly, guys, no. Your “long-term, open to short” line is neither charming nor mysterious—it’s just feeble and annoying. It also likely won’t get you what you probably want—what we all really want—at the end of the day: a sense of closeness, of acceptance, of real intimacy. It’s okay to want those things and then go after them—you just have to reckon with it first, and then admit it to yourselves after.
“Yeah, so I’ve ‘reckoned with it’ like you suggested,” say a few of the Tims after some deliberation. “But I actually don’t think I have time for a relationship right now. I’m juggling my band and my time in the pub, so a girlfriend doesn’t really slot in right now. I’d hook up with someone, though.”
Okay look, if you really don’t want anything serious, that’s fine too—but have the goodness to be upfront about it. We—the women you match with and date—would probably respect you more for it. And, who knows? You might find yourselves happier in the long run, because you’re creating great and worthwhile connections built on trust and the truth, even if they’re short-term.
So please, let’s keep it real, gentlemen, the Tims from Hinge. You are too old for lacklustre indecision and we women are too smart for unexamined vagueness. Just order your ribeye with creamed spinach and stick to it. Your future girlfriend (or, you know, that “short-term thing” you’re open to)—the one in her sweats eating shrimp pad see ew and laughing with her housemate on a Sunday night—will thank you. (And probably, somehow still, fall in love with you, your mullet, and your vinyl collection anyway.)
Liked the essay? Share it with your friends or subscribe to Anto Aesthetics. Thank you!