A post landed in the LDS Dating - Midsingles Facebook group a few days ago. The original poster admitted upfront he had just reposted it from somewhere else to see how the LDS community would react. The premise was simple: what do you call a man who is handsome, smart, and helps out at home?
249 comments later, he had his answer. And it wasn't one answer. It was about 12 different answers, most of them emotionally loaded, a few of them funny, and at least one of them genuinely heartbreaking.
The women showed up in force. Some said a man who contributes at home is a "unicorn." A "myth." A "fairy tale." One woman put it flatly: "I can't call him because he doesn't exist." The men weren't quiet either. Several jumped in to say "sounds like me" — and then other men showed up to say they did everything right and still ended up alone, unappreciated, or served divorce papers.
All of that from a meme about dishes.
Scott and Laurie read the whole thread. And they have some thoughts.
The Word That Started Everything
Scott
Before we get to the feelings, let's talk about the word that lit the fuse.
"Helps out." That phrase did more damage in this thread than the original question. A woman in the comments named it plainly: "Why is a man 'helping' at home? You live there. It's just being an adult." Another commenter put it differently, saying she wants a man who understands the principle of stewardship, not one who acts like he's doing her a favor by loading the dishwasher.
She's not wrong. The language we use reveals the assumptions underneath it. When we say a man "helps out," we're implying that the baseline is hers and he's lending a hand. That framing is older than any of us, and it was baked into a lot of the relationship models many of us grew up with.
But here is what I'd also say to the women in that thread: if the word in a meme is enough to make the whole conversation about semantics instead of standards, you may be solving the wrong problem. The real question isn't what we call it. It's whether you're building something with someone who actually shows up, every day, for the whole thing. If you're screening men by vocabulary at this stage of life, you might be filtering out some genuinely good partners over a phrase they've never been asked to examine before.
Laurie
The word matters, and Scott is also right that it isn't everything.
What the debate over "helping" is really about is the mental load — the invisible labor of planning, tracking, anticipating, and managing a household that so often falls entirely on one person. And for a lot of women in that group, especially those coming out of long marriages where they carried that weight alone, the word "helping" lands like a slap. It signals that a man sees himself as a guest in his own home.
That pain is real. It deserves to be named. And it also cannot be the wall you build around yourself in midlife dating. You are allowed to want a true partner. You are absolutely allowed to say "I need someone who sees domestic life as ours, not mine with occasional backup." That's a healthy standard. But if you arrive on a first date already braced for disappointment, the man across from you is not going to be able to meet you. He'll just be a suspect.
The Men Who Feel Invisible
Scott
The other side of this thread was harder to read.
Several men in the comments were openly bitter. One said he had cooked, cleaned, and done laundry while his wife sat in front of the television doing nothing. Another described himself as "overlooked, unwanted, unappreciated, and regularly taken advantage of." A 3rd made a joke about a man who does all of that being "about to be served divorce papers."
I'm not going to dismiss those feelings. Some of those men genuinely gave a lot in marriages that still ended badly. That's a real wound.
But here's what I want to say to that group, and I'm going to say it plainly because I think they deserve plain talk: doing chores is not the same thing as being emotionally present. Showing up physically — cooking, cleaning, providing — without also doing the harder work of actually connecting, communicating, and being vulnerable does not guarantee a good marriage. It guarantees a functional household.
If you're sitting in a thread on the internet cataloging everything you did and how unappreciated you were, you are not ready to date again. Not because you're broken, but because you haven't finished processing what actually happened. And a new partner is going to feel the weight of all that unresolved score-keeping almost immediately.
Laurie
What Scott is describing has a clinical name: a covert contract. It's the pattern of doing things — good things, real things — not out of love or genuine desire to contribute, but as a kind of unspoken transaction. "I will do the dishes, and in return she will appreciate me, stay with me, love me the way I need to be loved." The problem is the other person never agreed to the contract. They don't even know it exists. And when the expected return doesn't come, the resentment that builds feels completely justified to the person holding it.
That resentment is one of the most reliable relationship killers there is.
The men who showed up in that thread with open wounds are not bad men. Many of them sound like they genuinely tried. But trying hard inside a framework that was never designed for real intimacy is still trying inside a broken framework. The chores weren't the problem. The covert contracts were. And the exit from that pattern isn't finding a woman who finally appreciates you enough. It's deciding to stop keeping score at all.
"A Unicorn." Let's Talk About That.
Laurie
The single most common response in that thread was some version of: a man like that doesn't exist.
Unicorn. Myth. Fairy tale. "I can't call him because he doesn't exist."
I understand why women say this. Most of them have been burned. Some of them were married for 20 years to someone who never once thought to ask what she needed. The disappointment is real and it is earned.
But I want to gently push back, because the belief that good partners are mythological creatures has consequences that go beyond protecting yourself from disappointment. When you genuinely believe something doesn't exist, you stop looking for it. More than that — you stop recognizing it when it shows up.
There is a principle that Joe Dispenza talks about in the context of how our brains work: we tend to find what we are wired to expect. The brain filters for confirmation of what it already believes. If you have spent years collecting evidence that good men are a fantasy, your brain is going to be very efficient at finding more evidence for that belief — and very slow to notice the quiet, steady, genuinely present man who is right in front of you.
The unicorn is not a statement about men. It's a statement about where you currently are in the healing process. And that process is worth finishing.
Scott
I'll add one thing to that.
The men in that thread who showed up to say "sounds like me" or "that's me" — and then got buried under a wave of "prove it" energy — probably felt exactly like they always do. Invisible.
There are good men out here. Men who cook and show up and still want to keep growing. The problem isn't that they don't exist. The problem is that a lot of them have also been hurt, and the midlife dating space rewards the loudest and most confident, not necessarily the best. Quiet, present men are easy to overlook when you're on high alert for disappointment.
That's worth sitting with.
What This Is Really About
Scott
That thread got 249 comments over a meme.
That doesn't happen because people are bored. That happens because the question underneath the meme — "does a truly equal, genuinely present partner exist for me?" — is one of the most loaded questions in the room for midlife singles. Especially for people who came out of long marriages shaped by clear gender role expectations. Especially for people who followed the script and still ended up alone.
The argument about "helping" versus "sharing" is a proxy war for a much deeper question: am I going to have to carry this alone again?
That fear is legitimate. But it also isn't a plan. And it's not a dating strategy.
Laurie
What I want for everyone in that thread — the women who are exhausted, the men who feel invisible, the people who have decided good partners are unicorns — is for them to get somewhere better than where they are right now.
That starts with separating the old story from the new chapter. The person who didn't see you in your last relationship is not the person sitting across from you at coffee. The marriage that ran on obligation and resentment is not the template for what comes next. You get to want something different. You get to build something different. But you cannot do that while you're still carrying the evidence log from the last one.
The best thing any of us can do is decide — clearly, consciously — what we actually want in a partner, communicate that with honesty and warmth, and let people show us who they are before we've already decided. Not naive optimism. Just enough openness to be surprised.
You deserve to be surprised.
And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
— Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we figured out that the unicorn wasn't missing — we just forgot to leave the door open.