Here's another thing that I was just reminded of in this very thread, lmfao:

Men are expected to accept unsolicited advice at face value when they want to vent, because we're supposed to be the ones with all the answers, and if a man is complaining about a problem, then he's obviously just missing the answer.

This actually blew up my last relationship, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when my girlfriend at the time was stressed from being laid off and we weren't able to see each other due to the isolation orders.

She would try to vent to me about her problems, looking for support in a time of emotional vulnerability, and I, an inexperienced idiot just trying to be helpful, would suggest solutions that I thought she hadn't considered. If you can't guess exactly how that went, you've almost certainly never been in a serious relationship.

What made it worse is she would then say to stop mansplaining, which made me defensive because I thought she was tacitly accusing me of being intentionally misogynistic when I was honestly just trying to be helpful. At the time, I figured I just needed to adjust my approach a little bit, not completely change course. Unsurprisingly, that didn't work.

It was only in hindsight, some time after she had dumped my dumb ass, and I had blocked and deleted her number, that I was complaining to my friends and getting the exact same kind of thing back that I realized, "oh wow, I get it now, that is actually really fucking annoying and invalidating."

It was also around this time, while discussing my experiences with friends who have been diagnosed, that I realized that I might have ADHD. So that definitely hadn't helped.

In the extremely unlikely event you're reading this, K, I'm sorry. I figured out what I did wrong, just a little too late.