Why do women only want someone who can make them laugh?

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz or fill out this form.

Dearest Hera, 

I’m a just-turned-50-year-old (looking younger though) straight male and I’m finding it difficult to meet new love interests.

One recurring theme I’m finding is that almost every female is particularly focused on finding someone who is “funny” or “can make me laugh”. What is going on here? I’m not interested in being a clown to make someone happy, you can hire one for that.

If this is the bar that someone sets at the beginning, where does the ability to have honest financial, life plans and heartfelt conversations and connections sit? Are these people interested in me as a human with thoughts and emotions, because this is becoming a serious turn off on 85-90% of profiles I see.

Kind regards, 

Not Your Clown

Dear Not Your Clown,

Women only want one thing, and it’s disgusting. 

Some people might recommend you shy away from using the word “females” in a dating context, as it has all the warmth and humanity of someone trying to source a rare breeding terrapin for their new aquarium, but I can see you are a serious person with an unusually literal heart, so I’m going to give it to you straight. The fact of the matter is, women are bad people. 

When they’re not eating flavoured probiotic yoghurts to improve their gut health, or taking notes during other people’s meetings, their baser natures soon reveal themselves, and you’ll find them furtively watching reruns of short form comedy sketches, or scrolling through the Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide on their phone when they think you’re not looking. 

Is there a biological reason why women are predisposed to joke-seeking behaviour? As we know, women (in addition to being notoriously hostile to heartfelt conversations) are actually missing the gland that allows them to produce humour, and so are forced to subsist off the jokes of others, like parasites, leeching men’s hard won witticisms and wry observations. When they’ve wrung you dry of every spare jape and wisecrack, they’ll leave you for some younger-looking younger man, with fresh and motile banter, and take half your punchlines in the divorce. 

It wasn’t always like this. In the past, a man’s ability to find true love rested chiefly on the amount of beans he was able to produce in a calendar year. Women were financially and morally obligated to eke what little humour they could out of daily life, such as laughing at funny sounding wind, or ugly corn. They made their own humour from scratch, out of recycled proverbs and used bible passages. 

Then we discovered women had the previously undetected ability to process invoice payments for municipal orchestras and prescribe antibiotics for sick birds, and society has never recovered. Now that women no longer have to rely on men to fulfil their innate biological need for hat-ribbons and geegaws, they’ve expanded their already burdensome list of romantic demands to include “having an alright personality”.

It’s gotten to a point where you can’t even go on a first date with someone and have an earnest conversation about your shared financial aspirations without them trying to wheedle some observational comedy out of you. The result is an epidemic of eligible young-looking men such as yourself, who have an abundance of humanity to offer. But these women don’t see you as human. They see you as a glorified pun dispenser. You can’t even change a lightbulb or go out for a drink with a priest, a rabbi and a motivational speaker without them turning it into some crass, tawdry witticism.

I know it’s tempting to cancel your Tinder account, but my advice is try not to take dating profiles too literally. People often use stock lines as an informal way to convey their personal values. You have to learn to read between the lines. When someone says they’re “looking for a best friend to have adventures with” they’re not expecting you to rock up with 20+ years of bushcraft experience, and a ticket to the Guatemalan jungle. Instead of saying “I am looking for someone with a positive and lighthearted attitude to life, with a propensity to laugh when things go wrong, because life is short and I would prefer to spend it with someone whose presence uplifts me and brings us both mutual joy and respite, unlike my last husband Craig,” they might say something like “I’m looking for someone who can make me laugh.”

I agree this is a fundamentally craven and selfish ask. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they expect your life to be a 24-hour Mr Bean Christmas special. It may simply mean they would prefer a partner who isn’t ideologically committed to making the rest of their lives a misery. 

But where does that leave the men who are looking for an unfunny wife? 

There are a few options.

The first is honesty. While it would be easier to simply force women to lower their standards (you can express your support for the proposed legislation here) it might be simpler to accept that you’re working with a limited pool of candidates, and edit your profile to reflect the fact that you’re looking for a humourless arrangement. You could also say you were saving your jokes until marriage, although women may become confused and think this is a joke. 

If your problem is one of confidence, you could try and improve your sense of humour, little by little. Start off small, with Christmas cracker jokes or humorous T-shirts, and work your way up to funny accents. 

If your opposition to humour is ideological, you could always try seeking out intentionally unfunny women, by hanging around funeral parlours or National Party fundraisers. 

Ultimately, you can’t change the values of others. But the important thing is not to give up hope. Plenty of unfunny people have found love. Elon Musk has been married three times. 

Try not to take dating profiles too literally. Go on a few dates, and see whether you click. If you get the sense that your date is a joke-digger, or she keeps trying to steer the conversation to funny topics, like dogs wearing hats, or dirty tables, you can walk away, head held high. And if that doesn’t work, you may have to outsource the problem, and hire a couple’s clown on the weekends.

Best of luck, 

Hera