After 50 First Dates, This Is How I Overcame The Ick

There has recently been a glut of conversation around women getting the “ick”, prompted by experts suggesting the phenomenon damages men’s mental health. It was the culmination of years of women on Instagram listing things which can put them off a man for ever: him licking his finger before turning a page, for example, or Shazaming a song in a nightclub.

The customary take among women is that if you get the ick, it is an irrevocable sign of incompatibility. But I’m not sure this is always true. I’d argue the ick is unhelpful for the women who feel it, as well as the men they spurn. It was my biggest problem in dating. And, in my experience, the ick can be overcome.

I am well aware it’s not very cool, but I keep a tally of dates in my iPhone Notes (if dating is a numbers game, I figure I should be doing the maths). Last autumn, I realised I’d gone on 50 first dates over the past two years, but never gone past date three with anyone.

Partly because it was the name of a film, partly because 50 is frankly a lot of first dates, I decided something needed to be done. At this rate, how would I meet anyone I liked? I decided to address the issue through therapy – talking through what went through my mind on dates or when I decided to turn down another date.

My therapist pointed out I was slightly revulsed by things that were minor. The most common trigger for me was men making bad jokes – as in, not racist jokes, but like: “ha ha, OK, erm, that’s not actually that funny.”

This in itself is a little bit funny, because firstly, it’s such a silly thing to be put off by – everyone makes bad jokes. Statistically it’s going to happen if you’re good-humoured enough to put jokes out into the world.

And secondly, because it is a slightly recognisable trait in straight men (the sheer scale of Hinge profiles featuring men doing stand-up comedy is testament to their self-avowed comedic talent).

I’ve always hated the very TikTok pop therapy-type assumption that people reject others in dating for fear of getting hurt. But my therapist pointed out that disgust is, evolution-wise, our body’s way of saying “get away from that thing, it might harm you”.

Disgust stops us from eating mud and consuming the pathogens inside. What I was doing was self-protection – it’s just that my fear happened to be ending up with the wrong person. Indeed, psychologists found as much in a recent study: people with “high disgust sensitivity” are more likely to feel the ick.

Part of my problem was that I had read too many articles by women in their forties who had turned over in bed one morning and wondered why on earth they’d married their husbands (which is how long-term relationships are disproportionately depicted in today’s media).

There’s also some childhood stuff in there – I’d had a brain tumour when I was four years old, and had probably learnt to put up protective barriers around myself from the caution with which people treated me after I had to have surgery.

I resisted this revelation with all my might. I argued with my therapist that men had rejected me too. Could it be, she suggested, that they sensed my aversion and were turned off by it?

I told friends, expecting them to be gobsmacked – and they laughed at the idea I’d had to go to therapy to figure out that I’m put off by ridiculous things. I started to recall incidents stretching back years. I’d once fancied a guy at work for weeks, and written him off after he finally spoke to me at the work Christmas party and I decided his voice was too high pitched. I was a study in absurdity.

I started to feel like a hopeless case, until I remembered that two-and-a-half years before, I’d had feelings for someone and we’d had a relationship. I had previously put this down to him being unlike anyone I’d met.

But I wonder if part of it was the fact we lived a few hours from each other, so dates had to last the whole weekend. I’d felt moments of uncertainty that we worked too – minor “icks”.

But I’d ride them out those troughs of attraction, because I couldn’t very well turf him out at 2am on Sunday morning. And I got icks less and less as I fell for him.

And so, a few months ago, I started to breathe through my discomfort on dates, when the occasional voice in my head told me to put down my knife and fork and sprint out of the restaurant. I did the whole mindfulness thing, and tried to observe my thoughts dispassionately: “there’s a feeling of judgement”.

I mostly refrained from asking other women about their opinions on my dates – I suspect the stickiness of the “ick” among millennial women arises from the legitimacy afforded by Instagram Reels about icks. When winter came, I got to four dates with someone (my friends congratulated me), then five.

Then, on holiday, I met someone I felt a romantic connection with for the first time in a long while. It taught me that when I’m not thinking about someone as a long-term partner, I’m not so sensitive to icks because I’m not afraid of committing to the wrong person – and I can realise I’ve met the right person.

It’s telling that the most frequent icks I hear listed by women are, for example, men trying to catch a ping-pong ball which won’t stop bouncing, or stamping near a pigeon and the pigeon not moving.

It seems to me they relate to situations where men are having a go and being vulnerable even if they won’t succeed, ie everything modern women are supposedly asking of men. Is it any wonder we’re having conversations about masculinity being in crisis; how young men are so confused about how to be in today’s world?

I’m still working on how open-minded I need to be in dating – some icks, like a guy being rude to a waitress, might be worth listening to. One of the hardest things to realise was that I could have really liked one person I rejected, and probably more besides – I’d been too blinkered by my judgement to see their wonder.

But mostly, I feel lucky to have discovered the ick isn’t some irremovable facet of modern dating. It’s something we can – and should – get over. Don’t believe those girls on TikTok.