What it's like to being a single girl after news stories like Gabby Petito

So, I want to say a couple things before I start this post. First off, I want to say that I mean no disrespect to any victim's family. I couldn't imagine what Gabby's family (or ant victim's family) is going through. Secondly, I don't want this to be the post bad guys use to trick women. Honestly if guys use this to trick women, women will figure it out eventually (hopefully before it's too late).

It was already hard to be single. It seems like every time I am single men have gone crazy or have gotten weirder. It also seems like there was an uptick in married men on the dating sites. That is honestly only a problem if the wife doesn't know or has a problem with it. There were also guys who only wanted one thing. These guys usually become pushy and awful. There's an entitlement with men that I never noticed until recently. Some men think just because they show you basic human decency that they are entitled to whatever they want. Most of the time they don't even give you basic human decency. I had one man that his first message to me was "hey want to meet up and have sex?"

Now with the coverage of the Gabby case we have what could happen to women fresh on our minds and it's scary. We all knew what could happen to women even before Gabby, there were so many women before her. Her case was even more difficult because the person who killed her was someone she was in a relationship with. Then he didn't even face justice because he killed himself.

What makes these cases worse is that we have people defending the killer and victim blaming Gabby. Saying things like "it was probably an accident" or "she shouldn't have stayed with him" is not helpful. What if she was trying to break up with him when she was killed. Also, it takes a lot of force and anger to strangle someone. We need to stop making excuses for terrible and deadly behavior from men. We also need to stop blaming the victims. We need to start teaching young men to not be killers, rapist, abusers and over all terrible men. If we can't do that maybe, we need to continue to teach our young ladies to physically fight back. Maybe then men will learn.

Now I know that men aren't always the problem. I know that women can rape, kill and abuse men and other women. None of us are safe. It's not just single people that in danger, people who are in any kind of relationship can be hurt, killed and raped. We have been taught what to do to be safe but when we say no men don't listen or get mad. Men also get mad when we use the tips we learned to stay safe.

Men just don't want to take no for an answer, and they hate for women to set boundaries. I also hate that bad behavior is being excused by people saying, "boys will be boys." That is not ok, boys need to be better! Men get excused but women get shamed for similar behavior. We also shouldn't have a double standard for men and women when it comes to behavior in dating. If women have to behave themselves than so should men.

Shortly after the Gabby story I decided to stop dating. It was for a couple of reasons, but the main reason was the way men treat women. I have yet to find a guy to treat me like a human.