Hors d’oeuvres

How are you doing? Are you with me so far? Or were you thrown into panic by the opening list of words I threw in for as yet no apparent reason? Could you read them? Could you pronounce them? If so, congratulations – you need have no fear of the new trend on TikTok, which is to subject your partner to The llliterate Boyfriend Test, which comprises this choice little set along with several more phonetic traps for usually male heterosexuals to provide the internet with laughs.

I have SO many questions.

Ethical first, though to be honest when it comes to worrying too much about men, I… don’t. But. I do feel morally bound to voice at least a slight hesitation about the rightness of exploiting people’s ignorance, especially just for social media clout. On the other hand, if there’s anything more satisfying than seeing a smug smile wiped off the face of someone who thinks he has just scored one hundred per cent when in fact he thinks it’s pronounced “foo-cha” or “qiw-ee”, then I have not seen it.

Other questions vex me more. Like how, even allowing for selection bias – if we assume that most girlfriends are administering the test because they think their men will trip up and thus provide content – there can be so many more female halves of couples than male who know how to pronounce these items?

One answer could lie in the fact that for the first time in history the oft-researched and reported “intelligence gap” in dating and marriage has recently reversed. It used to be the case that highly-educated men married less-educated women (I know that intelligence is not the same as education – but “intelligence gap” is the shorthand sociologists traditionally use and that is why there are quotation marks around it). Now, thanks to the barriers to (Western) female education falling and women availing themselves of the opportunities hitherto denied them, it is the other way around.  

And yet, my mind keeps snagging on the fact that the test relies on knowing how a word is pronounced. And my theory is that this is the men’s weak spot because language is a social skill and men are comparatively less good at it than women. Word pronunciation in particular relies on conversation (Many! Varied! Ranging across topics, oftentimes taking in the ineffable and abstract, thus covering vast tracts of vocabularylands!), communication, alertness to what others are saying, a willingness to listen and a sort of permanent associative state that allows you to cross-fertilise matters in your mind. Do you see where I’m going with this?

These are the kind of skills – called “soft” better called “vital to the development and maintenance of humanity and civilisation now that all the lands we need have been conquered, all the immediate bears killed and all the buildings built” – at which women have historically been and remain better. They are the kind of skills intimately allied to carrying out (and being burdened with) the emotional labour that helps keep a relationship functioning.

And then I have to consider my more immediate response to learning of the new trend, which arrived quicker than any conscious thought. And that response was joy. Joy, mixed with relief. Because, as I watched the reels unfurl I knew I was looking at girlfriends who were not afraid of their boyfriends. Who must, each one of them, be confident enough in themselves and their relationships not to fear that their test subject – the soon-to-be-humiliated-and-put-on-the-internet test subject – will turn on them as a result.

If that sounds like a happy ending, I apologise for misleading you. I shall out where it does in fact lead us. It leads us to a lot of low bars. Very low bars. That women clear with miles to spare while men can just about clamber over with a lot of help and dutiful encouragement from partners looking down on them from an altitude bolstered now by educational supremacy on top of all the other things we’ve been supreme at for generations.   

So, I suppose my final question is – when are men going to start to climb? When are we going to start to demand that they climb to reach us, instead of endlessly reaching down to haul them up? When does the distance between us become unreachable? Because that time is surely coming. And when it does, we will all be in T-R-U-B-B-L-E.