Podcast: We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency

In today’s episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we’re unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we’re screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don’t know how to receive it.

Here’s the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We’ve been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We’ve been told these things are bonuses when they’re actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.

Today we’re talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we’ve ever made for mediocre men. Let’s get into it.

Key Takeaways

The bar isn’t in hell by accident. The patriarchy needs the bar low because if women raised it, mediocre men would stop being rewarded with extraordinary partners. The system depends on your low expectations.

A great man is just an average woman. The behaviour we celebrate in men as exceptional is the behaviour we expect in women as a given. Once you notice this, you cannot unnotice it.

You’ve been doing invisible administrative labour your whole life. The birthdays you remembered, the gifts you bought, the clothes you chose, the celebrations you planned. He got the applause. You did the work. Stop accepting that as the deal.

The friend-test cuts through everything. If you wouldn’t be his friend, if he isn’t on level with the women you already love and trust, then he has no business being in your romantic life. You wouldn’t tolerate this from a girlfriend. Don’t tolerate it from him.

Calm is not suspicious. Calm is the baseline. If your nervous system flinches when a man behaves like a decent adult, that’s not a him problem, that’s evidence of how low you’ve been trained to set your expectations. Raise the bar back to where it belongs.

The Transcript

Episode: 03
Title: We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency

Hi babes, welcome back to Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity. I’m Bry, and if this is your first time here, this is the podcast where we talk about the things our mothers didn’t, our therapists charge for, and our group chats half-finish before someone gets distracted by a TikTok about feral cats.

Today’s episode is one I’ve been quietly furious about for a while. Today we’re talking about the bar. The subterranean, sub-basement, six-feet-under-the-foundations bar that we’ve collectively allowed men to limbo beneath. We’re talking about why we clap for basic decency, why we hand out gold stars for eye contact, and how on earth we ended up in a culture where a great man is just an ordinary woman. Pour yourself something cold, settle in, and let’s get into it.

Let me set the scene with a small example, because I had a date a few weeks ago that crystallised this whole thing for me. He texted back. He planned the date more than three hours in advance. He paid for dinner without performing it like a one-man Broadway show. He listened. He didn’t make a comment about my body before the bread arrived. He hugged me goodbye without his hands turning into uninvited GPS devices. And after he dropped me home, he sent a normal, grounded message saying he’d had a lovely time.

And I sat on my bed afterwards in genuine confusion. Not because he was extraordinary. Because he was ordinary. He’d behaved like a normal, emotionally regulated adult man, and my nervous system had no idea what to do with that information. It was scanning for threats. It came up blank. And the thing that should’ve been completely unremarkable felt like a religious experience. That, right there. That’s the problem.

Because here’s what nobody’s saying out loud. We’ve been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that shouldn’t require gratitude. A man who texts back. A man who shows up on time. A man who doesn’t immediately try to renegotiate the terms of consent. A man who can hold a conversation that isn’t an interrogation or a monologue. We’ve been told, repeatedly, by everyone from rom-coms to our own mothers, that these things are bonuses. They’re not bonuses. They’re the entry requirement. That’s the floor.

And the bar has been dragged so low that we joke about the bar being in hell, but at this point Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. That’s how low we’ve dragged it. We’ve normalised behaviour that should be immediate disqualification. We’re out here clapping because a grown man managed to behave like he attended preschool. We’re screenshotting messages to our group chats with captions like “is this normal” when the message says nothing more elaborate than “looking forward to seeing you Friday.” We’ve become so accustomed to scraps that a slice of bread feels like a banquet.

And here’s the part that makes me want to throw something into the sea. Because none of this is new. Women have been doing the basic decency thing forever. Quietly. Consistently. Without applause. We text back. We show up. We plan things. We remember birthdays, dietary requirements, the name of your mother’s cat. We hold space without being asked. We listen, properly listen, with our actual ears and our actual attention. We do all of it as a baseline, as a starting point, as the floor from which we then build everything else on top.

I’ll give you a concrete example, because I lived this one. When I was married, it fell to me to remember every birthday on his side of the family. To buy the presents. To wrap them. To buy the cards. To buy the family Easter eggs. To remember every minor celebration his Catholic family deemed necessary despite not being a Catholic myself. A lot of pancakes were made. It fell to me to buy his clothes, because left to his own devices he’d have shown up to a wedding in trackies. And do you know who got the applause? He did. Everyone clapped for him. Look how thoughtful he is. Look how stylish he is. Look how he remembered. He didn’t remember. I remembered. He simply benefited from my remembering, while I quietly ran an unpaid administrative function for an entire extended family. That’s the bar. That’s how low it’s been set for so long that men get standing ovations for outputs that women have generated for them without ever being seen.

A great man, my darlings, is genuinely just an average woman. And I don’t say that to be cute or provocative. I say it because once you notice it, you can’t unnotice it. The behaviour we celebrate in men as exceptional is the behaviour we expect in women as a given. Imagine a woman being congratulated for replying to a text within twenty-four hours. Imagine her receiving a standing ovation for not making the conversation entirely about herself. Imagine a friend turning to you in a coffee shop and saying, oh my god, she paid attention when I was talking, she’s incredible. We’d laugh. We’d think she’d lost her mind. And yet, this is the exact framework we apply to men daily.

So how did we get here? Because we didn’t get here by accident. We got here because the patriarchy needs the bar low. It absolutely depends on it. If the bar is low, mediocre men get rewarded with extraordinary women. If the bar is low, women keep doing the emotional labour, the planning, the remembering, the management, while being told to feel lucky he stuck around at all. If the bar is low, you accept the man who texts back as a miracle and stop asking why he won’t talk about his feelings. The system works precisely because we’ve been trained not to ask for more.

And the cost of this isn’t abstract. The cost is years of your life spent in relationships that were never going to nourish you. The cost is your nervous system in absolute tatters from waiting for the other shoe to drop, every single time, with every single man, because experience has taught you that the shoe will drop. The cost is friendships strained by hours spent decoding messages that frankly required no decoding because the message was clear, you just didn’t want to believe it. The cost is the slow, quiet erosion of what you thought you deserved.

And back to my date for a moment, because there’s a coda you need to hear. The second date was terrible. Whatever spell had been cast on date one had clearly worn off, and what showed up in its place was a much less interesting, much more familiar version of the same disappointment I’d been bracing for the whole time. The point isn’t that he was the one. He absolutely wasn’t. The point is that for one evening, I got a glimpse of what baseline is supposed to feel like, and the fact that I found it shocking is the entire problem.

So here’s what I want you to do. Stop applauding men for breathing. Stop sending the text that says “he’s actually so amazing” when what you mean is “he didn’t ignore me for four days this week.” Stop comparing the men you date to the worst man you’ve ever dated, because that’s not a meaningful comparison, that’s grading on a curve that’s been set in hell. Compare them, instead, to yourself. To your own friends. To the women in your life who show up consistently, listen properly, and treat the people they care about with care. If he can’t meet that standard, he’s not the standard. He’s the floor.

And here’s the test that cuts straight through it. If you wouldn’t be his friend, if he isn’t on level with the women you already love and trust and choose to spend your time with, then why the hell do you want a relationship with him? You wouldn’t tolerate this from a friend. You wouldn’t text back a friend who left you on read for four days. You wouldn’t grade a friend on a curve. So why is he getting a pass for behaviour you’d cut a girlfriend off for?

The bar isn’t in hell. The bar was never meant to be in hell. The bar lives where it’s always lived, at the level of what a fully formed adult should be capable of. And the women I know are already there. We’ve always been there. It’s time we stopped reaching down to pull men up to it. They can climb. Or they can stay down there with Satan and his very sore back.

So if you’re tired, if your nervous system is fried, if you’ve applauded one too many men for clearing the absolute lowest possible threshold, take this as permission to stop. Stop clapping. Stop explaining. Stop grading on a curve. Raise the bar back to where it belongs. The men who can meet you there will. The ones who can’t, well, they were never going to anyway.

And I’m going to leave that right there for you to think about over your glass of savvy b. So thanks for listening to Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity. If you want more of this energy, head over to bryjaimea.com where I write about being a chaos goblin in her forties, dating disasters and the occasional small miracle, neurospicy life, and why your nervous system deserves better than the men currently on offer. You can also find me on Instagram and TikTok at bryjaimea, where I share the kind of content that makes you feel seen, slightly unhinged, and ready to trust yourself a bit more. Until next time, take care.

You Are Not Entitled to an Answer – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In this episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why you are not entitled to an answer. Specifically, we're talking about the strange little corner of modern dating where a few days of app chat somehow becomes an emotional contract, and suddenly a man you've never met believes your silence requires a formal explanation, a debrief, and possibly a follow-up meeting with management.I have two stories for you. One man who talked almost exclusively about himself, ignored the fact that I was sick, and then followed up a week later asking whether I'd reconsidered his "request for clarification". And another who became offended because I didn't respond to his selfie within two hours while I was lying in a dark room with a migraine. Sir. Please be serious.Because here's the thing. Before you've met someone, you do not owe them unlimited access to your time, attention, reassurance, or emotional labour. You don't have to justify why the vibes changed. You don't need a reason they'll consider reasonable. You are allowed to disengage because something felt off, because you changed your mind, because you met someone else, or because you're in your luteal phase and frankly the entire world can wait.Today we're talking about the difference between ghosting and simply disengaging, why demanding closure can become a boundary violation, the exhausting expectation that women should manage men's feelings for them, and why you do not need to JADE, justify, argue, defend, or explain, when you've already decided you're done. Let's get into it.Key Takeaways:A few days of chatting does not create a debt. Matching on an app, exchanging messages, or talking on the phone does not give someone a claim on your attention. Until you've actually built a connection, you are allowed to walk away without submitting supporting documentation.Closure is not something another person can demand from you. Asking once is one thing. Continuing to push after someone has clearly disengaged is not persistence or emotional maturity. It's refusing to accept the answer you've already been given.You do not need to JADE. You don't have to justify, argue, defend, or explain why you're no longer interested. The reason doesn't have to be good enough for him. It just has to be yours.Pre-date silence and post-date silence are not the same thing. If you've never met, disengaging is part of app dating. Once you've shared an actual date or developed a genuine connection, a simple goodbye becomes basic courtesy. Nobody needs a dissertation, but acknowledging another human being matters.Sometimes they don't miss you. They miss the audience. Someone can seem interested while actually being interested in having your attention. Real connection requires curiosity about you. If the only time they become deeply engaged is when you're leaving, pay attention to that.For more visit  ⁠BryJaimea.com⁠ or follow over on IG  ⁠@BryJaimea

1. You Are Not Entitled to an Answer 14:41
2. We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency 11:56
3. The Wine Aunt Manifesto 16:21
4. Who Said Anything About a Crisis? 13:07

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