So there seems to have been, at least according to my producers who send me this stuff, because they like to see me suffer, a proliferation on TikTok in recent weeks of viral challenges that women

draft their unwitting husbands and boyfriends into. The challenges are really tests. And every

week, someone on TikTok comes up with a new way for women to test the men in their lives. And if the

men fail the test, they're bad, I guess. And if they pass the test, then they're good, at least until the next test comes along.

The problem with these tests is that they are tests in the first place, as we'll discuss.

The other problem is that they're invented by women, for men, with a lot of womanly assumptions about what they mean and what a man's failure or success signifies.

It's very clear that no man was consulted in the devising of these tests,

which is a problem because men understand the psychology of men,

much better than women do, or at least better than women on TikTok do.

So let's go through these one by one.

First, we'll go back a few weeks to something called the bird test,

and here's how the bird test works.

The bird test theory is basically a predictor for whether or not your relationship is going to

succeed and it kind of goes like this. Let's say that you and your partner are sitting at a coffee

shop and you see a bird outside and you mention it to them. There's a couple different ways that

your partner can respond. Your partner could be like, oh, that's a really cool bird and engage with you and take interest in what you just said. Or your partner can dismiss it all together

and be like, okay, it's a bird. What about it? Basically, the Gottman Institute, which is this really

big psychology institute for relationships, calls that a bid. And the idea is if your partner

takes interest in the mundane, little small things that you talk about, the idea is if your partner takes interest in the mundane little small things that you

talk about, the relationship is just more likely to succeed because your partner has genuine

interest in whatever you say, regardless of whether that thing is a small thing or not. On the

flip side, if your partner kind of keeps ignoring your bids, that's kind of a sign that the relationship is going to fail because whether small or big, your partner is not giving attention to the things that you personally care about just for the sole reason that you care about it.

...