The everyday ones#
- Hold the door and let her go first. Extend it to everyone, especially anyone older.
- Carry the heavy bag. Suitcases, shopping, a loaded tote — particularly on stairs, in bad weather, or over any real distance.
- Take the worse seat. Give her the backrest, the shade, the view.
- Help her out of her coat when you arrive, hang it, and hold it open when you leave.
- Pull her chair out and help her sit.
- Let her order first.
- At anything formal, stay standing until the women at the table are seated, and stand again if she gets up.
The ones about safety#
These are the ones that actually matter, and they’re the ones most often skipped because they happen after the nice part of the evening is over.
- Walk on the traffic side of the pavement.
- Offer an arm on stairs, ice, cobbles, or anywhere heels make the ground hostile.
- Put yourself between her and whatever’s likely to be a problem — take the aisle seat, stand on the outside of a crowd.
- Walk her to her door or her car when it’s late or the area’s rough. Wait with her at the stop.
- Wait until she’s actually inside before you drive off. Do this for anyone you drop anywhere.
- Text to check she got home. Then say you’re glad she did.
The one that separates you from most people#
Plan the thing. Book a table, have a plan, arrive with something in mind. “What do you want to do?” is the default setting of a decade that struggles to commit to dinner, which is exactly why deciding something stands out as much as it does.
Where I’d loosen the framing#
Two honest caveats, because the list runs better with them.
It’s judgement, not a script. Running all fifteen inside two hours doesn’t read as considerate, it reads as a routine you learned. Some of these fit anyone. Some belong to a person you actually know. Time, place, and who she is all change the answer, and a gesture that ignores those isn’t really about her.
Most of this isn’t gendered. Carrying the heavy thing, taking the worse seat, waiting until someone’s safely inside — these are just decent behaviour, and they work on friends, colleagues, and your mum. Framing them as things men do for women makes them feel like a performance of masculinity rather than ordinary consideration. The gestures survive the reframe fine. Some of them get better for it.
What doesn’t need loosening is the underlying instinct. Accepting a bit of discomfort so someone else has less of it is the whole of the thing, and it’s genuinely rarer than it should be.
It feels staged for a while#
All of this is awkward at first, in the way that anything deliberate is awkward before it’s habit. Give it a few months and you stop noticing you’re doing it, which is roughly the point at which other people start to.
A few small things to try:
- Take the traffic side without mentioning it.
- Book the table before you’re asked to.
- Wait at the kerb until the door closes.
- Send the “glad you got home safe” message.
