there are no fish in the sea, just the weird mutated kind

So I was just reading a book which is weird because I haven't been able to read a book in a long while, which I attribute to my depression. Right up until highschool started, when it started getting bad, I was an AVID reader. Screw bookworm, I was a book dragon. Books were the most media I consumed. I would spend days just reading, not eating, not sleeping, I read my damn book on the toilet (and then disinfected the crap out of it because I'm a paranoid germophobe), I would get in trouble for reading in school when I was supposed to be learning or whatever. Teachers and parents alike had to pry the damn things out of my cold, dead hands. But I guess once I got sick in the head I just put them down and I haven't been interested in any since. I've tried to find some, it's just that nothing really interested me.

But thatisn't what this is about. This is about ✨boys✨. And why a good chunk of the male population kinda sucks (No offense, in my book if you're screwing around on Spacehey when you could be rotting your brain on TikTok like I do then you're one of the good ones.)

Anyways the point that I was painfully slowly leading up to was that a guy in a book written by a woman (that isn't screwed up in the head/Stephanie Meyer) is kind and sweet and funny and cares about people and has a deeper personality and like, emotions, but a guy in a book written by another guy is usually, in my own experience, lame.

The man in the book I'm reading isn't perfect. He has some anger issues and is a bit tactless and on the morbid side, but he is funny and sweet and charming and he likes DnD and stealing food people left on a diner table and like... He's chill. He talks with the main character on a deeper level than just casual conversation. He isn't afraid of emotion.

That's something I always look for in a book- Characters of any gender with well-thought out personality. I can't read a book with stereotypical and boring characters, which I think contributes to my inability to find any books that interest me. I want the "depressed" character to be able to crack a smile once in a while, or hold bunnies because bunnies are soft and pretty soothing. Depression isn't just laying in bed blankly doing nothing, though of course, it can be. And I want the sunshine, "golden retriever", happy-go-lucky character to struggle with addiction, or have a broken home, or anger issues, or be an ex-convict or something, something that isn't surface-level. Guys can be strong and have a fiery personality but also be able to curl up in someone else's arms when he's having a bad day. Girls can be shy and "subservient" and also perfectly capable of kicking someone's butt in a fistfight, because people are contradictory. People are different.

I went off on a total rant with this but I initially wrote this just to cry about why there aren't any boys who are as cool as the one in the book I'm reading. Maybe it's because of the area I live in, or maybe I just don't talk to boys enough to know that they have a deeper personality below football and joking around and whatever is trending on TikTok. I'm kind of a girls' girl but I talk to boys all the time, and they're all just... boring. I'm probably going to get hate for some of this but I'm open to debating anything I've said here and having an adult discussion about it.