I was out tonight with some friends at a dive bar downtown. My friend T. started talking about how, at strip clubs, you know exactly where you stand. The power relationship is clear: women are using their sexuality to get money out of men. He pointed to the two girls in tight, low-cut red tank tops hawking tequila shots at the bar as examples of women who manipulate men (again, in that example, to get them to spend money).

He’s divorced, 32, and is one of the many people I know whose marriages ended because their spouse cheated on them. “She gets 67% of my money,” he said, “and I have this stigma.” “Half the single guys I know in their 30s are divorced,” I said, “There’s no stigma.”

But that’s not what he meant. The stigma is on him. He’s been so affected by the whole experience that he doesn’t trust women. That’s why he likes strip clubs, he knows where he stands. He knows he’s being manipulated and exactly how, and he can choose whether to be a part of it or not. (He chooses to be a part of it fairly frequently. I say that without any judgement)

By the time you’re in your 30s, you’re either married or been in a long relationship that probably ended up with you getting your heart really broken. Or you’ve been through both. Some of us bounce back quickly, some of us lose a year or two to processing through the heartbreak and the lingering issues, some people never quite recover. We all in various states of brokenness, like the island of misfit toys.

Which means that at any given point, there are a lot of us who are trying to figure it all out after thinking, at some point, that we had it figured out. But then we discovered we were wrong, and we have to learn how to not only trust other people again, but to trust ourselves and our own judgement.

It’s really no wonder that so many of us have trust issues, that we have our walls up. It’s just another element on the dating landscape, something to understand and work with — and, hopefully, through.