The one-night sex story that thousands of women are sharing, but men don't seem to 'get'.

It’s fiction, yes. But Kristen Roupenian’s short story about an excruciatingly uncomfortable fling is so damn relatable it’s carving its way through women’s social media feeds faster than you can say, ‘Yes! This!’

‘Cat Person’, which was published in The New Yorker‘s December 11 issue, navigates a brief relationship between a 20-year-old university student named Margot, and an older man – Robert – whom she meets while working in a movie theatre candy bar.

The relationship exists via text message at first. A digital flirtation during which Margot builds her perception of this man, a few carefully constructed sentences at a time (He has cats, he’s witty, hard to impress). Their first real outing leaves her “filled with a sparkly lightness”, their second (a Holocaust film, a few drinks and terrible sex) repels her.

Yet even then Margot is unsure of who this man is, how to treat him, how to act around him, whether that dose of “sparkly lightness” could be had again.

We won’t spoil the ending – trust us, it’s worth the read. But as Roupenian told The New Yorker in a subsequent interview, “The point at which [Margot] receives unequivocal evidence about the kind of person [Robert] is is the point at which the story ends.”

It’s not a complex plot. But, like all the best pieces of fiction, it articulates aspects of life, of culture, in a way that the rest of us have never quite been able to manage.

The sudden unease when Margot finds herself alone with this man for the first time (“It occurred to her that he could take her someplace and rape and murder her”); how despite her discomfort, she rather sleep with him than reject him (which “would make her seem spoiled and capricious”); how she finds herself missing “not the real Robert but the Robert she’d imagined on the other end of all those text messages”.

As Roupenian said in her interview, ultimately, “It speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy.”

How long should you wait before you sleep with someone? (Post continues below.)

Some men, it seems, are having trouble gleaning that from the story. A twitter thread sprung up on Monday called ‘Men react to Cat Person‘, which the creator began populating with tweets from male readers that ranged from the outraged (“garbage post-high school crap”) to the confused.

“It seems mundane to me. I don’t get it,” wrote one.

“Can you direct me toward the appeal of this piece,” wrote another.

“What are you all relating to in this? Enlighten a brother.”

Oh, where to begin…?

You can read Cat Person on The New Yorker, then be sure to follow it up with Kristen Roupenian’s interview about the story.