Don’t you hate it
When people are in love
They’re so
They’re so happy
So goddamn happy
Happy
--Local H, “Lovey Dovey”
So I have a guilty pleasure. Of sorts. I love reading online dating advice columns. Can’t get enough of the things.
See, they all fall under a category of writing I shorthand as, “Someone got paid for this shit.” The articles are all the same dozen or so tired concepts repackaged in an attempt to seem fresh. And it’s always pretty obvious what the advice will be and how it will be packaged based on the article title. So something called, “What Men are Really Looking for in a Date,” will mostly consist of stupid shit everyone knows, like, “1. Something Out of the Ordinary,” and “2. Lots of Laughs.”
The really clever people getting paid to repackage shit will even get someone else to do the work for them. They’ll somehow solicit the opinion of some random person either that they know or who sent them an email after their last repackaged bullshit article so the article will say something like, “1. Something Out of the Ordinary. Dave, a 28 year-old philologist from Philadelphia , says that the best date he ever went one was a hot air balloon ride. “’I was a little leery when she suggested it,’ he said, ’But when you’re in a hot air balloon there’s nothing to distract you. We had a great conversation and when we finally landed we decided to go out to dinner.’”
It then immediately goes to, “2. Lots of Laughs. Lenny, a 21 year old windmill technician from Winnipeg, says that the best date he ever went on was with an amateur comedian. ‘She had me laughing right from the start,’ he said. ‘We’ve been together for six months now and we still laugh every day.’”
Then there’s the, “What She’s Really Thinking When She First Meets You,” sort of article. In this one we get random accounts of what this one woman you’ll never, ever meet thought upon meeting the love of her life, who you will also never meet. I would say that this is the most useless possible type of article ever, but someone got to pay the rent because of it, so it has some tiny amount of value.
Finally, you get the articles about people dating people outside their usual comfort zone and, not surprisingly, finding out that people aren’t just their age or their height or their income. And it’s always that. We get the hard-charging business woman who finds love with a soulful artist or the short guy who finally sucks it up and starts dating women taller than him. And it’s always fundamentally superficial bullshit like that. I have yet to see one of those articles where a white guy says, “I’d never dated a black woman before and the idea had always kind of freaked me out, but then one day…”[1]
See, the point of those articles isn’t actually to get anyone to think about dating or the larger issues of the world they occupy. It’s to get them to sign up for match.com or eharmony or whatever organization paid the writer $0.05/word to cynically spew repackaged bullshit.[2] So they don’t want you to actually put much thought in to dating beyond, “Wow, that sounds like a great idea, where can I try it out? Oh, hey, match.com.”[3]
But then there are the special internet articles about dating. I had the great pleasure to be introduced to not one but two of them today. One came via PF over at Forever in Hell. The other came from Feministe.[4] The first fit under the broad category I like to call “What’s Wrong with You” and the second under the category of “What’s Wrong with Everyone Else.”
The latter covers and article with the title “Where Have the Good Men Gone?”[5]
This covers a common lament. Basically, it’s the, “All men are douchebags or immature man children,” argument. I feel that I can speak to this article, since I’m pretty sure that I probably qualify as one of those elusive “good men” that don’t exist. Let’s toss out my bona fides:
I’m 29, 6’2”, and 215 pounds. I’m also told I’m fairly good looking.
I make…well, I make more than I need. By a comfortable margin. Let’s just leave it there.
I drive a car that’s just about to be 1 year old and isn’t embarrassing in any way (woo, stock Mazda 6!).
I don’t live in my mother’s basement.
I live within my means, pay all my bills, and have savings and investments.
I’m educated and more than capable of holding down my end of a conversation.
I have a wide range of interests.
I’m willing to try new things.
I know how to dress myself. I don’t look like a slob or a jackass the vast majority of the time.
I don’t immediately try to get in to a woman’s pants upon meeting her.
I unfailingly use the Oxford Comma.
In fact, right after I got Daisy, who is f’ing adorable, I was talking to a buddy of mine. Given that dogs are chick magnets in general and adorable dogs are, like, magnets filled with kryptonite,[6] it occurred to me that I’m now in an interesting place. I basically said that I’m now in that place in a lot of movies and TV shows where you have that one person who has everything going for them, but is constantly lamenting their single status because it’s the plot when it’s obvious to everyone that if it were reality this scenario simply wouldn’t exist.
To which my buddy said, “Yeah, but dating isn’t like that in real life.” You know you have that super-literal friend who ruins all your jokes. And you want to smack that friend, too. I know you do.
Anyway, my point is this: I’m probably one of those single good men who doesn’t exist. Let me tell you where I am. I’m at work. I’m at storytelling stuff. I’m walking the dog. I’m going to shows. I’m reading and writing. I’m playing video games. I’m watching TV. I’m living my life.
See, I haven’t recently met anyone I want to go on a second date with. I’ve gone on a bunch of first dates that have left me with stupid stories to tell[7] and not a whole hell of a lot else. Why? Because I have a full and interesting life. I’m not desperate to meet someone. I’m not worried about some sort of societal pressure to get married and have kids. So why should I get in the way of my own happiness just so the judgmental psycho who wrote the article in question has an answer to her patently stupid question?
The fact is, too, that I could ask that same question. I’ve met a succession of women who weren’t worth a second date. But rather than come up with a unifying theory of the Crazy Woman, I’ve come up with a much better theory: the good women are out there. I’m just not meeting them.
Of course that sort of pedestrian insight rarely gets splashy article space in the Wall Street Journal…
It’s okay, though, because the article PF fisked handles all that judgmental bullshit for me.
It’s a list article. Specifically, it’s a list of the six reasons that you, as a single woman, aren’t married. And it’s the sort of brilliant advice about committed, happy marriage you can only get from a completely un-self-aware, thrice divorced, walking definition of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Reasons 1-5 are basically, “You’re not good enough,” while reason 6 is, “You don’t think highly enough of yourself.” This is the sort of brilliant insight I used to be able to get only in fundie Sunday School.
The thing that ended up pissing me off most among the many things about the article that pissed me off, though, is was this lovely tautology:
When it comes to choosing a husband, only one thing really, truly matters: character. So it stands to reason that a man's character should be at the top of the list of things you are looking for, right? But if you're not married, I already know it isn't. Because if you were looking for a man of character, you would have found one by now. Men of character are, by definition, willing to commit.[Emphasis not mine.]
Bullshit.
Bull. Shit.
Bull.
Shit.
I’ll say it again. Bullshit.
Notice how, in this one paragraph, the author manages to insult every single person on the planet. And I mean every person who is single, not every person, full stop. If you’re an unmarried woman it means you’re a superficial bitch. If you’re an unmarried man it means you’re a rogue, a scoundrel, a layabout, the sort of man who takes the free milk without purchasing the cow.[8]
I get the distinct impression that I spent more time thinking about the ramifications of buying a new car last year than the author did thinking about getting married the first time. Or the second. Or the third. It took me the better part of a month and I thought about it from every possible angle.
I strongly suspect that I spent way more time thinking about the ramifications of adopting a dog than the author did about all three of her marriages combined. I first thought, “I should adopt a dog,” not long after I moved to Texas. I started paying attention to the dogs in the shelter over the summer. When my friends who fostered Daisy said they were fostering her I said, “Aw, she’s adorable.” When they posted the original thing on Facebook (again with the Facebook. Yeesh) again three months later to say that she still needed a home I said, “I’ma get me a dog now.”
Only someone who has no fucking clue how to plan ahead would dismiss forethought so easily. Only someone who has no idea what character actually is would mistake it for an impulsive desire to commit. Only someone who confuses impulsive commitment with character could possibly be stupid enough to be thrice divorced and consider that a mark of distinction and indication she’s an authority.
Now if you need me I’ll be playing with my dog. And reading stupid, repackaged advertisements for Match.com. At least they tend to amuse me instead of infuriating me…
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[1]In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve never dated a black woman before. The idea doesn’t really freak me out. I mean, that specific idea doesn’t freak me out any more than the idea of actually dating anybody freaks me out.
[2]I mean, I assume that the writers know they’re writing repackaged bullshit. I’d hate to think they think they’re about to change the world with the same article that appeared on Yahoo last week…
[3]Incidentally, the whole online dating thing has done a bang-up job going mainstream over the course of the last, like, five years. Match and eHarmony are now ubiquitous concepts in our life. Whatever the hell Zoosk is seems to have a crapload of advertising dollars to spend. The whole idea was still the butt of jokes at least as recently as Napoleon Dynamite, which came out in 2004 or 2005. Now it’s like, “Yep, I was best man at a wedding that started at match.com,” and other such stories are pretty much normal.
For the record, I blame Facebook. First, it’s possible to blame Facebook for everything. Second, Napoleon Dynamite came out in a pre-Facebook world. Unless you were on Myspace or the sort of person who was hard core in to Usenet you probably mostly used the internet for news and email and to find random information you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. And, y’know, porn and Napster. If you didn’t use Myspace you mocked people who did.
All of the sudden, boom, social networking became something every college kid did. Then it became something everyone did. Once the internet became a broad-based forum for social networking the idea of dating random people from the internet went from a weird thing that creepy people with no social skills did to something that seemed like it might be a good idea.
Also, I suppose the fact that everyone and their mother has a digital camera these days helps. Because, like, pictures are a good thing to have of someone you’ve never met. But, primarily, I blame Facebook.
[4]Yep. I occasionally peruse feminist blogs. It’s not a big part of my repertoire, as single-issue blogs aren’t all that great in general and single-issue blogs that hammer on issues that I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about really don’t do anything for me. But I do like to know what’s going on and how people think about issues I do care but don’t worry a lot about, so I tend to like Feministe. It does the feminism thing, but it’s more, “Feminists writing about stuff that matters to them,” than “Feminists writing about feminism.” There’s a world of difference between those two concepts.
[5]Check the pantry. There’s always a something behind the baking soda. Unless you’re like me and don’t own baking soda because you’re…um…somewhat lazy. And don’t bake.
[6]Plus, Daisy is an almost perfect dog in general for meeting new people. At 40 pounds she’s big enough that I’m not some random dude walking around with a tiny dog who looks like he got the dog just to meet women. But she’s also small enough that she’s not going to scare people away. Basically, if you’re not prone to be scared of dogs in general, you won’t be scared of Daisy. She’s also friendly and curious and a weird enough breed that people will flag me down and say, “What kind of dog is that?”
[7]Like…like, there was the one that didn’t go well from my perspective. I found her boring and the best conversation I had that night was with her gay friend at a gay bar we ended up at. Since I’m terrible at rejecting people (key problem: I still haven’t adjusted to the idea that there could actually be women who I don’t have to try to impress out there and who, instead, would actually be trying to impress me. So my default assumption that people forget I exist when I leave a room kinda causes problems for everyone involved) I didn’t do a very good job of forcefully delivering any sort of, “Yeah, I’d rather not do this again.” Hell, I might have said the opposite at the time due to a general desire to be polite. I need to work on that.
Anyway, a month after the date I hadn’t heard from her at all and suddenly she stalked me down on Facebook. Since I’m a dumbass I responded to her email. She tried to talk me in to asking her on a second date, which did not go well for her. Then she said that she just wanted to be friends. I responded (again, because I’m a dumbass) as I am wont to do: with a story. Specifically, it was a super-abbreviated story of the time with Her, wherein I said, “Look, I’ve been in the place you’re trying to talk yourself in to before. I can tell you from personal experience that it won’t end well. You might as well drop it.”
She then proceeded to amateur psychoanalyze me and lecture me about allowing the bullshit I’ve dealt with in the past get in the way of my future happiness. At this point I realized that no matter what I said she’d respond to what she wanted me to say, so I hit the delete button. And I doubled down on my policy of not telling my last name until the third date.
Damn Facebook.
[8]Am I the only one who finds that particular analogy insulting to women? I mean, seriously…
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