A Woman of Valor, Who Can Find?
Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:31:00 GMT
I find it amusing that most women writing personals on Craigslist want a “decent” guy, but would never dream of dating a conservative religious person. They want a decent guy who is OK with getting an abortion if they have sex without a condom. They want a decent guy, but aren’t looking for a long-term relationship. They want a decent guy who will put up with all of their quirks and hangups without having any of their own. On top of all this, they want a guy without an ulterior motive. It should be obvious that all of these things are, taken together, insane.
I’d like to say this reflects poorly on women, but we all know that in reality it’s just economics. Women on any personals service can make arbitrary or insane demands because they will get a ton of responses either way. Though I find it hard to understand why the world’s most completely generic personals ads get a bunch of responders, I’m sure that they do. As an ex of mine once observed, every woman has three guys who are dying to sleep with her.
And then there is the attractiveness of the blank slate. Kate’s character in Dodgeball is a perfect example: very attractive, apart from the scene when you see inside her house and everything is covered in cheesy unicorn art. A pretty girl loses some luster when she reveals her passion for orthodontics. In Free Enterprise, Claire is completely detached from our experience in reality through her complete detachment from other people. In reality, getting to know a person involves getting to know their parents, their best friends, their siblings, their roommates, their coworkers. In the movie, Claire has none of those complicating aspects. We want to fall in love with someone simple, a free radical bouncing around the universe unattached to anything, ready to bond into our molecule without any entanglement with foreign substances.
Online personals really represent a hilariously horrible dilemma. We are becoming more isolated like these atoms, bouncing around unattached. We wind up trying to be explicit about what we’re looking for, but we lack any kind of network that might produce what we really need. The eye cannot see itself, yet we are expected to write to the world what we are with the hopes that another eye which cannot see itself can perceive in this note that we are what it needs to complete itself. Wouldn’t our family and friends do a better job if they had a chance?
We have, really, no chance of communicating what is essential about ourselves in one paragraph of text written specifically to woo someone we haven’t met. Our friends and family have an image of ourselves in their minds. They can talk about our qualities generally. We can only mime it based on what we have heard from them about ourselves. A human can hold an image of another human within, and it is mostly valid. It can be off by a tone or two, and certainly lack some of the details, but this image is almost completely inaccessible to ourselves. If you have the slightest clue what you’re all about, it’s only because you’ve had someone tell you or a guess you’ve made based on looking at your bookshelf or your CD collection.
This leads us back to the number one thing people talk about in personals, their likes and dislikes. What could be less relevant? Yet it’s the only thing we can talk about that differentiates us from each other spiritually. Our souls all crave the exact same things, but our minds naturally appreciate different things to different degrees. And of course tribal affiliations are handy for weeding people out. But when we are trying to create relationships for ourselves, it’s always a process of weeding people out, disqualification. If we actually were being treated as people, as images within the minds of those who know and love us, then the process is completely different. I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of it except that every time I ever entered an intense relationship, we both suddenly felt like experts on all matters of the heart and tried to set up our friends, and it never worked. But we weren’t working from a basis of lists of mutually exclusive qualifications, but more like from the thought of finding two colors that complement each other. (There is a joke that a Jewish matchmaker calls any two Jews who are about the same height as one another a match.)
I don’t really know where I’m going with all this, except to say that dating is miserable and I think I can blame the country and the culture.
Summary: Most people blow, but try in vain to appear like they don’t in dating personals. End result: tragedy.
I’ve noticed the following trend in my own life:Moral of the story: Don’t bother looking; just be.
You’re like the only person who reads my blog.
I agree in principle and I think you’ve had good experience doing this. But at the same time, it’s impossible advice to take. If you’re starving, you can’t just “be yourself” waiting for food to show up.
It’s a tough balance. If you starve, do you eat garbage, or just fast? However, it is true that if you don’t place yourself in situations where food wanders by, then finding food may become difficult.
My general policy has been one of friendliness. I get along with nearly everyone. Even if they don’t really resonate with my personality in any fundamental way, I can restrict myself to some subset that gets along with them. Since girls are people with needs just like everyone else, just being friends with a great number of people increases the likelihood of finding someone with compatible needs.
The other big trick is to not take relationships seriously until they get serious. Sometimes you need to spend a week being intimate with someone just because you both need it, but then you go separate ways as friends without regrets. It’s unhealthy obsession that prevent people from relating to each other more freely.