My Dearest Ladies, It has come to my attention- both by correspondence and careful review of my daily news-feeds littered with passive-aggressive status updates/images preaching about how youve never met a good man, but you know all the wrong ones, talking about getting hurt again after you stuck your neck out or even how dissatisfied you are with the stock of guys in the wild, unable to find the guy who will treat you right - that right now you are a little upset. Some of you have spoken to me about the matter personally, with horror stories of pushy guys who dont know what no means, guys who use you, guys who swept you off your feet like Prince Charming ala Disney Movies, only to stoically dump you months later. You expressed complete frustration, exasperation at how difficult it is to find a good man out there. Some of you even flipped the table on me, blaming everyone and everything with a Y-chromosome in a man-hating tirade fueled by trending yet misguided opinions operating under the false pretenses of neofeminism. I have listened. I have heard your voices and I have offered comfort in lieu of an actual answer of substance, something I feel deserved much deliberation before sending you off with advice. However, I have come to a conclusion, one just for you- and you may not like what I have to say. Youre part of the problem and if you want to solve the problem, you need to come to terms with that. First off, despite everything your daddy told you, you arent a princess. You never will be, unless you overthrow the government or something.. and Im sure a lot of people in this country would take issue with your Monarchy. You arent a princess, this isnt a Disney movie and the world does not revolve around you. Youre a human being. An average person, just like everyone else. Your dad may have raised you thinking you were *his* princess, but carrying on that role/mentality past your childhood is silly and frankly a little creepy. Do you deserve to be treated well? Verily! We all do. However, this is the real world, where people are good and bad (bust most everyone is somewhere in the middle), the Huntsman doesnt make the income you like/wont move to the city with you, Prince Charming is a chauvinistic trust-fund frat boy (hence Prince and not King) and no story in life ends with and they lived happily ever after. Second, let us discuss these men you are dating. He said all the right things, he has a big lifted truck out of a stereotypical country music video, he makes a lot of money or goes to a nice school. He picked you up when you were vulnerable. He partied like a champ. You thought you could fix him. He said he could save you. Basically, nature played the oldest trick in the book on you- distracting you with superficial assets that caught your eye or tugged at your heartstrings, all the while masking the less than desirable qualities that spelled certain doom for you. Sometimes, you knew all along that this was bad for you but pursued/stuck around nonetheless. I had a girl once call me after a terrible date, asking where the good men were at. I told her once she stopped dating boys, she would find the men and that they would suddenly appear all around her, having been there the whole time. The fact is, the nice guys are all around you- a lot of them have even been there for you, over and over again. Maybe they like you, maybe they just never thought about it that way. Some are Alpha personalities, some not so much. They are as varied as the snow in a blizzard. But one thing that doesnt seem to vary? Your taste in partners. Yeah, I said it. All the guys reading this are slamming their fists on the table, grunting he gets it. Youve more or less been dating the same copy of a copy of a copy of a scumbag since that first time some guy broke your heart. They seemed broken, they had a nice smile, they offered to protect you, they were flashy, they found you when you were the most vulnerable. Prey do this in the wild. Animals will feign wounds, give displays or swoop on the wounded to exploit them for their own gain. Basically, all the nice guys have been more or less forced to watch you reenact those seat-gripping moments on Animal Planet, over and over and over again. Some guys even got tired of watching you get chopped to pieces and bailed- and who can blame them. Doing the same thing over and over with no markedly different results is the definition of insanity. This is the jungle, the wounded usually get left behind for the good of the species. Dont get me wrong, we do it too. Im also flooded with Charlie Brown-esque wishy washy man posts/complaints about how the girls never notice the nice guys, or how no girl will ever go for a guy. To them, I hand a box. There are a pair of brass balls in there. Hold on to them, you will need them later. We also date the same people over and over again (I will be the first to admit that I had a running, painful losing streak with educated, slightly-liberal women of higher social class than my own, who turned out to be completely lacking in autonomy/sense or who thought they could fix me, when there was nothing to fix). We heard the warnings, we didnt see them. At some point, even we, the men you lump into a box with the predators of your grievances, were weak. Hence the whole you arent a princess, youre like everyone else argument. For every 3rd awful man out there, there is one out of 3 awful girls who helped him get that way and vice-versa. The remaining four awful people are sociopaths, incapable of love, rational thought or empathy. The world is full of them and they grow in number by the day. Might as well get cozy, not one corner of the planet is devoid of them. I may be sort of an everyman; I cant speak for everyone else, but I think If I could, It would go something like this: Look, we love you. We always have. You are anything but perfect and frankly, some of your decisions are terrifying. The only reason the guys youve been serial-dating exist is because weve more or less created a society that weeds out natural selection and, more than ever, gives these jerks a free pass. But we love you. Probably always will, in some capacity. But The sooner you come to terms with your pattern of destruction through careful introspection, the sooner you realize what is truly important in life, the sooner you kick these dough-eyed vipers to the curb once and for all- the sooner you can get on with your life, creating new episodes instead of reruns. Who knows? Maybe youll end up with one of us. Cant promise you a life happily ever after... ..but it will be pretty damn good.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:33:54 +0000