I shook my head. “Bingo and motorcycles and books on tape? We’re not compatible.”
“You have no idea if you’re compatible,” Evan said. “What you have to push through, because it’s not going to come naturally, is your laundry list of credentials and how it’s supposed to look. You can be happy with someone who has most of what you’re looking for.”
Just then I spotted a guy who was exactly what I was looking for.
“Oooh,” I said, clicking on a cute 40-year-old. I read on. He had an interesting profile. He was funny. He had a creative but stable-sounding job. I liked what he wrote about what he was looking for in a partner—it pretty much described my personality.
“There’s just one problem,” Evan said.
“What?” I asked. This guy looked really promising. What could possibly be wrong here?
“His desired age range is twenty-eight to thirty-five. He says he wants kids.”
“I have a kid,” I said.
“He’s not looking for someone with a kid. If he were, he’d have a higher age range. He wants someone to have his own biological kids with.”
“But if he met me, we’d probably like each other. We seem to have similar personalities and interests. Why shouldn’t I just e-mail him and see if he replies?”
“You can do that,” Evan said. “But what would you do if someone who was fifty-five e-mailed you? You’re the equivalent to him of a guy who’s fifty-five to you. You’re just a few years out of this age range, but a critical few years if he wants kids. He probably won’t e-mail you back. It’s not a good use of your time. What you need to do is focus on the people who are looking for someone like you. It doesn’t matter who you’re looking for if he’s not looking for you.”
“It just seems so unfair to be ruled out that way,” I said, even though I routinely ruled out guys that way.
“You think you’re above the rules because you have a lot going for you,” Evan said. “But it doesn’t work that way, as you’ve probably noticed. This is a slog, it’s a lot harder than it used to be, and I agree, it isn’t even fair. He probably would like you in person. But he’d probably also worry that you were too old to have kids with him. So you can try to buck the rules and end up frustrated, or you can try to work within what’s realistic in terms of percentages and find the right guy for you.”
SAYING YES INSTEAD OF NO
Evan clicked over to a feature on Match called “reverse search”—it shows guys who meet your search criteria, but who are also looking for someone like you. Not surprisingly, none of the guys were in the 35 to 45 range. The youngest I saw was 46.
“Here’s what I want you to do for next week,” Evan said. “I want you to pick one guy out of every twenty that appear on your reverse search list. That’s just 5 percent of the guys who meet the desired traits you chose earlier today.”
That seemed pretty doable, but Evan had one more suggestion. When there are things I find unappealing about a person, I should try to be more accepting than judgmental. If a guy writes a long, awkward e-mail, for instance, it doesn’t mean he’s a dork. Maybe he was nervous, or is new to online dating, or cares enough to take the time to send a personal note instead of a snappy pickup line.
“Look for reasons to say ‘yes’ instead of ‘no,’ ” he reminded me. “Screen in rather than constantly screening out. Always ask yourself this: If an interesting guy were right in front of you, would you honestly turn that person away because of a few pounds or inches, or a sentence in a profile that you don’t like? If so, that’s fine. Just don’t complain when you can’t find anybody suitable because you’ve eliminated every potential guy on a technicality. Because if these guys eliminated people on technicalities, they probably wouldn’t date you, either.”
Ouch. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I’d been so focused on whether I was interested in a guy that I barely considered whether he’d be interested in me. So Evan told me to write down all the reasons someone wouldn’t want to date me—all the things a potential boyfriend would have to put up with if he chose to be with me.
I jotted down a few things and handed them to Evan. He looked over my list.
“That’s it?”
“What?” I asked. “Am I missing something?” I’d already written that I’m short and neurotic and like a lot of personal space.
“Um, I don’t know,” Evan said. “Maybe that you’re a perfectionist?”
I didn’t see what was wrong with that. Isn’t that a good thing?
Evan told me I was making a classic mistake: We think we’re such a good catch that whatever is “wrong” with us won’t be a problem for a potential mate. We think, yeah, I’m a perfectionist, but that means I’m conscientious! Rarely do we think, Yeah, I’m a perfectionist, and that makes me really rigid and hard to live with.
Which is why, he continued, many people list things that actually sound positive: I’m too ambitious (instead of I’m ruthless). I’m too honest (instead of I’m insensitive). I’m too giving (instead of I’m needy). I’m too independent (instead of I’m a workaholic). I’m too analytical (instead of I’m too judgmental).
“Think about what someone would really have to put up with to be with you,” he said. I gave it another shot, and soon I came up with things like: I’m overly sensitive. I can’t cook anything other than pasta. I can be pathologically indecisive, which always drives boyfriends nuts. I get stressed out easily, and when I do, it’s never a pretty sight. I have several profoundly annoying habits, like insisting that my things stay exactly where I’ve placed them, even if they’re in someone else’s way. I won’t use a cell phone because I think they cause brain tumors, so if you want to reach me, I’ll have to be near a landline. And the list went on . . . and on.
No wonder I’d screwed up my dating life: I wanted to feel secure and relaxed in a relationship, but if I was with someone truly as flawed as me, I’d feel dissatisfied because he was so different from my ideal. And if this flawed person was excited about me, I’d say he was coming on too strong or, worse, seemed desperate. But the second someone closer to my “ideal” happened to want to date me, I was constantly on edge, trying to be “on” and entertaining, and feeling insecure because those men always had countless women vying for their attention. The flawed men always seemed too excited about me, and the idealized men didn’t seem excited enough.
I knew that looking at my flaws was important in accepting other people’s flaws, but suddenly, seeing them there in black and white, I wondered why anyone had ever dated me at all.
“That’s good,” Evan laughed. “So next time you’re about to rule out some guy because he’s not your ideal, try to focus on the good things about him, because some guy is going to have to focus on the good things about you, even though he may have wanted someone more easygoing or taller. Every time you start to dissect some guy, note that he’s willfully ignoring all of this in order to go out with you. We want to be tolerated for our moodiness, but we want someone who’s never moody. We want to feel attractive even when we let our bodies go, but we want someone who’s fit. Doesn’t that seem hypocritical?”
It did seem hypocritical—I wanted men to accept me for who I was, but I wasn’t willing to accept them for who they were. In the past, I’d always focused on what compromises I’d have to make to be with someone else, but I didn’t seriously consider the second part—that being with me wouldn’t be winning the lottery either. And no wonder. Like most women, I had friends constantly telling me what a great “catch” I was, that any guy would be “lucky” to have me, and that I should never compromise when choosing a mate.
But Evan said that what many women look at as “compromise”71 is really just plain old “acceptance.”
Of course, he wasn’t suggesting that I have a personality transplant and suddenly become Ms. Go-With-The-Flow. He was simply suggesting that in order to reduce the number of filters I used to screen men out,
I’d have to change my perspective. It’s easy to find the things you dislike about a person, but it’s more productive to find the things you like.
He told me about a psychologist named Judith Sills, who wrote a wonderful book called How to Stop Looking for Someone Perfect and Find Someone to Love. In her book, Sills says that every person is a package deal, or like the blue plate special at a diner. There are “no substitutions.” You have to take the annoying habits and unpleasant features along with the rest of the meal. You may have to deal with a metaphorical side dish you aren’t crazy about. “If you require that someone fulfill your perfect picture,” Sills writes, “you’re in for a long-term relationship with your fantasies.”
That’s exactly what Evan was trying to tell me. As he got up to leave, he reminded me of my assignment: Pick one out of every twenty guys who met my search criteria and who were also looking for me. E-mail three of them. We’d compare notes the following Monday.
9
It’s Not Him, It’s You
I was sitting at my computer trying to pick one of every twenty guys on Match when my friend Lisa called and asked what I was up to. I told her about Evan’s assignment and suggested that she try it, too. Lisa, who is 35 and single, groaned. She said it sounded like a good plan, but she was completely burned out on dating—online or otherwise. She didn’t want to talk about dating tonight. It just made her more panicked about still being single.
“Let’s talk about movies, books, global warming, the latest episode of Weeds—anything but men,” she said.
How different this was from two years earlier, when Lisa was 33 and all she wanted to talk about was men. Or, rather, one man—her boyfriend. Lisa had been dating Ryan for a year. He was a 33-year-old lawyer, and she was smitten. They had a lot of fun together, they shared the same goals for a family, and they seemed compatible as friends and lovers. In fact, Ryan had been making comments about marriage. But something didn’t feel right.
“He just doesn’t fuss over me,” Lisa said toward the end of that first year together. “It’s not the way I’m used to being treated in a relationship.”
At the time, I completely understood what she meant: She didn’t feel adored by her boyfriend. He told her he loved her, but he never said that he was the luckiest guy in the world to have found her. He said she was pretty, but not the most beautiful woman he had ever met. He brought her Tylenol when she had the flu, but not flowers for no reason. He was consistently sweet and loving toward her, but he wasn’t demonstrative. He didn’t put her on a pedestal the way other boyfriends had. Never mind that she didn’t put him on a pedestal either. That was the guy’s role. He was supposed to court her, right?
One day, after another marriage comment, Lisa shared her doubts with her boyfriend. “I just don’t feel that you’re totally in love with me,” she said.
“But I am!” he insisted. He couldn’t understand why she felt that way, and Lisa couldn’t explain it—it was just a feeling, but one she couldn’t let go of. Each time she brought it up, he would seem perplexed, and she would feel rejected. He would then attempt all kinds of romantic gestures to prove his love—leaving a chocolate kiss with a sweet note on her pillow in the morning, calling in the middle of the day just to say he loved her. Lisa was charmed by these gestures, but she also didn’t trust them: “I want him to want to do these things,” she’d said at the time. “But now he’s only doing them because I asked for them.”
Still, Lisa tried to feel reassured because even if the gestures felt forced, it was sweet of Ryan to make the effort. But then, two months later, Lisa and Ryan were at an engagement party and the groom-to-be said in a toast to his bride-to-be that he could never love anyone as much as he loved her. That got Lisa thinking, and when she and Ryan were in the car on the way home, she asked him a question: “If something happened to me and I died young, do you think you could love another woman as much as you love me?”
He thought about it for a minute. “Well, it would be different from the love I have for you,” Ryan replied.
“Different, as in you loved me more?” Lisa asked.
“Different as in . . . different,” her boyfriend said. As he reached for her hand, he asked, “Why does it matter? I want to be with you, not some hypothetical other woman. I don’t want to think about you dying. I love you. It would be hard to meet someone I love as much. But if I died, I’d expect that you’d fall in love again and it would be different from our relationship, but that you’d go on and live your life.”
Three weeks later, Lisa broke up with him.
“I wanted him to be absolutely crazy about me,” Lisa said now, two years later. “The fact that he could imagine loving another woman as much meant, to me, that I wasn’t the love of his life. I wanted him to say, ‘I could imagine getting remarried, but I’d never love her as much as I love you.’ ”
I asked Lisa what would happen if the hypothetical situation were reversed. If she’d married Ryan, and he died young, could she imagine falling in love again?
There was a long pause. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I think I know, intellectually at least, that you can fully love more than one person in your lifetime. But in my heart, I want a guy to feel that way about me and only me anyway.”
At the time, I’d backed her up completely. Now, though, as I thought about what Evan called my “unreasonable expectations” when I clicked through online profiles, suddenly I felt that Lisa was being unreasonable, too. And yet, in other areas of our lives, we were considered generally reasonable people. So what was going on here?
TOO GOOD FOR AN ORDINARY RELATIONSHIP
Dr. Michael Broder, a Philadelphia-based psychologist who specializes in relationships, thinks that many single women today bring a dangerous sense of entitlement to dating. Wanting to be adored in that fantasy way, he believes, is another unreasonable requirement on some women’s already unreasonable checklists.
“I hear all the time, ‘If I can’t have a guy who is this, that, or the other thing, I’d rather be alone,’ ” he told me. “So I say, ‘Okay, but be prepared to get your second choice. Because with that sense of entitlement, that’s what you’ll probably get: being alone.’ ”
For these women, he said, not only is the imagined guy a fantasy, but so is an actual relationship. After all, there’s a limit to what a relationship can provide, and Dr. Broder feels that women in this frame of mind are looking for a relationship from the perspective of what the guy can provide for them—a “me-me-me thing”—instead of wanting something more reciprocal.
One of his patients, for instance, had recently said to him about her current boyfriend, “Why should I be with a guy who’s less successful than me? I might as well be alone!”
Dr. Broder says he sees a heightened sense of entitlement that previous generations didn’t have. Our mothers might have wished, but certainly didn’t expect, that their husbands would constantly want to please them, be attracted to them, entertain them, enjoy sharing all their interests, and be the most charming person in the room. Instead, they knew that marriage involved failing health, aging, boredom, periods of stress and disconnection, annoying habits, issues with children, and hardships and misunderstandings of all sorts. But many women today seem to be looking for an idealized spiritual union instead of a realistic marital partnership.
“You end up with the type of woman today who sees herself as too good for an ordinary relationship,” Dr. Broder said. “But ask happily married women about their marriages, and they’ll probably tell you they’re pretty ordinary.”
So how did “ordinary” become the kiss of death in dating?
IS HE IN MY LEAGUE?
Maybe it has to do with our egos. For all the talk about women suffering from low self-esteem, Dr. Broder says that many take the “girl power” message of I’m fabulous! so far that nobody’s good enough for them.
I thought about the 29-
year-old acquaintance I’d set up on a date a few years ago with a guy who, I told her before the date, reminded me of her.
“He’s cute and loves old movies,” I said. “He’s a lot like you.”
So she went on the date, and came back insulted.
“How could you have said that he’s like me?” she asked.
I had no idea what she meant.
“You didn’t tell me he was so scrawny!” she explained. Well, so was she.
“And he has that weird hair,” she said. He does, but just a year earlier, she had a purple streak in hers. I asked what she was expecting.
“I guess someone more dynamic,” she said. “I mean, we could talk about old movies and he was sweet, but when you said he was like me, I was expecting someone more . . .” She trailed off, but I knew what she was trying to say: “Do you think this guy is at my level?”
Well, yes. Yes, I did. And I also thought that if she could see herself accurately and not as Angelina Jolie—she might have really liked him. They were both cute-ish, nice, and perfectly enjoyable people, but they wouldn’t blow you away with their looks or charisma when they walked into a room. They were ordinary people. Like most of us. (He, of course, is now engaged to someone a lot like her, but without her attitude. She, of course, is still single.)
The more I talked to Dr. Broder, the more I wondered if this level of self-involvement was a large part of what makes it hard to find a guy. Can it get to the point where we think we’re so special—so uniquely exceptional and appealing—that we lose perspective entirely? I used to think, yeah, I have high standards, but I can’t help it if I have good taste. (Speaking of good taste, never mind that the guys I have chosen haven’t always turned out to be so fabulous, either.) Our generation of women is constantly told to have high self-esteem, but it seems that the women who think the most highly of themselves are at risk of ego-tripping themselves out of romantic connection. The more highly we think of ourselves, the more critical we are of perfectly good guys.
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