On dating

I didn't include Jess Zimmerman's piece on "high-maintenance" women in my roundup because I figured dating issues deserved their own post. It meshes with other articles I've linked to and discussed--on the Cool Girl, the Chill Girl, etc. An excerpt:

For a woman who has learned to make herself physically and emotionally small, to live literally and figuratively on scraps, admitting that you have an appetite is a source of cavernous fear. Women are often on a diet of the body, but we are always on a diet of the heart.The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding.

Pair with this insightful Ask Polly response:

So stop asking for water and then pretending it’s wine. Ask for wine. And if your wine tastes like water, send that shit back! Don’t pretend that you didn’t want wine in the first place. DON’T FUCK THE DUDE WITH THE WATER AND THEN TELL HIM ALL YOUR SECRETS.

Ask for wine. Don’t be embarrassed that you want wine. Just say “I am someone who drinks wine now. Nothing else will do. It’s okay if you can’t give it to me. I will find someone who will, or I will make it myself. I am good and strong and I can do lots of things. I am beautiful and broken and I deserve this.”

***
Dating is not going well, but--as I did say in my roundup--the answer is not putting up with more bullshit or even mediocrity from men.

I've never enjoyed dating--it always sucked--but I don't recall it ever sucking so comprehensively. There were always annoying and offensive messages and bad dates, but there used to also be good online conversations and at least okay dates--few good dates but a fair amount of interesting ones. You'd learn something maybe. Kind of like house hunting--may not be the house you want or the one within your price range, but it's an interesting insight into other people's lives. In theory, I enjoy meeting people and learning about them. It's a stew of humanity out there.

But--with the exception of supercreep, who was a very interesting man (or at least pretended to be)--I've come across a lot of just-boring. Including people who you'd think would be interesting. I've also come across a number of douches. The guy who wants someone who goes out instead of watching TV (why is going to a bar inherently preferable to watching TV?). The guy who wants someone who "owns" her career, and provides the dictionary definition of "to own." I own my paycheck and my house, douchebag. I sometimes wonder about my career.

I went out with a very unambitious slacker. I mentioned--specifically, in a conversation about getting to work in spite of SafeTrack--that I could only really telework when I had serious deadlines, as I did in the winter. His response was, "it sounds like you have deadlines; that would stress me out." Bye.

I thought of him in the context of this controversial piece in the Guardian, which is only one side of the story but I'm not unsympathetic to it. It makes me wonder: were expectations made explicit? It's never healthy in a relationship when any partner feels that (s)he is giving disproportionately, but is he really? Or is he undervaluing his wife's unpaid work? We don't know. But I know when I went out with the slacker guy who complained about the cost of living but still talked about how his goal was to work part-time eventually, I thought, his spouse will end up supporting him and his hobbies. Bye.

My goal is not to not work; my goal is to enjoy my job. I do some of the time, and when I do, I really do. I want more of that--that sense of fulfillment from doing something well and from learning all the time. I get that other people seek that kind of fulfillment--that of achievement--outside of work. 
But I can't identify with it.

It's never just one thing that keeps me from going out with someone or going out with him again. Something like what I just described--that's just one stark thing to latch onto, in light of an overall sense of incompatibility. Am I dismissing decent guys? Yeah, maybe, but like I've said, I've too often done the opposite and I've learned to trust my instincts.

***
I too (like Jess Zimmerman in her piece) had always dismissed romance, not so much because I didn't think it was allowed but because I thought it was style over substance (and sometimes it is). I don't want a man to send me flowers instead of talking through an issue; I want a man to send me flowers and talk through an issue. I didn't realize how important flowers, etc. were until I dated a man who I knew would never send them--who wouldn't perform any kind of romantic gesture. He was, incidentally, of every man I've ever dated, the strongest on substance. I never fretted about whether or when I'd hear from him; he never tried to f* with my head. I would have liked to say that that absolved the need for gestures, but it didn't. Something was missing--a sense of couplehood. I'm ready to admit that I want both style and substance.