Greetings, superfriends – Wonder Woman, reporting for duty.
Being a nearly-immortal Amazon princess, I can say with a surety that I have seen a whole load of humans come and go. While I don’t pretend that my two thousand year long acquaintance with the male of the species has led me to understand him any better than the average human female does, my experience does at least lend me a familiarity that many of my human (and non-human) female friends – SuperGurl included – seem to find valuable.
Thus I found myself on the phone with SuperGurl this afternoon, discussing a particularly fine point of relationship-building. (I should issue a disclaimer at this point and let you know right from the outset that I don’t have dating issues, myself…since Steve Trevor bit the dusty some years back, I’ve found myself drifting further and further back towards my roots, traditional Amazonian celibacy. But – I digress.) SG found herself in several dating quandaries in recent weeks, and saw fit to come to me for advice. She liked what she heard, and asked me, one girlfriend to another, to codify this dating advice here on her blog.
Let me warn you, some of this shit is harsh. A double millennium of studying human behavior stripped the rosy glow away from my analysis of “love” – “love”, enshrouded in layers of romantic unreality like almost no other human concept, still has to occur on planet Earth and within the boundaries of human reality. Therefore…
Wonder Woman’s Amazon Code:
Let me ask you a question about your dating life. Come closer.
There. Now – why do you date?
No, think about it for a minute. Don’t feel like you’ve got to blurt out the first thing that comes to your mind, as if it were “Jeopardy” up in here. Relax.
If your answer was something in the vein of “for the free dinners” or “to get laid”, then I can’t help you. Or, rather, you don’t need my advice. But, if your answer was anything along the lines of “to find someone that I really enjoy being around” or “to find a potential life-partner” or “to find someone to love”, then we can do business.
That accepted – that you date to find someone compatible, someone that you understand and who understands you, someone you’re comfortable around and whom you could envision yourself loving – let me ask you another question: what do you do when you’re trying to find a sofa? Or a car? Or a new home? Do you walk in to the first house you see and scream, “I’ll take it!” to the real estate agent without ever looking at anything else?
If you do, you’re a fool. You’ve only looked at one fucking house! You don’t even know what you want! The seller is going to rape you because you’re obviously desperate, and you’re probably going to get stuck with a whole host of problems you didn’t even know were there, problems you’d have seen and could have avoided if you’d looked a little deeper before signing the contract.
Same goes with dating, ladies. Look – I know what it is like to feel lonely, and to feel the urge to cling on to any halfway acceptable man in your vicinity just to stave off the heartache of that big, empty bed…but it never works that way. You can’t just accept everyone that you date as a potential partner – it’s about looking around, shopping, if you will. In order to date successfully, you have to be able to spot potential issues and call them either dealbreakers or no-biggies early on. And, when I say dealbreakers – I mean “things that disqualify a person from a relationship with you”.
You have to go in to any dating relationship with a complete willingness to say “Hell, no.”
I see so many women who take crappy men into their lives and hearts – and men who take crappy women, for that matter – just because he’s there. They hate everything about their relationship, their whole lives are unhappy, but they were so desperate to have a relationship in the first place that they’d accept any kind of shit just to be in one. That doesn’t fly, sisters. If you spot a dealbreaker, a reason that you guys are fundamentally not a match, you gotta go. Although such discoveries usually occur within the first six months of a relationship, many women will pooh-pooh dealbreakers offhand, thinking she can change him, or that things will get better with time.
She never can, and it never will. Accept it as fact. You have to be willing to see facts and cut ties if necessary, and to break up in a kind, loving, and gentlewomanly way. And, you have to be willing to go back to the drawing board – to go back to being alone until the next dating opportunity arises. Period. Even if it hurts. Even if you miss him. Even if you’re dying to have sex with him just one more time. If you’re truly, truly looking for someone to love, long-term, you have to learn to identify dealbreakers and to act on them.
So, what is a dealbreaker, you ask? I can’t tell you, exactly. It depends on you. I’d define a dealbreaker as any character trait or behavior that, if you had to deal with it all the time, would drive you crazy, or make you miserable. Some examples of dealbreakers include:
- He has these really moody periods in which he won’t call me or see me and it drives me crazy
- He wants to have an open relationship, and I can’t deal with that
- I am a hardcore pothead and he’s a DEA agent
- I am an extremely frugal money-manager, and he spends every dime he makes and lives with maxed-out credit cards
- I am a very religious person, and he is an atheist who often mocks my faith
- He insists that he is not going to get married to anyone, ever, and I am looking for a potential husband
- He insists that he never, ever wants kids, and I know I do
…and the list goes on and on. Do you see what I am saying, here? Problems of these kinds can’t be fixed, folks. Cut the tie – lovingly, with dignity – and move on.
Now, the main problem with this Code of mine comes from a conflict with the fundamental nature of many women, and that is that many women – most women – have a genuine desire to please someone that she becomes interested in. That’s fine – but far too many otherwise wonderful women will carry it a step too far. They’ll spot a man they think they want, and set about to get him with measures that are destructive to the future of the relationship, and destructive to the soul of the woman. She finds out what he’s interested in, what he eats, what kinds of music he enjoys, what church he goes to…and bends her whole personality into pretzels to become the kind of woman that he’d date. She’ll shape-shift to try and make him love her.
Don’t do this. You can’t maintain it, and you’ll be miserable in the long run. Learning new things from a person you’re dating is fine, but re-molding yourself in his image is not. If you have to shape-shift to keep your relationship, you’re in a dealbreaker. Leave.
The other side of the coin is honesty – you have to be willing to be very clear about what you need in a relationship to any dating partners. You can’t pretend that it’s find with you that he is terrible with money when, a year into it, you’re going to resent him for the way he spends. If you don’t make most of your fundamental needs known to him – verbally, without expecting him to read your mind – in the first three to six months of your relationship, you’ve made a huge mistake. See, you teach people how to treat you. If you shape-shift early on, if you refuse to make your expectations and needs known, and you teach him that you love every stupid thing that he loves, that he’s cute when he’s drunk, and that you’re fine with him occasionally missing the toilet when he pees, it’s going to become a major problem when you’re married and miserable because your husband is an incontinent drunk with a taste for 80’s hair metal bands.
Finally, some practical – and controversial – advice for women seeking a mate:
What I am about to impart to you sounds outdated, sexist, and oppressive. I don’t care. Life isn’t fair, and it’s the goddamned truth, so I’m saying it. Deep down inside, most men do not have any respect for women who pursue them. It’s true. Most of the men I have known, when looking for a bed-mate, will sleep with Satan incarnate if she has a tiny waist and big tits. Likewise, most of the men I have known, when looking for a wife, look for a woman with some dignity, a woman worth getting to know, a woman who seems like she has an even temper and a level head on her shoulders, and big tits and a tiny waist. Most men, though, have sense, and value a decent woman more than they value ginormous boobies.
Dignity? Means a lot of things, but it mostly – here – means no pursuit. In the early dating stages, don’t call him. At all. I mean it. Never initiate a phone call. Same goes for email, text messages, IM’s, chats, and any other form of instantaneous communication. It’s fine to return his calls, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t call him all you want later on in the relationship. But right there at first, let him do the calling. Let him do the pursuit. Any whiff of desperation is immensely off-putting in the initial stages – and immensely undignified.
Dignity also means that he doesn’t need to know your entire life history on the first date. Keep things light, and be content to get to know each other gradually. This serves two purposes – the “knowing” you establish over time is much more profound than that gained from a few weeks’ acquaintance, and it also keeps you…well, it keeps a touch of mystery about you. It signifies that there are deeper waters, that there is more of you to know and explore. I mean, you’re a complex lady, correct? How could someone know all of you in a week or so? It can’t be done that way. Respect yourself enough to live like you know that.
Dignity? Don’t drive by his house. Don’t look for him online. Don’t make unnecessary trips to his work, etc., etc. You’ll drive yourself batshit with that kind of nonsense. And – dignity also includes not whining, moaning, or pitching a fit when a dealbreaker is found. Don’t do or say things you will regret, just calmly end it. Why? Regret leads to an insane desire for that mythological beast known as “closure”, which just brings you back into contact with something that pains you, over and over again.
The bottom line? Self awareness, maturity, and strength. The payoff? Relative happiness. Breaking it down:
- Self-awareness – be cognizant of the lengths that your sense of loneliness will lead you to in accepting the unacceptable, and be on guard against an impulse to shape-shift; know yourself well enough to know what kinds of things you absolutely cannot deal with (atheist/religious person, pothead/DEA, etc.)
- Maturity – be mature enough to accept facts, mature enough to make decisions that are correct for the long term
- Strength – strength to examine your own self and your own needs, strength to admit the truth to yourself when you encounter unpleasant facts, strength to end it when you have to, strength to restrain your impulses to call him, text him, drive by his work, track his sorry ass down, and demand to know why he didn’t call you first.
Follow these tenets, and you will do pretty well. Yes, you may end up alone – but you won’t end up with an asshole who makes you totally miserable, either. Personally, I would much rather be with myself than some asshole, any hour, any day. Wouldn’t you?
Until next time, superfriends…
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