If I wasn’t always a shallow, sexist pig,
Something must have made me one.
No tattoos, no smokers and no fat chicks. I judge women on first glance and these are the three main things I’m looking for. Or at least they seem to be.
They’re shallow, judgemental and even sexist. And that bothers me somewhat because that doesn’t sound like me at all. At least not to my ears.
It wasn’t always this way. I’ve dated all three and in some cases hotly pursued them.
So what’s changed?
Being old
The elderly are typically viewed as a less fun-loving bunch. Cynicism seems to come with the gray hair and wrinkles. The old tend also to be viewed as a more prejudiced, less tolerant group of people too and while we may ascribe that to the time in which they grew up, perhaps that attitude also comes with the gray hair and wrinkles.
Whilst I don’t have the gray hair and wrinkles yet, am I nonetheless just becoming a grumpy old man?
Viva Viagra!
I certainly don’t feel that my libido is waning now I’m the wrong side of forty. I’d still hit the ceiling in the morning if I didn’t pause before I took a pee. I’m still strongly drawn to that which I find attractive. I can still do it as many times a night as I could half a lifetime ago.
But nature’s changes don’t happen in a heartbeat. TV adverts tell us that half of men over forty have what they politely describe as erectile dysfunction. You can bet it’s not half of those who are forty.
Maybe I’m just further down the road to needing that little blue pill than I think I am. Perhaps it just takes a fancier meal to tickle my jaded appetite.
But if that’s the case, nobody’s told the big guy.
The clock’s ticking…
In my younger years I dated women with some or even all of my blacklisted failings. As I’m now in my forties and still single it logically follows that none of these relationships worked out terribly well.
Of course it also follows that my relationships with women who had none of these black marks against them didn’t work out terribly well either. Some may further point out that the only common factor is the general crumminess of the guy involved. But relationships fail in different ways and for different reasons and the women on my putative blacklist do tend to be the ones I was keenest to get away from.
Am I therefore simply triaging on experience? The twenty-something me wasn’t keener, just dumber. He had no experience to judge with and no bad experiences to be scarred by. The forty-something me can see a pattern emerging and is simply being guided by it.
…and I know it
That twenty-something me may have lacked experience but he had something to make up for it. He had time on his hands. When you’re twenty you can afford to piss away a year of your dating life on a hopeless long shot, enjoy the roller-coaster and move on to the next without turning a hair. When you’re forty you have far fewer ride-tickets left in your pocket.
I may not feel older but I nonetheless am. My body knows I am and so do my instincts. And while I may (hopefully) be a long way from the end of my days I’m surely a fair bit closer to the end of my mating and pro-creating ones.
So perhaps it isn’t my mind getting more intolerant but my instincts getting more desperate to make sure I don’t waste the time I have left?
Aside from comforting me that I am not in fact becoming a bigoted old fart it makes a lot of sense when you actually look at my rules.
No tattoos
I freely admit that I hate tattoos, they distract and detract from what’s attractive about a woman and I think that’s an entirely natural reaction – they’re a blemish like a mole, birthmark or scar. In some of us they trigger an instinctive reaction to see them as the same sort of failing of form and symmetry, a failing of the genes.
This sort of misfiring instinct I can handle. That’s not why tattoos make my blacklist. They are on the list because of what they say about the person inside.
Why get a tattoo? Because your friend got one and you liked it? Because some celeb got one? To do what everyone else seems to be doing? To express your individuality by picking a design from a set in a catalogue and having it permanently etched on you?
These answers are dumb and also totally miss the point of the question. Why get a tattoo? Why permanently mark yourself with ink? Like the design? Get it on a t-shirt or a bag. I’ve nothing against self-expression or looking cute, I just don’t see why you have to scar yourself permanently to do so.
To me tattoos are the height of crowd-following vapidity. No thought, no depth, no self-control. It’s not about the tattoo but the idiocy of having one. Truth is my ideal woman could have one, but she’d have an interesting and deep reason as to why. And I can’t be arsed to wade through the 99.9% of “oh, my best mate got one and I thought it looked really cute, ha, ha ha” answers to find her.
Nor do I care to gaze upon it in twenty or thirty years when it has taken on the character of a faded, misshapen fold-out picture.
No smokers
I’m writing this post in the West End of Glasgow’s fair city, where the chilly, drizzly December morning stroll to work takes in an awesome number of cute girls, warm and snug in their winter coats and flashy boots, dressed smartly for their day at the office and almost all trailing a stink of cigarette smoke behind them.
Three things have always struck me about Glasgow. It’s the only city in the world I’ve ever visited where even unders a clear blue sky it can still be raining on you, I’ve never seen more people on crutches in my life, and I’ve never seen more smokers puffing away outside the offices.
Yeah, I’m a non-smoker and I’m not keen on foul smells, particularly avoidable ones. But it’s not about the smell. Again it’s what being a smoker says about you. I’m not talking about the guy who enjoys the occasional joint or cigar, a pleasure enjoyed in moderation and heightened because of it. I’m talking about the addicts, the slaves to a malodorous and murderous vice dulled by excess.
Lack of self-respect, self-worth and self-control are part of this, but I think for me it is more abut the hole in your life that being an addict reveals. We’re all hard-wired for chemical highs and we can and should enjoy vices in moderation. But a rewarding and fulfilling life gives you the same chemical highs as the vice. Abusing a vice reveals that it is substituting for the chemical highs your life isn’t giving you. There’s something missing in your life that you haven’t the enterprise or gumption to fix. I want a relationship where we’re part of each other’s lives but still have our own. I want to be wanted, not needed. I still want my independence and I want my partner to want hers too. I don’t want to be a crutch for the hopelessly needy.
No fat chicks
Fat bodies aren’t “conventionally” attractive, at least not in my culture. Put a shapely, firm, curvaceous woman up against a sagging, chubby one with an ass which rubs the back of her thighs, fat spreading under the straps of her underwear and tyres of lard like a comedy caterpillar costume when she sits down and, let’s face it, there’s no competition.
Honestly though, for Miss Right I wouldn’t care about that – if I met someone I respected, related to and found genuinely interesting I wouldn’t care if she was 240 pounds. I just don’t think it’s very likely.
Because again it is not the appearance but what it says about the person buried beneath the blubber. Being overweight is like smoking. It’s the abuse of a vice to make up for a hole in your life, a hole I don’t want to have to fill. Relationships with the demanding and the needy have never worked for me.
And again it reveals a lack of self-control and self-worth around your health and your appearance. If you don’t value yourself enough to balance the calories in and calories out why the hell should I?
Not older, just wiser
So I don’t believe I’m becoming more judgemental and prejudiced in my old age. The mating instinct is one of the most powerful ones we have, and I think it is just very good at trying to narrow the odds as we get older.
And I should probably forgive it for that since my mating instinct knows it is probably far closer to death than the rest of me.