1) You want someone who is similar to you, but different in a few key areas.
This can suggest self-doubt or discomfort with embracing your own vulnerability. It may also highlight personal flaws that you wish to correct or negate by associating with someone who lacks these same flaws (like being a messy person who prefers to date people who are scrupulously organized, for instance).
2) You want someone who is the opposite of you in almost every conceivable way.
This desire is a bit more troubling, as it could indicate a measure of self-loathing that this book is ill-equipped to fix. If this is the case, I suggest either intensive therapy or high-impact kickboxing in advance of the mating process.
3) You want someone who the opposite of you, not because you hate yourself, but because you insist on holding others to a set of standards that you have no interest in adhering to.
This wish is also troubling and outside the purview of this book. Look for my follow-up book, Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Need This.
The truth is that even the most fair-minded person has a tendency to overlook his or her own shortcomings compared to others’. A survey of twenty-six thousand men and women by MSNBC and Elle Magazine asked participants to rate their own physical attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 signifying “international supermodel” and 1 signifying “repulsive hobgoblin.” (No, that wasn’t the survey’s official language.) Most respondents rated themselves between 6 and 7, with 30 percent of those under age thirty rating themselves an 8 or higher.[lviii]
Either they just happened to be twenty-six thousand particularly hot ladies and gents, or we have a tendency to give ourselves a bit too much credit. Having not seen the sample group, I’m willing to allow for the former, but I would bet on the latter. I’m sure there have been countless times when I thought a girl was checking me out but, in fact, she was trying to guess what kind of leafy vegetable was lodged in my teeth without my knowledge. One of the wonderful things about the human psyche is that it shields us from strangers’ true thoughts about us. If that means I erroneously feel like James Bond despite having a Brussels sprout hidden in my molar, I’m willing to go with it.
As endlessly sexy as I know my readership to be (you especially!), it’s statistically impossible for us all to be above average. Some people just have to be average. Your author is such a person, and he has even become more comfortable with his visual mediocrity. Besides, everybody knows that authors don’t have to be beautiful as long as their readers are. (Please note that the burden of breathtaking hotness at book signings is squarely on your shoulders. If you’re counting on me to carry the gorgeousness load, we will both be disappointed.)
The good thing about our swelling egos is that we’re generally charitable to our significant others also. The same study found that 85 percent of young women and 81 percent of young men were happy with their partners’ looks. (The survey also validates my personal theory that there are roughly four percent more assholes among young males than young females.) The survey was even more encouraging as it pertained to body image, with the majority of respondents rating their partners’ bodies higher than their own. Asked for comment on the study he co-authored, psychology researcher David Frederick of the University of California, Los Angeles said:
“Even people who were dissatisfied with their bodies were satisfied with their partner’s body. There’s some degree of reassurance that we are our harshest critics.”
That’s good news for both sides in the war between the sexes. Perhaps future genetic science will isolate the “fat paranoia” gene and get rid of this bastard along with the cheating one.
So what do we look for in the people we choose to be naked with on a regular basis? Despite all that “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars” junk, we all want roughly the same thing. (I guess Men and Women Are from the Same Planet, Because Only One Planet in Our Galaxy Has Sufficient Atmosphere to Support Human Life wasn’t a terribly catchy title.) A paper entitled “Sociosexuality and Romantic Partner Choice” documented a study asking men and woman to rate the importance of fifteen different attributes in determining a prospective mate.[lix] Respondents of both sexes valued mates who were physically attractive, had a pleasant disposition, and who possessed beliefs and core values akin to their own.
Men were slightly more likely to place an emphasis on physical characteristics, a finding that shocked the Institute for Things That Are Painfully Obvious, although no one else. Women placed a bit more value on traits like kindness and earning capacity, but the gender differences weren’t extraordinary. One of the most popular myths propagated by dating books inferior to this one is that men are inscrutable alien creatures whose desires and motivations are beyond the understanding of anyone with a Y chromosome. If you honestly believe this, let me save you a lot of wasted time and money. If you want to know what guys are really like, heed the following instructions to the letter:
Go ask one.
I don’t mean take samples of the male population from various locations, ages, and walks of life, and then compare and contrast them. I mean ask one, as in a solitary unit. As long as he isn’t clinically insane or missing essential chromosomes, his answers should tell you as much as you require to unravel the unfathomable complexity of those curious, penis-wielding creatures you see around you. Spending more intellectual energy than that is like fretting over the recipe for a peanut butter sandwich. (I intentionally omitted jelly from the sandwich and will leave it up to you ladies to need vagaries like molasses.)
If you’re still confused by those strange life forms trying to buy you mixed drinks at your local tavern, a poll of two thousand men asked them to state the top ten traits they find attractive,[lx] including:
Soft-heartedness (the male equivalent of kindness & consideration)
Modesty (known among my gender as “not acting like a huge dick”)
A pleasing voice (including, but not limited to, enjoyably evocative communication during intercourse)
Facial features (see same note as #3)
Hair (insert vulgar joke here)
Skin tone
Weight
Blah-blah-do-I-really-need-to-keep-spelling-it-out-blah
Finally, an exposé that reveals what’s behind the curtain! Men are rather fond of the way women look, including their skin and hair! If we could just access their secret meetings, we might discover their opinions on breasts too!
I can’t reveal the source without compromising his safety, but I think I’ve located a whistleblower who’s willing to talk off the record…
If I’m being a little glib, it’s only because I believe some ink has been spent on these specific questions before. In my experience, I’ve found that most women understand most men perfectly well, beginning with an understanding and healthy appreciation for our basic simplicity. Beyond that, it’s only necessary to retain mastery of the subject by accepting what you know and avoiding getting struck by anything heavy enough to trigger amnesia. Believe me when I say that there are more interesting and complex quandaries present in the Hardee drive-through menu than are present in the average male brain.
Trust your observations and act accordingly. If you find yourself second-guessing us, back up one guess. In most cases, one is more than sufficient. Stay the course. My gender is just begging to admit we’re outgunned and turn over the reins in perpetuity to a benevolent matriarchy. Half of us never wanted to leave the nest in the first place; at least a gentle takeover would allow us to retain some dignity. Our gender entire history is predicated on a series of increasingly embarrassing admissions of fault.
On behalf of men everywhere, please stop us before our apology becomes an extinction-level event.
In the next chapter, we’ll discuss how to get ahead by never moving an inch.
Chapter Twenty
Accountant in the Sky
A few years ago, a friend of the family, a respected commercial real estate agent and developer, excitedly told my father he was poise
d to make a killing on an older lakefront home he’d purchased for a song. He asked my dad to take a look at the property with him. Though he admitted the home had fallen into disrepair after standing vacant for a few years when the previous owners moved to Florida, it had been priced so far below market value that any repairs would be a relatively minor expense.
When my father took a cursory look at the dilapidated mess, he prepared his friend for some unfortunate news. A proper inspection was necessary to check for mold, termites, and cracks in the walls and foundation. When Dad’s friend called after the inspection a few days later, his earlier excitement was gone. His tone was angry and a little indignant.
“Grant, I thought you said that guy was reputable. That son-of-a-bitch gave me an estimate that was more than what I paid for the damn property.”
This was the outcome my father had quietly suspected the second he set foot inside the house. It was immediately apparent that this wasn’t the deal of the century, but rather a money-and-energy-draining shambles that wouldn’t see a profit any time soon, if ever. He’d tried to let his poor duped friend down as gently as possible. There was no point in repairing the property, as the cost would be more than the resultant home worth.
There is a term in real estate known as “replacement cost,” which refers to the estimated expense of rebuilding an existing structure with modern materials and methods. Replacement can express what a property is worth, but not in every case. Replacement cost is a term more often employed by property insurers in their attempt to properly compensate the policyholder when he suffers a total loss. For instance, if an insured warehouse essential to my business burns down, the insurance agency will give me enough money to erect the same building on my property.
Most properties are valued according to their replacement cost. If you buy a home and it depreciates, potential buyers are under no obligation to reimburse you for the amount you paid. Even if you wait for the market to recover (an incredibly difficult prediction), you may never get back what you spent. Such was the investment of my father’s friend. Repairs were so prohibitively expensive that he had little choice but to bulldoze everything and sit on the property until he could afford to rebuild. What looked like a quick, profitable flip of an undervalued asset turned into an expensive five-year mortgage on undeveloped land that nobody wanted in a down market.
Some of you may be re-checking this book cover to make sure you haven’t grabbed a real estate textbook by mistake. Don’t worry, we haven’t changed topics. I told this story to demonstrate a mistake people make in both real estate and relationships. Relationships are a lot like pieces of real estate. Both are investments that benefit from attention and care. Even the best investments require some maintenance from time to time. Neglect is ruinous to the long-term health of all our investments of time and energy.
Relationships also share this similarity with real estate: they’re not all equally valuable. Like any other investment, there are winners worth your attention and others that can never be saved. Throwing all your resources (time, love, energy, etc.) into a hopeless case won’t turn it into a winner. As my father told his friend after the inspection, trying to fix a loser is futile. Not only would you forgo more money than you might ever get back, you would also waste resources better spent elsewhere. In real estate, my dad calls this “throwing good money after bad.”
In Las Vegas, there is a similar term for this process of obsessively incurring greater and greater risks in an effort to reclaim “investments.” It called “chasing the loss.” Vegas has built an oasis in the sand off of profits from people who insisted that their losing streak was just about to end. Every one of them was certain his luck would change if he just stuck it out long enough. Go to any casino on the strip and observe people leaving after a long night at the tables. The unlucky ones lurch out like the walking dead, their eyes glazed over from waiting for a hot streak that never happened.
Pouring your heart into a bad relationship is no different than doubling down on a bad hand at blackjack or trying to repair a condemned building. No amount of commitment or belief is sufficient to change the outcome. Losing is inevitable. The best you can do is to minimize the damage, learn from your mistakes, and live to fight another day.
Okay, I promise not to bet it all on red or buy swampland in Mississippi. Where’s this all going?
I told these stories to demonstrate a common mistake among those perpetually disappointed with their loves lives. Disappointment is natural when a relationship fails. Disappointment isn’t necessarily unhealthy. When we cease to be disappointed by anything, it’s usually because we’ve come to expect nothing. That’s a depressing way to live.
Don’t sacrifice optimism just to avoid being let down. If that’s the only remaining viable option, be like that guy at the casino who knows it’s just not his night and walk away.
There’s another opportunity to allay romantic frustration, and seizing it early can be exactly what you need to serve disappointment a temporary restraining order. Think about what’s at the core of your past romantic disappointments. What was ultimately missing? Did your partner fail to live up to his promises? Did he say things just to manipulate you? Did he misrepresent the person he really was? Where did he come up short?
Allow me to advance a potentially controversial theory. Maybe your ex-boyfriend didn’t fail you. You may be genuinely hurt by what happened, and you may even trace that hurt directly to his inability to meet certain expectations. That doesn’t mean he was responsible. If you see consistent patterns of disappointment in your past relationships, especially those repeatedly focused around certain chronic failings in your exes, it may be time to re-examine the evidence. If you find yourself let down by different men over and over again in the exact same ways, the failure may lie in perception more than reality.
When you examine the nuts and bolts of past disappointments, how much can you definitively ascribe to dishonesty or misrepresentation? Who failed to meet expectations, your exes or you?
We can’t reasonably expect to be all things to all people, especially not to those who claim to love us most. Unconditional love offers freedom from performance. In our daily lives, so much is presentational that moments of candid reflection are necessary to remind us who we are. At our jobs, we struggle to perfect an air of professionalism and confidence that will inspire our employer’s faith in us. Among our peers, our persona is defined more flexibly by the intimacy we feel with those closest to us. The more comfortable we are, the less our thoughts and behaviors are tyrannized by image.
The experience of being loved is essential to our humanity; love provides the only forum where success and failure are equally embraced.
Whether “karma” exists or not is a subject for debate, but it seems logical to assume that those capable of expressing love are most likely to receive it. Is that an expression of some kind of cosmic “justice?” I have trouble envisioning an all-seeing supernatural accountant in the sky who has any interest in the countless petty intrigues here on Earth, but your guess is as good as mine. For our purposes, it’s more instructive to sort out cause and effect than it is to judge right and wrong. After all, being “right” isn’t much consolation when the person you love leaves you for someone else, nor does being “wrong” prevent him from leaving.
If there’s any consolation in this terrible scenario, it’s that very little good comes from ignoble beginnings. I experienced this firsthand in my last long relationship in Los Angeles. I met my girlfriend under inconvenient circumstances. Though she’d lived in L.A. her whole life, I met her online just after she moved away to Nashville, Tennessee. It wasn’t ideal for starting a relationship—exchanging emails and texts, occasionally talking on the phone when our schedules permitted, not knowing when we would see each other.
Oh, and she was married. Did I mention that bit? Anyway, this happened many years ago, though not so long ago that I can comfortably write it off as youthful indiscretion. I was dumb, plain and
simple, and I knew it from the outset. She’d been married her entire adult life, mostly unhappily, and I wasn’t much more than a convenient impetus to abandon a sinking ship. That didn’t stop me from falling in love with her, of course. Masochism wasn’t a hindrance at the time; it was a bona fide aphrodisiac. I lost a great job, all contact with my friends, all the money I had, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t encased in Lucite. I think she also took the last of my self-respect when she left, but I can’t say that for sure. In fairness, it could’ve rolled under the refrigerator during one of my numerous post-breakup crying jags.
I tend to be a little absent-minded when I’m sobbing uncontrollably.
Don’t think that I’m fishing for sympathy. I’m sure the ex-husband would like to raise a few objections as well. I got exactly what I expected and nothing less than I deserved. There may not be a supernatural accountant in the sky, but justice was served nonetheless. I suffered through spiraling depression and a litany of other mini-crises too numerous (and embarrassing) to mention. Like my old calf injury, the memories of that pain will probably never disappear completely, but neither will the hard-won wisdom.
If that woman is reading this, I want to say I’m sorry. I was a whiny, selfish teenager in a man body, and I don’t blame you for leaving when you did. As awful as things were the last time we spoke, I never stopped caring about you and wondering if you turned out okay. I sincerely hope you’re doing well, and I honestly owe you thanks. This book might never have been written without your influence.
Honestly, most of the meaningful truths I’ve gathered over four strange decades came at a terrible price. There are things that happened when I was much younger and things I witnessed that are indelibly burned in my memory even now, as well as all that I lost or gave up through ignorance or negligence and all the people I drove away or left without saying goodbye. I’m usually happy to forget nearly all of the insight and wisdom collected here through my experiences.
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