ILIZA: Sorry, I’m not down with that.
DUDE: Huh? That’s a little blunt—
ILIZA: It’s not personal. I just don’t want to date a man with kids. I want someone I can take vacations with without worrying about anyone else’s schedule.
DUDE: Maybe you’d like them, though.…
ILIZA: Would you date me if I had two sons?
DUDE: No.
ILIZA: Wow, you answered that fast. Anyway, you seem like a nice guy, but by not putting “proud father of two” in your profile, you’re hiding something. And even though I’m not into kids, there are so many women out there who are. Like I have one friend who is a few years older than me who would love to date a man with kids.
DUDE: Well, you’re the oldest woman I’ve ever gone out with.
[Ouch.]
ILIZA: Eh, whatever. You’re a year out of a nine-year marriage, and you don’t know what you want. Why would I date you?
DUDE: Huh?
ILIZA: I make a lot of money and I’m not ugly. Why would I want to put up with your baggage?
DUDE: Well, we could always hang out and see where it goes.…
ILIZA: You mean just fuck? No, I don’t have a problem finding someone to sleep with.
DUDE: Guess you aren’t gonna have that second drink?…
ILIZA: No, no I’m not. But you can walk me out. Oh, also? This is why I don’t give out my number.
And… unmatch.
Fun tangentially related anecdote that I’m leaving right here because, well, it’s too cringeworthy a story not to put SOMEWHERE in this book. I had gone on about three dates with a guy—we’ll call him Chris Hemsworth. OK fine, let’s just call him Chris. He didn’t look like Chris Hemsworth, though, so we’ll call him Paul, not as in Walker, as in Giamatti. We’ll call him a hot Paul Giamatti. HPG and I hadn’t slept together. We had made out twice—while standing, in case you were curious on logistics. HPG looked like a boyfriend. Nice face, a little bit of softness on his body, but definitely not fat. He was funny and carried with him the kind of pain that can only come from feeling less than in the eyes of one’s father. He was the kind of guy who, in conversation, you could see was thankful for a woman he could open up to. He was sweet and sensitive, which is why the next part of the story was such a shame.
One night, I decided to send HPG a pic of some underboob (no face; this isn’t amateur hour!). Just a picture of my chest with a shirt pulled up enough that you could see my underudder. It was pretty hot. And I’m not going to lie—I sent it because I wanted to get a reaction. Isn’t that what any sexy selfie is about? We want dudes to have a seizure and realize that there has never been a more perfect woman on the planet. We want their dicks to fly off and tears to roll down their faces (probably because their dicks just flew off?). Point is, I was just a girl… standing in front of a boy (and by boy I mean mirror with my phone in my hand) asking him to love her (i.e., to tell her that her body made him want sex with her that she would only bestow upon him when the right amount of alcohol had been consumed).
What he wrote back was… not what I expected:
“Me likey that picture long time.”
Take a second to say that phrase out loud, as an adult. Let’s forget the bastardization of an already overused Full Metal Jacket quote. In my world, “me likey” comes eerily close to the reaction a toddler has when his mommy asks if he’s enjoying his num-nums.
I stood there for a minute, and I guess I thought about it too long, because shortly another text came rolling in: “Herro? Why you no like meeee?”
And then he added… the cherry on the infantilized jargon sundae… a crying emoji.
That was our last text exchange. My Girl Logic tried to pretend, for a mere .13 seconds, that maybe I could still date him. But my libido had instantly withered when I received those texts, and whatever fantasy I’d been building up about HPG had been crushed by a giant toddler foot.
I’m sure not everyone would have reacted how I did. (Dirty baby-talk isn’t my thing, but maybe it’s yours?) And maybe HPG was a great guy at heart! But in that moment, when I decided to stop texting him, my GL was acting on my own best interests. Instead of instilling self-doubt, this time my GL was egging me on, telling me to cut and run, reminding me that in the past, whenever people have said dumb or weird things right off the bat, it’s been an indicator of what’s to come. How can a smart person not apply past lessons to current situations?
I decided a long time ago that just because I’m talking to a guy doesn’t mean I have to try to make a relationship work (a.k.a. settle) if it doesn’t feel right. No matter what age I am! I get it; as we grow older, it feels harder and harder to find a man we’re remotely interested in. When you do manage to apple-bob your way to a decent human, you’re so exhausted from trying that your Girl Logic starts thinking, “He’s not amazing, but what if he’s the last man who will ever want me? I am thirty-three. It’s either make it work with him and be 64 percent happy or die alone wearing wedges with boot-cut jeans, alone in Valley Village. Guess I can overlook the fact that he says ‘should have ate’ instead of ‘should have eaten,’ picks his teeth at the table, and always forgets to ask me how my day was.”
But it’s OK that grammar matters to you. It’s OK to want someone who doesn’t pick his teeth and someone who is communicative. Your GL is picking up on the little things that are genuinely important to you because in the end they’re not so little. In the end, they represent bigger things that can have a major impact on your long-term compatibility and happiness. Love and relationships are a fucking minefield of cheap shoes, selfish intentions, OK-looking bodies, and weird interpersonal issues.… And then there’s the second date. GL might get tripped up at times, but at its heart it knows what will and won’t work for you in the long term.
GL will eventually remind you of these truths: Could you die alone? Probably. Will you turn thirty, shit the bed, and never date again? No. Every time I get out of a serious relationship, I think, “I can’t believe I have to start all over again. I’ll never find a connection as special as the one I had with that guy.” And then, one day, I find myself out with someone wonderful, and it all starts again.
Seriously, what does “having it all” even mean? “All” is subjective. Not every woman’s vision of a perfect future looks the same. Not every woman wants kids. Not every woman wants to get married. Not every woman wants a house in the suburbs. Not every woman wants a career. Not every woman is attracted to men in the first place. Why and how did dudes become the key to our Perfect Future?
My friend, a gorgeous doctor, is married with two kids. She appears to have it all. And for her, she does—she has the life she wants, one that fulfills her. But her fantasy life is not mine. Even if I had the dream husband and all the rest, even if my love life were a 15 on a scale of 1 to 10, if I couldn’t get on stage and talk about my experiences, your experiences, and the experiences of every woman we know, I wouldn’t possess my version of having it all. My friend’s life may look enviable because it’s traditional; women haven’t been independent long enough for us to totally abandon the ideal of being the trifecta of perfect wife, mother, and career woman (while still looking good). But ask yourself: If you couldn’t do the thing you loved most, would you truly feel complete? If I couldn’t express myself and make people laugh for a living, I would crumble inside. So I make sure I can keep doing what I love, for as long as I love doing it. Nothing is as important to me, for now.
How many women buy into this fantasy that every part of us should be eternally perky and shiny and soft, and that will help us “land a man” and get our wizened eggs fertilized, and then, finally, the dream will be realized!
Some women achieve that dream and discover it’s a nightmare. Especially when husbands demand their own brand of perfection. I remember once, during their separation, the asshole husband of one of my close girlfriends said, “I’d want to sleep with you if you tanned more.” Forget the inanity of this statement for a s
econd. It’s this type of standard—men wanting you to be something you’re not—that’s damaged so many women so much. If it wasn’t the tan, it would be weight, or the way she spoke, or the clothes she wore. I feel bad that he was raised in a world where that sentence could even cross his mind. (They have now been divorced about three years. She is in her early forties, and her new fiancé is thirty-two. I love this ending.)
In our grandmothers’ era, perfection meant looking pretty and keeping house. Women had to be good cooks because we weren’t supposed to have jobs outside the home. Men wanted a woman who would stay home, vacuum in pearls, and then, after spending all day speaking only to her baby, she’d be expected to make dinner, have a martini ready, and blow him before retiring in her separate bed (no cuddling, even!?). So at some point, women in the ’60s and ’70s turned to pharmaceutical “helpers” like Valium to get through it all: the cooking, the cleaning, the demands, the expectations, the loveless marriages, the requisite blow jobs. (Hence the popularity of that Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper.”)
To me, the modern equivalent of Valium is white wine. Over the past several years, women’s consumption of white wine has skyrocketed. The archetype of the blue-blooded American Wasp and her drink of choice, a symbol of breezy fun thinly veiling an underlying alcohol addiction, has become a mainstay in our pop cultural lexicon. Real Housewives drink it on camera, funny girls drink it in comedy and sketches, Cougar Town made it a character, Hoda and Kathie Lee chug it to endure morning television.
I’m all for getting drunk on a weekend, or a Tuesday night if I don’t have anywhere to be the next day. But the amount of alcohol single women are drinking these days seems a little excessive—and it makes me wonder if we’re just using it as a numbing tool to escape the pain of our constant quest for a “perfect” life… and as a way to beat our own GL into submission. I’ve done it; everyone does it. You drink to deliberately lower your guard, your standards, your underwear. I’ve been out with someone I was half-attracted to and figured, “Whatever, we’ll get fucked up, then kissing him will be fun.” The other person, of course, never knows you’re dulling your senses to find him attractive. Our GL may even turn optimistic: “What if I get drunk, we mess around, it turns out fun, and I actually grow to like this Hunchback?”
But maybe part of us is trying to quiet the voice inside us that actually knows what we want and deserve from love. Maybe we’re so afraid we won’t get it that we just have a drink, go along for the ride with whatever dude happens to be there, and take our chances. In college, heavy drinking made us more likely to hook up with guys we wouldn’t normally be attracted to; as adults grappling with the realities of aging, alcohol can cause us to be more willing to take a chance on men we KNOW (or would know if were sober enough) aren’t what we’re looking for.
(And yes, of course women also drink just for fun because thinned blood feels good flowing through your body and drunk dancing is the best.)
Alcohol and GL don’t always mix, though, especially in your twenties (also known as the grossest decade of one’s life). Back then, I remember feeling outright ashamed when I’d make eye contact with a hot guy, like I should apologize for not being pretty enough for him. My ideal relationship fantasy then involved traditionally hot men; the hotter the better. And though I never did anything I didn’t want to do, being blinded by the fact that an attractive man could desire me did lead me to make some poor romantic choices in my twenties. Really, for much of my life I was no better than those nerdy, newly rich dorks who develop apps or sell scripts and only date women who resemble wax figurines (perhaps to compensate for never getting laid in high school?). This didn’t always end well for me.
When I moved to LA at twenty-one, I met a guy at the grocery store. Aw, just like in the movies! He had a chiseled jaw and a southern accent, and his name was Jason. We spoke for a bit, and he eventually called over his brother, Riley. Both of them were super hot, just mountains of proportionate muscle and tank tops. The three of us hung out for a few months and did everything together. I preferred Jason over Riley because he was softer, quieter, with less of a creep vibe.
Later that year—this was New Year’s Eve 2005—I had to go back to Boston to retrieve some things from school, and I decided to spend NYE with Michelle. Hanging with her, I noticed that something felt off in my body. Welp, turns out I was pregnant. And yeah, it was Jason’s. I was young and partnerless, not fully rooted yet, and my dreams for my life were far from fulfilled. I was not ready to have a child, and certainly not with this random dude I’d met at the Albertson’s soup aisle. Hence, I wanted my pregnancy to be, well, gone as soon as possible.
It was the holidays, so we couldn’t see a non-ER doctor or get to Planned Parenthood. I was scared, so I called my mom. This woman had paid for my college, sent me around the world, and supported me in moving to Los Angeles. Now I was calling to inform her that there was a good chance I was about to ruin all the hard work we’d put in because I was a sucker for some good old boy with a pretty face. What an ignorant, terrified brat.
She wasn’t angry, though. She was understanding and warmly pragmatic. When I got back to LA, I called and discovered it was $600 for an abortion at Planned Parenthood. I called Jason and told him what was going on. “I want you to keep it,” he said. “I won’t help pay for an abortion.”
I was making under $30K a year and supporting myself, so $600 was a huge chunk to me. I was lucky: my mother gave me the money. I think about that number a lot, and how insanely fortunate I was to have a mom who supported me, both emotionally and financially. There are so many women in my position who get pregnant and through lack of resources, end up giving birth to a child they can’t care for—or, worse, hurting themselves trying to get an abortion from someone shady. This is part of why I support Planned Parenthood, because I’m not just a donor, I was once a patient.
After I flew home to LA and had the procedure, Jason stopped by the next day to see how I was feeling. For the record, I was feeling fine, and I had nothing to say to him. He told me he was probably moving home to Arkansas, and I couldn’t have cared less.
I did feel stupid, though. I couldn’t help being physically attracted to someone pretty, but I definitely let Jason’s looks—and what I thought his looks meant about me—override my better judgement. I was twenty-one and drunk. I was a fucking moron. My story is just one example of why women’s reproductive health options are so important: in my case, it was because all people make mistakes, but young people make more mistakes.
Enough years have passed that I’m no longer struck dumb by hotness—in fact, when a super-good-looking guy asks me out, I immediately assume he’s less smart, makes less money than me, and is otherwise severely flawed. I’m not always wrong about that, either. In your early thirties and up, if you’re a man who is model hot, you’re either already married, famous, or successful. If not, in my book you’ve sort of failed. I see it on dating apps all the time: these thirty-five-year-old male “models” have no education, no job, and poor social skills to boot. When you’re a white dude with every possible societal advantage at your disposal, and you still can’t figure your life out, then you’re just dumb. And no, glomming on to your friend’s “fitness brand” or throwing “social media consulting” onto the same resume as anything to do with real estate doesn’t count as a career. (P.S. To the sole dilettante genius stunner whose brains have allowed him to pursue pottery, snorkeling, a clothing company, and a medical practice on the side: Comedy is about sweeping generalizations. Don’t be a stickler.)
Another damning element of constantly striving for a perfect fantasy is that we expect perfection, then mock women who fall short of it. If someone gets work done on their face or body and it’s great, we’ll never know. But if they get it done wrong, even slightly, they end up looking… weird. Not bad, necessarily, just… they’re in the Uncanny Valley. The “Uncanny Valley” is a term used in robotics (I can’t believe I’m typing a sentence about rob
otics) when an android or robot is meant to look like a human and comes close, but something is still off enough to make you feel uneasy.
So how can we stop fruitlessly trying to squeeze our lives into constrictive little Disney-princess boxes? How can we stop letting ourselves slowly morph into white-wine-addled robots in the name of “perfection”? Remember that whole “having it all” thing I mentioned earlier—how my friend’s version of “all” was nowhere near the same as my own? That’s true for everything, and, honestly, the only person you need to impress is yourself. I know that sounds schmaltzy and is easier said than done. It’s hard to accept yourself, and it’s hard when it seems like everyone around you has what you want. (Why don’t we stop to think that maybe we have what they want?)
Sometimes, your GL whispers so many things at once, you become numb. A great example of this is whenever I give myself too much time to get ready to go out. I’m guaranteed to find new imperfections that don’t exist, thereby adding more and more layers of crap to my face and ultimately ending up looking uglier in the process. (Ladies, give yourself forty-five minutes to get ready, tops. Contouring alone is insane; why do all of our faces have to look like Picasso’s cubist period?)
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