It’s not my fault.
Well, okay, it technically is, I mean, it takes two to tango as they say, or do the horizontal mambo, or go down the old dirt road, or Foxtrot Unicorn Charlie Kilo, or do a load of laundry, or partake in Private Johnson’s Dishonorable Discharge, or pelvic pinochle, whatever you may call it, properly done requires two consenting adults, even if one of them suspected it may be a really REALLY bad idea, or has been duped by a carefully crafted line delivered over Kendall Jackson by a Romeo with a tongue slicker than a Wisconsin back porch in January.
If it even gets that far. Most of the time, things fall apart long before apparel commences departure, and I. nearing fifty, am coming (sorry) into this with the dating knowledge of a 17-year old Amish girl. And we’re talking the obedient one, not the one who’s been sneaking out to the barn with Jebediah to play hide the plowshare.
I was dumb.
I was dumb for about two years. Men could tell me any tall tale (straighten my Longfellow?) and I would believe them, Oh, I would believe anything! I put the gull in gullible, and they could see me coming (sorry again!) a mile away.
I love you. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted. You’re different than the others. Ive never met anyone like you . You’re just what I’ve been looking for. And I’d swallow the lies hook, line and sinker, until I was strung up, hanging on a boathook flopping for dear life with a bunch of other girls who couldn’t see the lies for what they were, sucker-fish one and all.
But this dumb fish is starting to catch on.
You know how you get good at something? You do a really shitty job for a long time, then one day realize you’ve been doing the same task for so long that now you’re getting pretty good at it. If you persist, you keep getting better, then you become great, and eventually you are an expert.
I am starting to see through these charlatans, hawking their snake oil and three-card Monte TONIGHT! at a bar near you. They start the show and draw you in, the strategies to separate a lady from her clothing are virtually endless on a Saturday night.
All of the men begin to filter into mental categories in my brain. They march, rank and file, through my head and divvy themselves up, an XY chromosome assembly line, queuing up in tidy little rows, different types all neatly sorted. They have become predictable, and I now easily identify what I could not see before…
THE SEVEN DWARVES OF DATING:
Let me introduce you to Drunky, Lazy, Sloppy, Ghosty, Picky, Needy and Playboy. Wait, they require no introduction, you have met these seven a million times on any Saturday night.
#1 Drunky: This one’ll sneak up on you…Here’s the guy who forgets to call because he’s at the bar half in the bag, cognitively impaired to brain stem level, though still capable of 30-IQ requirement games like bar dice or pull tabs. His line “Can you meet me right now?”, the battle cry of one incapable of making long term plans. And if you did manage to schedule evening plans, you can fully expect him to pass out after day-drinking and leave you waiting… and waiting… aaaand waiting… a cobweb-infested skeleton by the phone hoping for a call that never arrives.
But ohhh, the flattery he can accomplish when he’s a few drinks in! You’re a Goddess. You’re the most beautiful Nymph walking the planet. I LOVE YOU wayyy too early, but he doesn’t love you. The guy you’re actually dating is Johnny Walker, Jim Beam or Jack Daniels, who have one and all been bullshitting women since the first bottle left the still in 18whatever. Beware, there is a tipping point with heavy drinkers in which the charming Dr. Jekyll suddenly goes sideways and transforms into his asshole doppelganger Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde is no fun at all. And if he’s this far gone, you may even meet his sidekicks Mylanta, Tums and Imodium.
You will be unlikely to secure any actual dates, because this guy is patently incapable of mentally considering a schedule. and just has you meet up with him at The Bar. There will always be a The Bar, because he’s there almost every night, and has a stool there with his unique buttprint. If you have good boundaries, you won’t wind up with Drunky. because all you have to do to foil him him is tell him you’re not available till next week. His brain is too addled to make plans that far ahead, so he’ll never follow up on taking you anywhere. Congratulations! You have successfully filtered out Drunky. And when you do, you’ll really have to dig in your heels and block his number because one thing you can be sure of, no matter how ugly the breakup or how long ago you last saw him, you absolutely WILL hear from Drunky again. He needs a ride. Here’s an idea. When Drunky asks for your number, give him Uber’s.
#2 Lazy: This guy just wants to watch things. A spectator of life and the consummate armchair quarterback, this is Mr. Couch Potatohead with the legs missing from the set because you are not getting him off that damn recliner. His sense of humor is limited to Seinfeld and The Big Lebowski quotes, because he spends most of his free time on the couch watching them for the 78th time. Actually, if you love TV, this could be a great match for you, and you can both ecstatically sail off into the sunset on your dual Barcalounger to the theme of Friends, Season 5 in which Ross finally marries Rachel.Your vacations will include cruises, that space limiting event with miles of endless buffet and flopping on a zero-gravity lounge in the sun…wait a minute, Lazy Dwarf is starting to sound kinda great, unless he’s also…
#3 Sloppy: These are the guys who have skid marks in their shorts. Ever wonder why women rarely do? They smell….interesting, and can’t be bothered to shave or wash their hands. You will catch something from Sloppy, he’s a walking Petri dish, and although I know humans are designed to live in a bacterial soup, Sloppy has pushed it far beyond and is actively creating new species. These are the guys you see whose shirt doesn’t cover the last four inches of belly, and who won’t get rid of the holey hell T-shirt from 1983 bearing a faded Bart Simpson still declaring to no one who cares EAT MY SHORTS. These are also the guys who took their dating profile pic in front of a bare lightbulb wearing a dirty WHO FARTED baseball cap. In a great swath of irony, these are also the guys who will hit on the most high maintenance women who work out daily, dress carefully and nicely, and are made up to the nines, and be really upset when these women, who have worked on themselves and are amazing, turn them down. They will accuse you of being shallow, the great irony being that they will NEVER hit on a woman who has a level of self-care as low as their own.
#4-Ghosty– …where are you? Hello? Helloooo?? There are so many of these guys, I almost need subsets. You have the guy who only texts and never actually schedules a date. I knew a guy who would text about once a month, “Hi, stranger,” have a few hours of text conversation, never call and never get together. He’s probably a disembodied head in a jar of Formaldehyde dictating texts to his computer, I’ll never know for sure, because of course, I never met him. GIDude was a Ghosty too, he would Casper into my life about once a month, suddenly want me to come over, and always tonight, never an actual scheduled date. A truly interested man knows how to schedule an actual goddamn date. Also in this category are the guys who go too far with ohmygodyou’reamazingwherehaveyoubeenallmylife only to vanish into the ether with nary a call or text message to explain. Are they on milk cartons now? I keep waiting for this plethora to suddenly reappear, having been abducted by aliens who legitimately wouldn’t allow them near their phones, millions of women suddenly getting the replies they’ve been waiting on for years…
#5-Picky: Are you going to leave that glass there? This is the guy you’re walking on eggshells around, because dammit you’re not doing it right! Prepdude was a Picky, who pouted for a half hour once because I cut the onions wrong and panicked constantly about the levels of everything in his (Well, actually his mom and dad’s…) pool. With Picky, you’ll never feel you’re doing anything correctly, and he is the first one to point out something wrong with your clothing, your hair, or your driving. Ohhh how they love to pick apart your driving (I may or may not have contributed to this by not being the best driver. Heyy, he still didn’t have to say anything, even though I was about to hit a farmer’s market stall.).
Picky can be an insufferable know-it-all, and will die on the sword for any minor argument, his perfectionism forbids him to be wrong about anything. Picky will remember what you did wrong for literal years, and is the guy who will be complaining about the time you left the door open while being fed strained plums in the nursing home. An endless obsession over minutia ruins every event, and when I was with a Picky, I would be just praying to the powers that be that nothing would go wrong, because to a Picky, Every. Little. Thing. is a crisis. Vacations were just a giant pile of shit to fret about. He worried about where we parked the car, he worried about catching something in the airport (Pre-Covid, mind you.) He worried the shuttle wouldn’t come for us, even though it ran on a 15-minute schedule. (“What if they were bought and didn’t have time to paint the name of the company on the side yet?” Yep, those words passed through his brain and out his mouth. I don’t get this level of paranoia either.) No amount of joy is too small to be ruined by Picky Dwarf.
#6 Needy: How come you didn’t respond to my message right away? Hoo boy. This is the guy who makes you feel like you’re running a daycare center. Ever work an extra long difficult day only to pick up your phone and find 137 increasingly anxious messages wondering why you aren’t texting back? If you’re in a relationship, well yes, you do expect some level of timeliness in communication, but if it’s ten AM on a Monday, how does one not figure out you are somehow tied up at work? This goes hand in hand with Jelly, the guy who wants to ensure you have not a single solitary male friend whom they invariably view as competition, even though it’s your brother. Some guys are just too much work, and if you are in the mere dating process and have to feed constant updates as to what you’re doing every second of every day, is it really worth it?
And the last Dwarf of Dating, and the most common, is…
#7 Playboy: This is the guy who has so many fish already on his boat that they’re starting to rot, yet keeps tossing out the net for more, more, more. Never happy with anyone for long, these are the guys who start each day messaging hey beautiful to a double digit number of females. This is the guy who dances up to you when you’re out with your girlfriends and is more than happy to press up his package against you, thinking somehow this will magically transport you from the dance floor to his bed. I met this guy most often, there are lots of them around because they are serially single and generally incapable of maintaining an actual relationship. This is all they have, so take a hard pass and let them move on to the next woman, because they always will anyway.
Aaand there you have the Seven Dwarves of Dating, and hopefully this helps filter out these timewasters.
If you are a guy and made it this far without angrily snapping your laptop shut, rest assured I fully understand there are wonderful men out there, it’s just that the Dwarves tend to HEIGH-HO! their way in long before you get to say a genuine hello, I’m interested in you. And women warrant an equivalent awful date category list, but I never dated any and therefore can’t address it properly. And I”m not gonna rat out my friends.
I am exiting Storyland now… come on back, it’s almost time for me to meet the love of my life…
Worship Leader Gone Wild 