"you're my exception" my ass.

I'm going to warn you up front: The following is going to be a man-hating, frustrated, ineloquent whiney rant about how love, romance, men, and modern society all suck. If you're currently in a good mood, someone I could have a shot with romantically, or easily bored, I recommend just moving on. Here are some other fun links you can read instead of this one.

To set the stage, I'll give you an update on my last post. My nerdmate, remember Gollum? yeah. Turns out he's a major asshole. In the course of our improv class, we had to tell bad date stories. Very cute. (For those of you who know me, I told the "Greased Lightning" story and wished I hadn't.) It comes to Gollum's turn, and he begins to turn me off more efficiently than any man ever has. He doesn't really "do" dates; he prefers casual hang-outs, (read: hookups.) He then talked about how he is the worst boyfriend ever and doesn't believe in, and I quote, "romance, dates, love, all that mushy crap." I'm amazed that the other people in the room couldn't hear the deafening fsssssssssssssst of my bubble swiftly deflating. I've heard this from lots of guys before, but Gollum somehow said it with such naked honesty and conviction that it counted for extra super-duper turn-off.

None of this is REALLY a shock, but it was still upsetting.

Also, the other cute guy from my class, we'll call him "plan B", def has a girlfriend. Yeah. Sweet. awesome. Even the way-too-short-guy-you-had-already-made-allowances-for-in-your-head has a girlfriend. I mean, he's a great person and all, but I thought he was flirting with me, but he probably wasn't and even if he was he's got a girlfriend so whatever just deal. Yes, I know that was one of the worst run-on sentences of all time. So sue me, I warned you this post would suck.

This final blow came after a trifecta of perfectly placed pieces of media that created the perfect storm of my current funk and motivated this post.

1. The movie "He's just not that into you." I saw it with my cousins because there was nothing else playing at the right time. It was pretty cute, lots of celebs in it, blah blah blah. The movie set up this whole new paradigm of rules which seemed to make sense to me. Most romcoms take place in a version of New York City that I would love to visit, but certainly have my doubts that it even exists. I kind of dug it. The main girl needed to shut her mouth sometimes, but she was much more honest than a lot of heroines. Then, after the movie spent all this time setting up the new rules, it broke them even worse than the usual tale of boy-meets-girl. Justin Long's character, after he has coached her in the ways to interact with men, lead her on, rejected her, then mooned after her once she finally calls him out, says "You're my exception." And it just pissed me off. SRSLY?!?!? This was only the beginning.

2. A couple of days later, I made the mistake of watching "The science of sexual attraction" or some such show. It was pretty interesting, and we enjoyed lobbing a few poorly timed and superficial comments at the scientists and the participants. Then, as they were doing a study to watch how just peoples' faces and voices were more or less attractive. The narrator said one sentence that stuck in my craw, "We each start with the most attractive and work our way down until we find someone who will accept us." Man, do I wish I had NEVER heard that sentence. Yeah, I know that its probably true. It's still just entirely too clinical and cavalier about the struggle of people trying to find one another in the bar jungle of our generation. Sidenote: I think the scale is tipped in the favor of men. The theories behind THAT will have to be a whole other post.

3. This was the lit fuse finally disappearing into the ACME made bomb, and its always the dumbest little things that will set us off. It was an article in Cosmo, the world's most prolific periodical, and it was in the section "to give to your guy." (It's really not that bad, but this was just the grain of rice that tipped the scale.) It said "do you want to show your girl that you care about her? Do her a favor. She's much more likely to be in the mood if she's not worrying about getting the oil changed."
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ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING ME?!?!?! What kind of society do we live in where an article in biggest pile of dribble of ALL TIME has to explain to anyone, male or female, that if you care about someone, you should do nice shit for them. I feel like it is a sign of the romantic apocalypse. Romance is ENTIRELY dead. And not in the sense that I'm delusional and read romance novels and there are no princes on steeds or pirates at the helm, blah blah blah. I've known that was long dead. It's even worse than all that.

Think about it. Say that you're a male between 22 and 35. Why on EARTH would you want to have a girlfriend? I feel like none of them even want one anymore. You certainly don't NEED one. There is just as much pressure about a career as there always has been, so its a viable excuse to just say you're focusing on work. (Same goes for women, but its only the beginning.) Men, from what I can gather, are innately LAZY. Girlfriends take effort. It seems as though most would choose an entire weekend of playing 38 hours of a videogame with no sleep and 5 separate pizza deliveries than a relationship. They have YEARS more of reproductive viability, so that's not an issue. They have less pressure from family and friends to settle down. And if they wanted to actually have sex, **gasp**, not a problem. There are so many attention starved BEAUTIFUL and AMAZING women that if they feel randy, they can put on a stupid button-up shirt, head out to the local bar, hook up with some woman WAY out of their league with a shot of whiskey or a long island iced tea and a minor put-down, and there's really not any expectation of calling her again.

AND THIS IS JUST RANTING ABOUT THE LACK OF DATING SCENE.
Dating. Casual. Not committed. BIG SCARY THING, isn't it?

Don't even THINK the word "married", heavens to betsy, they all just get a runnin'.

Look. I know that this is hands-down the most psycho post of mine, but I'm really not that crazy. It was really not that long ago that it was reasonable for a girl to want to get married before she was 40. Or hell, to even want to kiss a guy without it being a deathwish for their friendship. And I'm not ready for anything major, it would just be nice to get to hold hands at the movies every once in a while.

The fact that its "trendy" to be an single, womanizing douchebag is unnerving though. We now expect this from our guys, and kind of hold it up with our barside banter and self-conscious hairflips. The standards we have all come to expect, and even perpetuate is the scariest part of all.

A wise woman once told me two words, and I hope they help me make it through this hurricane of romantic jackassery. She said "never settle."
And even though it may harder than ever, I don't intend to.