they’d gotten into while I was out cleaning houses or whatever. Or my fate would be Shirley, a closeted lesbian forced to wisecrack with disrespectful teens while making two dollars an hour.
“Settling” is a coarse way of saying “adjusting my expectations,” and I think that gets a bad rap. Dude, I would rather settle than be “chronically unfulfilled due to my outsize desires.” I don’t mean that you should marry someone you hate just because they won’t go away, but I do think it’s worth examining what you actually want while being honest about what is important to you. Then it won’t feel like such a compromise, you know? On top of that, it’s totally unfair to make a flesh-and-bone person compete against an imaginary ideal that was imprinted on you when you were too young to understand what was happening. Shit, growing up I wanted to marry the Beast from Beauty and the Beast. A strong, virile creature who read tons of books and could fuck up a wolf?? Yes please! Sign me up! I could’ve lain awake every night waiting for Mufasa to save me from a wildebeest stampede in a gorge, but do I climb into bed next to a fucking lion? No, bitch, because I am realistic. Instead, I married this person who makes her own kombucha and charges her crystals under the new moon. Girl, adapt!
Lately I have become perplexed at the vanity and immoral behavior now associated with the task of dating. I’m a single man living by myself, with no responsibilities but my own. I am looking for someone who will fit into my lifestyle. Unfortunately, I have encountered some roadblocks that keep me single. First: I am not looking for a ready-made family. Second: I’m not in a position to analyze her last relationship, which left emotional baggage. Third: I am definitely not looking for someone who isn’t business- or life-oriented. What I want to find is someone who doesn’t have a long history of suitors or life issues that cause further relationship problems. How do I go about separating the disposables from the possibles?
CAN YOU GET ON A ROCKET TO MARS? First of all, don’t knock a ready-made family. I joined one and you know what? It’s fine! There’s so much less for me to do, and that’s comforting. Second, is this emotional exploration really being asked of you, a regular person who wrote to a housekeeping magazine for advice? Is this a thing, asking a single man you met on Tinder for deep Jungian analysis? Third, are there sentient, breathing women who are not life-oriented? What do those words mean? “Business” I understand, but if I am alive, am I not life-oriented? Also, my kingdom for a person on Earth over the age of five who does not have any “life issues.” LIFE IS MY ISSUE, SIR.
Who cares about helping some asshole who refers to people as “disposables,” but is this what it’s like to date these days? I’m not asking from the snooty perch of the Smug Married. I am genuinely concerned that this is what women are encountering when they are trying to see a movie and get a pizza with three toddlers stacked in a trench coat masquerading as an adult human male. The thing about having this many stringent requirements is not that you aren’t allowed to want what you want. Of course you are! You should have standards. You deserve to be happy! It’s that, if I had this many stipulations, I would feel like I had to offer the exact same and then some in return. And I couldn’t. I’m fucked up.
I imagine that if this is the standard I expect a person to meet before I’d consider dating them, I have to have a dope crib and an 850 credit score and a lifetime six-figure job with benefits and a clean bill of health and regular therapy sessions and a mom who loves me and all my chakras balanced and be very good at bringing a person other than myself to orgasm. I don’t have even one of those things, which is why the job application to be my boss is incredibly short. It’s basically: “Can I pick all the music and have 75 percent ownership of the remote?” And if you agree to tolerate me, I’m yours! I aspire to have