By A little while ago I was talking about my recently disastrous Tinder experiences to a female friend who had just signed up to the app for the first time.
Spoiler: she is beautiful.
I was whining and bitching about how the women I had dated over the last year or so had been high-maintenance.
In fact, it has been a tricky spell featuring several one, two or three-night stands, an alcoholic and someone who ended up in hospital with a mystery mental illness. Note to self: quite why I do seem to end up with people like that is material for another post (and a shrink).
But I’m sure it isn’t as simple as some attractive friends seem to think. She smiled beatifically as if she’d come up with a real plum piece of dating advice.
“Instead of going out with these crazy people, why don’t you go out with someone like Carrie,” she said, referring to a distant mutual acquaintance.
Unrealistic expectations
On the face of it that was perfectly decent suggestion. Carrie was obviously neither an alcoholic or depressive – in fact she was one of these glowing people who make everyone’s life a bit more pleasant.
More than that she was gorgeous and single, since her husband had run off with his lover a year ago.
The only problem was this. Carrie was not interested in me.
“I don’t know about that,” ruminated beautiful friend beautifully. “I think most people can be seduced if you show enough interest in them.”
That, it struck me, was the kind of advice only a beautiful person would give. Because for them it is closer to the truth than it is for us.
In fact, Carrie had turned me down flat a couple of months after she got divorced.
Being constructively persistent is one thing.
Being a pest who continually chases someone after having been given a very firm brush-off is another.
At the risk of seeming defeatist, it’s better to simply accept that no means no.
Parallel universes
My beautiful friend told me just after she went on Tinder, that every time she swiped right on a man on Tinder she got a match.
“Does that happen to everyone?” she asked, her huge eyes innocently wide open.
“No,” I sighed. I wondered how much of the advice this beautiful friend had given me over the years had been informed by this rose-tinted worldview.
And just as a disclaimer here yes, I had made a move on beautiful friend a few years earlier when we first met. She wasn’t interested (beautiful friend is interested in almost nobody).
And yes, after a few weeks I asked again just in case persistence might pay off.
The answer was still the same.
An off-switch for crazy dates
Less naive, but just as wide of the mark in his beautiful person-centric advice, was another friend who sometimes makes an appearance here.
I’m going to call him Handsome Devil. He is also a pretty person. Handsome Devil is less idealistic than Beautiful Friend and also less choosy.
Unlike Beautiful Friend, who would not be out of place in a convent, Handsome Devil fucks around. And around… and around.
Handsome Devil sometimes doesn’t seem to take into account that other people might face difficulties beyond “too much choice”.
In his case, he actually makes a living out of being good-looking.
Handsome Devil thought it was simply a question of me changing the kind of woman I was interested in.
His advice reminded me of the episode of The Simpsons where Bart’s Krusty doll becomes possessed and starts killing everyone.
In the end, all that is required to stop the doll’s killing spree is to move the switch on its back from “evil” to “good”.
If having lasting, more successful relationships was as simple as “stopping chatting up crazy people”, believe me, I would have done it.
Shiny, happy people
Handsome Devil has a lot of experience when it comes to dating and seduction and much of what he says is true.
But equally I wonder how much of his experience-gained advice is universal.
How can it be when beautiful people only suffer a fraction of the rejections of their less beautiful counterparts?
I thought of another mutual friend, who is short, has frizzy hair and wears glasses.
Since I’ve known him, he’s only ended up with high maintenance women.
A beautiful mistake
But it would be a beautiful person’s mistake to assume that he goes out with high-maintenance women because he doesn’t realize they are going to be high maintenance.
Believe me, this guy goes out with high-maintenance women because often, a high-maintenance woman is the woman who he can get.
There is no point in coming up with any value system which apportions bad judgement to someone who is simply doing the best they can with the tools they were given.
The same goes for beautiful people and their dating advice. Not content with just being hot, they also want to be recognised for their wisdom. But how can they be so sure that their tales of what makes for dating success have any relevance for the rest of us?
And what about me even? To what extent am I beautiful? Not to the same extent as my beautiful friends that’s for sure.
But I would be as unrealistic as they are if I thought it was only my quick thinking and writing skills that get me dates.
