I got mansplained

Ok so I signed up for online dating. And by I signed up, I mean that drunk me let sober me be talked into it by one of my friends. But I'm on there nonetheless, proclaiming for the world wide web that I am single and ready to mingle. I had second thoughts when the first person to message me was a 35-year-old divorced Catholic with two kids, a place in suburbia and tons of shirtless photos of his tattooed chest. If this is the kind of person who thinks I would date them, Match.com had best review the way it calculates its compatibility algorithms...

One of the guys who messaged me soon after seemed cool enough. We had things in common, he looked really cute in his pics and he was a doctor. I do not see dollar signs when a guy is a doctor, I just figured it meant he was really smart and probably a good person. But I began to get red flags from this guy almost immediately. Douchey red flags.

He asked if I wanted to meet up so I gave him my number so he could call me expressly for that purpose. Instead, he begins texting me really stupid, inane, boring small talk while I'm busy at work. How's your day? Whatcha doing? I'm in Chicago, etc. (Here's the thing: If I have never met you, it's safe to say I do not care what you are up to and do not want to expend the time and brain power on coming up with funny/cute/coy responses to your texts while I'm on deadline. When we've met in real life and I see if you are indeed as hot as your pics suggest, then maybe I will engage in witty repartee. But not before.) I responded to his texts, but curtly.

Three days and 20 texts later, he finally decides on a place and time to meet up. I say, ok, great, see you tomorrow night. The next day he texts me to make sure we are still on. Uh... yeah. We just agreed on this 12 hours ago, remember? Then half an hour before we are supposed to meet he texts and says for me text him when I get to the place so we can walk in together. Hmm... I thought it was understood that when meeting someone, anyone, even friends, the first person to get there generally goes into the establishment, gets a drink or a table or whatever and waits for the other person. But I play along and text him when I get there, then I stand around awkwardly outside a trendy, hip bar while he keeps me waiting for 10 minutes. His douchbaggery thus far has sufficiently turned me off to the point that I no longer even want to meet him, but I silence the voice in my head that is screaming at me to run away while I still can.

Things went downhill from there. Five minutes in I knew I had made a mistake. The "date" consisted of me getting mansplained. For one hour. All men mansplain at one time or another and all women have been mansplained. Boyfriends do it, dads do it, strangers do it. Here's what it looks like: the man stands up taller and puffs out his chest so he can literally talk down to you, his body language suggests he knows waaaay more about whatever topic you are discussing than you do. He's an expert in fact. He sticks his chin in the air. Sometimes he closes his eyes while speaking, dismissing your thoughts and opinions while seething with condescension, all in a tone of voice that says, sit down, silly little girl, let me handle this, you don't want to hurt yourself by thinking complicated thoughts. When guys try to manage your expectations, it's a form of mansplaining.

He lectured to me, talked at me, talked over me, telling me how the world works. For one solid hour.

Here were his major points: Boulder is full of communists who hate dogs, doctors and journalists are a lot alike because they are both dying professions, (couldn't really make the leap on that one) the universal health care bill is bad because (sick) people will be getting something for free, because people are dumb and don't know any better they will go to physicians assistants and nurse practitioners instead of doctors, the city is not friendly to businesses and sets business owners up for failure, he lived in boston, hated it, he lived in the carribean, hated it, he doesn't have all the numbers on the economics of it, but he's SURE composting is bad, people who don't go to college deserve to make $15 an hour (this part was really funny to me, because I would sell my soul for $15 an hour. And although a few of those years were a little fuzzy due to all the 40s we drank, I'm pretty sure I actually went to, and graduated from, college. If he thinks $15 an hour is what people who don't go to college make, he is pretty out of touch with reality. Or at least my reality) Oh and because of some reason, blah, blah, I'd stopped listening, his income goes down by five percent every year. Oh yeah, ouch. I feel for you, doctor.

And here's the kicker: He does surgeries to implant some kind of spinal cord stimulator into people who have chronic pain. (Although he likes this kind of surgery, it's not worth it to him because he has to drive to a different hospital and doesn't get paid enough for it. You can see he went into medicine for all the right reasons.) Then he mentioned that a woman once asked him if he was able to implant one that would allow her to have orgasms whenever she wanted. He said yes, he was able to, but no, he didn't do it.

He would ask me questions about myself and then interrupt me to mansplain how I was wrong or interject his opinion on something he was clueless about. It was especially comical when he started mansplaining all about the journalism industry and how it works and what's wrong with it. He just kept talking. And talking. It was like he paid someone (me) by buying them one drink to sit there and listen to his lectures. And I'm pretty sure his hatred of me was equal, judging by his chilly good-bye as he sent me packing, although I can't figure out why since I barely got one word in the entire time and dutifully nodded my head and pretended to listen...

But here's the best part: As we were leaving he actually said, as if he had some kind of ESP: "You aren't one of those people who writes about their dates and how full of themselves they are, are you?"

No, of course not. You mean people do that?

The Myth of the Psycho Girl

OK. So. I'm sick of how women are constantly characterized as controlling, ball-busting, angry, bitter bitches. And men are fun-loving, laid back free spirits. Wheee! Men are allowed to dick around during their 20s and 30s (that's like two decades!) abusing substances, living out of vans, hooking up but avoiding real relationships (or any kind of responsibility), "finding themselves" and having adventures (but not real jobs), in a state of perpetual adolescence. I read a really interesting article a few weeks ago in Salon about this perpetual adolescence thing. This is not only expected of them, it's encouraged and glorified in popular culture (Wedding Crashers, Knocked Up, The Hangover). And if women occasionally get fed up with their childish antics, it's us who are the psychos.

Well I have a hypothesis. It's called: There's No Such Thing as the Psycho (Ex)Girl(friend), There are Only Asshole Guys. And yes, I stick by my hypothesis title at the risk of sounding angry and bitter...

Example #1: So my ex's best friend, J, was in town this weekend. He called me to see if he could stay at my house and if I could bring him to the airport (this is the story he told me) because the couple (his friend M and his fiance) he was supposed to be staying with got into a huge fight and he had to leave their house. Here's what I found out really happened: J's flight got in at midnight and his couple friends dutifully went to pick him up. The next morning, itching to get snowboarding early, J grew impatient when the fiance had to be dropped off at work at 9 a.m., thereby delaying his departure to the mountains. So a fight and angry e-mail exchanges ensued between the fiance and J, at the end of which bridges were burned, J had nowhere to stay and was probably out (at least) one friendship.

He blamed the whole thing on M's fiance. He said M had a habit of going out with girls who were controlling, bitchy and the fun police.

But here's the thing: J is a freeloader. I know this because he lived on my and my ex's futon for weeks at a time. I like him a lot, but even I used to get annoyed with him. He's a really nice, happy-go-lucky kind of guy, but you care less about that stuff when his snoring is keeping you awake at night and he's breaking your kitchen appliances.

The point is this: The fight was NOT all the fiance's fault and if J wanted to stay friends with M, he should have at least made an effort to be nice to the girl he's with. The real problem here is J's unwillingness to realize that M is one of the few men who has succeeded in graduating from his perpetual adolescence and is now a grown-up with a real job and is engaged to be married. But in this scenario, his fiance becomes the manipulative succubus who won't "let" M hang out with J. Controlling, psycho girlfriend is the story J will tell when people ask what the shit happened. I've never even met this girl, but I'm already on her side.

Example #2: A friend of mine (who is 30) asked this girl (who is 21) to be his date at a wedding because she's "really fun." (As an aside, not only is this girl 21, she also has a tiny tattoo of a mustache on the side of her index finger, or maybe it's her middle finger, I can't remember, which makes for A LOT of mustache ride jokes and photo ops, and makes her really popular with the guys. She sticks her finger under people's noses and everyone laughs. It's like her party trick. I can't decide if it's really cool or really fucking retarded.) But he didn't really like her. So they go to the wedding, have fun, don't have sex (I just made out with her! That's it, I swear!) and several days later my friend asks her for her (hotter) friend's phone number. And she gets pissed. And won't talk to him anymore. And he doesn't get why. She must be a psycho.

If you ask me, he did a poor job of managing her expectations.

I asked him why he 1. was hanging out with 21-year-olds in the first place, 2. would think it's ok to bring one to a wedding if he had no intention of dating her, even if he didn't have sex with her, (purposefully not fucking you is apparently asshole guy code for "I'm just not that into you, make no mistake, we are just friends, even though I invited you to be my date at a wedding and then kissed you").

He said younger girls are more fun because all the girls his own age are angry and bitter and jaded.

Well congratulations, asshole. You have just added another to our ranks. Welcome to our demographic, finger mustache tattoo girl. At this rate, we will achieve world domination earlier than I'd hoped.

Managing Expectations... Jazz Hands

I booked a ticket to NYC this week. It's an exploratory mission to determine whether a permanent return to the East Coast is what I really want. The added bonus is actual sex with my favorite phone sex fella.

After I booked the ticket and informed the boy, whom I haven't seen in a year, I realized I am a liar. I tell him (and others) that it's purely sex that I am after in his case. I'm human, I'm liberated, I'm training for an Iron Man, I'm going on a humanitarian trip to Haiti in April. I am woman hear me roar. I'm FINE with casual. Right? I am a born people pleaser and I can tap dance as fast as needed. Jazz Hands.

I am also acutely aware that he is about as jumpy as they come. Boy's got rabbit in him. I'd like to meet his mother, or the girl that obviously worked him over cause he is the total package of emotional baggage to be sure. I do love a challenge.

I actually don't know what his story is, not really.

We met over a year ago. There was an instant attraction, but he was seeing an old friend of mine so off limits. Things with them ended and we had a secret little fling a few months later. You are free to judge me on this. I probably deserve it. Attraction is however a strange thing. The instant I met him, I took a deep breathe and thought, gulp, be cool, this one could be trouble. It's my theory when you meet someone that stops you in your tracks like that, it must mean you would have healthy babies or something. It can't have anything to do with actual compatibility with a total stranger. I don' t believe in love at first sight. It's just nature's way of saying, oh, y'all would be a good fit to propagate the species. That's my theory, anyhow.

We started an email/text flirtation. He made me laugh and most importantly, he was just the right combo of aloof and charming to make me chase him just a little bit. The emotionally unavailable are my specialty after all. He showered me with attention, I responded. Who doesn't like attention? He pulled back just as I started to get really interested and suddenly I was chasing him. It eventually ended, as it usually does, with me getting sick of it and telling him to go to hell. I really stuck to my guns and didn't hear from him for almost a year. He texted me over Christmas to apologize for his previous behavior. It got me thinking about how much fun it is to have someone to flirt with regularly... yada yada yada I already like him more than I want to admit. Rats. Foiled again.

I'm a big girl now I suppose (bigger at least than the one who fell for ex-boyfriend, yikes, ask me about the housewarming poetry slam sometime) but I can't help but wonder if I perhaps do need to manage my expectations just a little bit. In the words of my co-worker Brian, "Dating is a numbers game, see a lot of people, hedge your bets, don't settle". I fancy Brian a bit of an off beat life guru. (He is also captain of non sequiturs and sweets. He fills the silence with statements like, "Luke Perry is a Dick" and the space in his top drawer with reeses. He can stay.) I am going to try taking his advice. Flings are good for the soul, just as long as the head keeps the heart in check. I doubt Scarlett Johansson is going to regret rolling around in Mexico with Sean Penn on her death bed, no ma'am, I do not think so.