Jennifer Aniston vs. The Oprah

This week the long-running Oprah Winfrey show came to an end. She's on to bigger and better. Many news stories and celebrity "news" stories this week chronicled her success, her rise to fame and riches by overcoming the poverty and abuse of her early years. She's a philanthropist who has done charity work with girls and schools in Africa. Her book club endorsement can make or break an author. She created trends. She gave audience members cars. She has her own magazine and soon-to-be cable network channel. She spawned Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. She ushered in an era of copy cat talk shows and hosts that wanted to follow in her footsteps. She's a media mogul. Earlier this year, Forbes put her net worth at $2.7 billion. Yes, folks, that's a b. She's bigger than Jesus. I like to refer to her as "The Oprah."

And THIS is exactly just how wildly (unattainably) rich, famous, successful and influential women have to be before people, the media and the tabloids will shut the fuck up and stop obsessing about when is she gonna get on the marriage and kiddies train already. Sorry, Jennifer Aniston, you're just not there yet. There is absolutely no hope for the rest of us...

Relish, part II

Except that I did. Hear from him again. And before I knew it, we were dating. Well, having sex at least. And I still was not sure if I liked him or not. He was kind of boring and straight edge and a conformist. Suburban. Vanilla. Underwhelming. Yawn.

But turns out he had one redeeming quality: He was the best sex I've ever had in my life. Honestly, I had low expectations for him, but dude has got moves. It was like I didn't even have to tell him what to do, he just KNEW. It was like he read my mind. It was the kind of sex you have only with someone that you've been with for a long time and you know each other really well and know exactly what the other person likes.

I had suspected that this (the best sex) might be the case for a while. But I was skeptical. At first I thought it might be due to the fact that I had been celibate (not for lack of trying) for nearly a year and I had actually just forgotten what sex was like. So I thought perhaps my standards had been lowered and I withheld judgement for the moment. But after giving him several tries, they were all fantastic and I had to conclude that Relish was awesome in bed. I wanted to meet his ex just to shake her fucking hand.

But then the sex, it went to my head. Do you have any idea what a year-long dry spell does to a person? Especially when the last boy in your bed turned out to be (surprise!) a virgin? And then you accidentally stumble upon what is apparently God's gift to women cleverly disguised in a dorky exterior? That does some crazy shit to your head. I got greedy.

I began Facebook stalking him and wondering who every woman was that posted on his wall. Were they too getting to experience his magic penis? Were they in on his secret? One day he cancelled plans with me because he crashed his bike and was sore. He sent me a pic of his road rash. My mind raced. Obviously it wasn't really a picture of him. It was a photo of someone else's road rash and he was just trying to invent an excuse to blow me off. (In my defense, can't help being skeptical, I'm a journalist. I assume everyone is lying. You know the saying: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.) This was getting out of hand. I was getting paranoid. (I realize that revealing the inner workings of my brain does little to dispel the myth of the psycho girl. Noted.)

Now comes the real problem. Relish tagged along with me for Thanksgiving with my friends. All through the turkey, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie, the Trivial Pursuit (will this game never end?!) my brain was consumed with thoughts of the awesome sex we were going to have later. After we (finally!) got back to my house, he declined to come inside, saying he had to work in the morning and drove home instead. This was also the only time in months that neither of my roommates were home and possibly the only time that this would happen for the foreseeable future. He left me sexually frustrated. Talk about a missed opportunity...

That weekend we went skiing and had sex and it was great. But then he did it again.

He came over on a weeknight to hang out. We watched a movie in my room. On my bed. And by watched a movie I mean I looked at my watch repeatedly and wondered when the damn movie would be over so we could get to the sex already. It was all I could think about it. But the second the credits rolled, he jumped up. And he left. It was only 9 p.m. No sex. Not even any making out. Played the ol' gotta get up early card. Again. And he was about to leave to go out of town for two weeks.

Does anyone see what was happening here?! HE WAS RATIONING THE SEX. When a guy says they gotta get up early, translation: I'm just not that into you. Everyone knows that one. But maybe he WAS having sex with other people and he was just spreading himself a little thin? In any case, he had flipped the traditional gender power dynamic and HE was denying ME.

This would not do...

The pickins, they are slim, and it's 50 percent our fault

Ok girls, listen up. I have figured out how we are going to get guys to grow up and start acting like responsible adults worthy of dating us. But first, you must read this article from Slate that explains it all quite nicely. If me telling you to read it isn't enough, this is the title: "Sex is cheap: Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they're failing in life." Got your attention now? Read it. I'll wait.*

So, for those of you who still didn't read the Slate article despite my first footnote not making any sense, let me sum it up for you. Men like sex more than women like sex. (I'm inclined to disagree, but then when you've been involuntarily celibate for close to a year, your memories of sex are so distant they are probably skewed... so who knows.) In a society where women are plentiful, (and have lots of autonomy and authority) men don't have to be successful or commit because if their girlfriend dumps them, there's always another girl who will have sex with them. In a society (like engineering colleges) where the women are few and are in high demand, they can be choosy so the men compete for them, and so have to be more successful and driven and willing to commit or the women will not have sex with them.

So did most of my ex's friends at the aforementioned engineering college get married to their college girlfriends soon after graduating because they were in love? Of course not! It's because after four years in a girl desert they had no clue that in the real world women actually comprise 50 percent of the general population and thought that if they didn't marry the one they have now, they might not get to have sex ever again. Suckers.

Here's the kicker: While young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success is hindering their drive to achieve in life. It's kind of like why buy the cow (stop playing video games/trying to "find" yourself and get a real job already) when they can get the milk (attractive women will still have sex with them despite the video game playing habit/lack of employment) for free.

Here's the take-away: Women, if we want to date men who are successful, driven and don't live in their minivans or parent's basements, WE NEED TO STOP REWARDING THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR. Like Jacqui says, the pickins, they are slim and it's 50 percent our fault.

I've never liked the Lysistrata approach to solving anything, because, well, I like sex, too. However, desperate times call for desperate measures. So from now on, women of the world, let's band together on this. It's called raising the bar. We need to NOT have sex with losers who exhibit ANY of the following red flags:

He lives in a vehicle and thinks it's cool. Living in vehicles is for homeless people.

He lives in the basement of his parents' house/Craigslist stranger's house

He is unemployed**

He calls you "chief"

He smells bad and/or has greasy hair. If these things alone are not enough of a deal breaker, they could also be indications he lives in a vehicle/his parents' basement.

He has four children with three different women, none of whom he was married to. (This is not (only) because children are monsters and what new girlfriend wants to deal with four of them, it's because he exhibits poor decision making skills/a troubling inability to wrap it the the fuck up.)

When you ask him what he does, he says he makes candy. (He does not make candy. In fact, it's his father's company in another state that makes the candy and ships it to him, which he then sells at farmers markets. Except that he doesn't really sell it at farmers markets. It just piles up in his house because he did not submit the proper paperwork on time to legally sell it at farmers markets. He is afraid to tell his dad about this situation so he makes his living waiting tables and selling weed. When his friends come over to smoke the weed, they eat the candy.) The not-having-sex goes double for this person.

He has aspirations of being a ski bum/river raft guide.

He has a fake wall to pretend he isn't living in a studio with a roommate***

He sleeps on a futon/couch/sleeping bag on the floor. Grown-ups sleep in beds. Fact.

This is not an exhaustive list, so feel free to add to it. The most important thing to remember, girls, is that if you have sex with any of these guys, you are fucking everything up for the rest of us. And you won't be doing them any favors either. How are they ever going to learn how to be productive members of society if you are having sex with them? So don't. Thanks in advance.

*Who are these women that say no when an attractive, young stranger approaches them while walking down the street and proposes casual sex?! This is basically my dream come true. And I would probably cry when they said "just kidding!" and I found out we were not, in fact, about to hoof it to their apartment for some afternoon delight, but that I was just a statistic in their stupid little graduate student psychology research project. That is just plain cruel.

**Since this is a recession and I'm not totally heartless, if the guy was recently let go, seems upset and a little worried that he was recently let go and is actively trying to find a new job, you may have sex with him. Especially if he has a job interview this week. But proceed with caution.

***This doesn't apply in Manhattan

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.

Top 10 Deal Breakers for eHarmony users

How fitting that the NYT should post this health blog (the real question is what is this doing on a health blog in the New York Times and not in some pop psychology segment on E!) about relationship deal breakers not only just a few days after I started my own blog about deal breakers, but also just a few weeks after I quit the online dating service eHarmony, or as I like to call it, eDesperate.

The focus of this blog is on a portion of eHarmony called "Must Haves" and "Can't Stands." I never liked this particular feature of the site because I thought it was too reductive and judgmental and antagonistic, so I tended to ignore this part when communicating with potential mates. According to an analysis of eHarmony users, out of 50 options, the top four "Must Haves" were the same for men and women: 1. sense of humor, 2. chemistry, 3. affectionate, 4. communicator. But from there, differences emerge.

Included on the women's side, but absent from the men's are being financially responsible and being committed to marriage, home and family. Included on the men's side and absent from the women's side were being passionate and having patience. Translation: women want a man with money (financially responsible) who will provide for a family (committed to marriage and children) and men want a woman who likes sex (passion) and will put up with their bullshit (patience).

Now on to the deal breakers. Both sexes hate lying, cheating and being rude. And really, who doesn't? What's interesting is that for men, the fourth thing they can't stand is poor hygiene. It trumps being angry, mean spirited, using illegal drugs and infidelity. My question is: Who the heck are these people dating? This isn't junior high where the school nurse has to come talk to the smelly kid about his BO. Most adults I know can somehow manage to bathe, brush their teeth, use deodorant and put on clean clothes on a somewhat regular, if not daily, basis.

I don't think this one is referring to general cleanliness or even embarrassing housekeeping things some of us let slide, like the pile of dog fur that has accumulated on my bed. Translation: Men like woman who will shave their legs, wear make-up, dress up and do their nails and hair. By calling these things, collectively, "hygiene" eHarmony lets them off the hook for being shallow or sexist.

Also, coming in at number eight, men can't stand someone who is excessively overweight, thereby contributing to the unrealistic expectation that American women be slim and chipping away at my body image and self-worth. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I, too, put on my list that I could not stand someone who is excessively overweight. But I felt bad about it. And judgmental. And I only added it because if someone is overweight, they will have trouble keeping up when we climb 14-ers and do 100-mile bike rides. And that just gets annoying.

Rounding out the top-10 list, at numbers nine and 10, both sexes can't stand someone who is lazy, defined as "someone who likes to spend excessive time sleeping, resting or being a couch potato," which is interesting to me since I got matched with A LOT of guys who said they liked to "sleep in," "hang out" and "clean out their cars" on the weekends. Real go-getters they were.

So anyway, the results just tell us what eDesperate users must have/can't stand in a mate. But they also reveal that the people on this site, in general, still abide by some traditional gender roles and stereotypes...