Last night, for the second time in a week, I heard a man make the following statement:

Women Want Love, Men Want Sex

Now, to be fair, the first guy who said it presented it as a question. He asked me (and another female friend) if we thought there was any truth to it.  The second preached it as gospel.  Saying, in essence, that men woke up every morning thinking about sex (which, I’d imagine is true, in many cases) and women woke up every morning thinking about love (which I know to be false, as I am a woman and I can’t remember the last time I woke up thinking about love).

I’ve certainly made plenty of ridiculous generalizations in my time. PLENTY. And, for sure, any time anyone says, “men want X” or “women want Y” they are sure to be wrong because human beings are complex creatures and not all men nor all women are alike (hence my general distaste for dating advice and the dispensing of wisdom that starts with, “Men are…”). But I find this particular pearl of wisdom particularly distasteful and here’s why:

1)  If you were to create a pie chart of the last decade of my life, and divide it up by how many days I awoke thinking of sex, love and then a third slice called other (because there are some days when both sex & love are nowhere on my radar screen, it would look something like this:

Now, I’m not claiming to be a typical woman, but I am actually female.  And I think of sex a lot more than I think of love, even when I’m in a relationship. Call me crazy, I like sex.

2)  I know actual straight men, with functioning penises, whose charts would reflect a much higher percentage of time focused on love.

Just because people repeat things, over and over, doesn’t make them true.

Oh yeah, today was supposed to be a poll. I guess I’m still off schedule. Or something.

One of my new favorite reads is More Magazine.  Although, I’m officially out of their target demographic, at 39 I’m not quite “old enough” (they “celebrate women 40+”), hehe.

The truth is that as much as I like some of the other mags for women, I feel left out. So many of the articles in other mags are obviously written by and for women in their 20s/early 30s.  And the differences in our life experiences is rather glaring, at times.

So today I was taking a break and reading More and came across this.  A question we’ve pondered here, on the blog, many times:  Why do men in their 40s think I’m old? Although I think the WHY is kind of obvious – because they can. I don’t love the advice given, nor do I hate it.  As a woman who lives with this issue I constantly have to remind myself that not ALL men in their 40s think I’m old.  Only some.  And while I have widened my search (I’ve always dated older and am now trying to convince myself to be open to younger) I haven’t given up on those guys in their 40s either.

Humor me for a moment:  please click here

Seinfeld: “Elaine, what percentage of people would you say are good-looking?”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus: “Twenty-five percent?”

Seinfeld: “Twenty-five percent?”

Louis-Dreyfus: “Um-hmm.”

Seinfeld: “No way! It’s like four-to-six percent. It’s a 20-to-1 shot.”

Louis-Dreyfus: “You’re way off.”

Seinfeld: “Way off?”

Louis-Dreyfus: “Yeah.”

Seinfeld: “Have you been to the motor vehicle bureau? It’s a leper colony down there.”

Louis-Dreyfus: “So, basically, what you’re saying is 95 percent of the population is un-date-able?”

Seinfeld: “Un-date-able!”

Louis-Dreyfus: “Then how are all these people getting together?”

Seinfeld: “Alcohol.”

And, as I said yesterday, that sounds about right to me.  Not because there are so many people who are unattractive, but because we are all such unique individuals.  My 5% could be very different than a friend’s 5% because we look for different things in men.  Taking this ‘dateable’ thing further, I’m quite sure there are many, MANY, men who would put me in the undateable pile.  While others happily put me in the dateable pile.  Vive la difference.

All that said, here’s my real point – I think the same applies for online dating (yeah, here I go again).  I don’t think the dateable/undateable numbers shift all that much when you move to the online dating world. It’s just a matter of perspective and context.

First of all, you’re sitting at your computer staring at (if you live in a major metropolitan area or you’re doing a wide area search) potentially thousands of people.  That’s a lot of people.  And if only 1 in 20 of them are dateable, in your eyes, then that means you’re going to be looking at a lot of undateable dudes (or chicks).  That’s a lot of ugly.  After 10 or 15 minutes you start to think, OMG there’s a lot of unattractive, stupid people here.

Then there’s the fact that so many people seem to be shopping in the wrong store – FOR THEM.  Last week I did a test drive with Match.com. It didn’t work out and I cancelled the trial membership because Match.com isn’t a good match for my needs.  It’s not just me.  A lot of women in NYC that I’ve spoken with have found the same thing, that match.com tends to attract a lot of guys from the ‘burbs. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you want to date a guy from the ‘burbs.  Which I don’t.

My point is that one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to online dating.  That my odds of meeting someone go up when I’m on a site that meets my needs and goes down if I’m on a site that doesn’t.

Anyway, I just wanted to put it out there, once again, that I think online dating gets a bad rep.  That most people, if they wanted to and if they were interested in making the effort, would find that there was an onine dating site on which they could find 5% of the users dateable.

But then, it’s a lot easier to just complain about how things don’t work.

This started innocently enough.  I was out for beer and wings with Lostplum and Mirthful33 and there were a few cute boys standing not far from us (Lostplum spotted them first, go figure).  And I said, “Nah.  They would be cute.  But the one in the suit has a really bad $10 haircut and his friend’s wearing a baseball hat.  So not hot.”

And so it began. Our* list of things that make otherwise perfectly attractive guys MUCH less attractive.  Potentially so unattractive as to render them undateable (depending on the night, our sobriety, and which of us you were trying to convince).  I should warn you that our system of compiling this data was to have Lostplum text me things as we spotted the offending issues out on the sidewalk and in the bars.  As the night wore on and we had more to drink, we might have started to get a little meaner/funnier/crazier.

• bad haircut (the kind that look like they were done by a blind barber)
• baseball cap (in a bar?)
• double pop top collar
• wrap around tribal tatoo on his upper arm
• be strong bracelet
• seashell/surfer bracelet (or worse) necklace
• too much hair gel/product
• muscle shirts
• skinny jeans (especially the really skinny ones)
• eyeliner
• transition frames
• earrings bigger than studs
• cell phone holster clipped to his belt
• cut offs (jean shorts that are cut-offs)
• a man purse
• tucked in polo shirts

I know.  It’s a long list.  It probably could have been a lot longer.  Help us out.  What did we miss?

*I went back out again last night with Lostplum and Mirthful33. We were joined by @iamalejandra.  We did a chaotic little pubcrawl throughout the LES and the East Village.

I’ve written a few times about the type of men I used to date.  And the fact that I know that, in the long run, those relationships always go wrong.  No matter how much I like a guy or even how much he likes me, I’ve been down that road enough times to know there is no happy ending.

Just a lot of tears and anger and sometimes a few feeble apologies long after they’d do any good.

Being the slow learner that I am, it took me a long, long time to get here.  And here isn’t a firm place.  Sometimes I’ll meet some guy and like him immediately and then realize after the fact that he’s officially “bad for me” and I shouldn’t see him again.

Even harder is the fact that I don’t find myself atttracted to too many guys who aren’t “bad for me”.  Instead, I’m constantly playing this game with myself.  I call it, What about him.

What about him?

Nah, he’s bland.

He’s not bland.  He’s nice and sweet.

What about him?

Nah, he’s too timid.

He’s not timid.  He’s just not pushy.

What about him?

Nah, he’s too _____.

Get over it.

It’s a sucky game, a sucky way to try to date.  Never trusting my own instincts.  But I figure I’m learning.  Unlearning old habits.  Picking up new ones.  Trying to always remember that that little voice inside my head (the one that wants to skip work and stay in bed and have sex all day) usually doesn’t know what’s best for me.  So when it says, “I want him”, it’s a sure sign to stay away and keep looking.

I’m not sure if this makes sense to anyone.  But a while ago someone asked me to write on this topic (changing the type of men I dated).  This seemed like a good place to start.