“How Deep Is Your Love?” – The Bee Gees
There comes a time in every new relationship when you take stock. For women, it’s usually after the first or second date. They talk to their buffalo-assed girlfriends and use a complicated math formula similar to the one used by physicists to measure the atomic weight of a black hole.
Before you think me a misogynist, I should say I have a great respect for the intellect of women. The thing is, a group of women together tends to bring out the worst in them as individuals. Unfortunately for me, Dana’s friends were a group of women with the collective IQ of a box of Krispy Kremes. That was bad enough, and bode ill for any relationship I could have with Dana, but lest you think I was under the misconception that my friends were rocket scientist, and in an effort to offer full disclosure, my friends are considered by many to be a compelling argument for extinction of the species.
My buddies are good guys, don’t get me wrong. The thing of it is that they aren’t really known for deep thoughts, at least not publically. They have priorities and those priorities tend to influence their interest in any given subject.
“So, was she good in the sack?”
That’s the guys main criteria. I’d be lying if that was the worst part. The worst part is that most guys would still take a bad lay from an attractive woman than a great lay from an ugly one. The reason can be found in the figurative reality. You can easily make your friends believe an attractive woman is a good lay, but there is no way you can convince them that a woman who isn’t attractive was capable of making you blow your baby batter across the room like Peter North getting his prostate milked.
The motivation to enter mutually exclusive relationships are quite different for men than they are for women. For women it is the first step toward a safe, happy, nest to raise young and waddle happily toward the golden years. For men the allure of a mutually exclusive relationship is getting laid in the next 20 minutes and anything beyond that is too complicated to bother thinking about. The fact that the two goals are diametrically opposed tends to get lost on both parties. I mean, women give it up to catch a husband for long term happiness and men try to get women to give it up for short term relief.
If I said sex with Dana was unsatisfying, none of my friends would believe me. She had the kind of physical attributes that clouded a man’s mind, not completely unlike the the 40s radio serial hero, The Shadow. I once spent an afternoon at a pub listening to her ex-boyfriend explain why he sold his grandmother’s priceless engagement ring to pay for two tickets for Dana to see The Boss in New Jersey. The fact that Dana took her best friend instead of the guy who just sold the family jewels for the tickets was not lost on me. Personally, I wouldn’t sell my grandmother’s used underwear to see Springsteen, but that’s me. Clearly this guy had issues, but would I be able to resist whatever full-court press she’d throw at me when the time came?
I recall spending a month’s salary on a trip to Fiji and any legs I had to stand on in this argument are broken like the promises i constantly made to my bookie. If getting what she wanted was relatively within reason, all it took was three minutes of her trying on bikinis at Wet Seal for me to realize I couldn’t fight someone sporting 44 caliber tits. The problem was in that figurative reality I was talking about. I didn’t much care that she was possibly the worse lay I’d had since I figured out what to do with a penis. What mattered was all my friends were envious of me and they believed the sex was as awe inspiring as her tits.
Of course, truth be told, Dana wasn’t the first human accessory I invested in. Looking back at the car wreck that was my romantic life brought to mind one mistake after another. The idea that women could cause one man so much misery might explain why some men begin finding other men attractive. Of course, switching teams isn’t a remedy for male stupidity. I have gay friends who explain that the same issues that permeate heterosexual relationships plague homosexual ones as well. The only difference is that you can beat the shit out of your gay male lover and have amazing makeup sex, where attempting the same thing with the opposite sex will yield an indictment for battery and rape. Solving male/female relationship problems requires a more deft hand… one that apparently socially crippled people such as myself don’t possess.
The question is how to change? Finding better partners is one way of having better relationships. Are these women in bars? Libraries? Churches? Hell, one of my friends met the love of his life in a laundromat. Of course, that particular relationship is more rinse cycle than fluff and fold, but I digress.
At this point in my reverie, just minutes after watching another girlfriend abscond to greener pastures, I made a commitment to change my luck with the opposite sex and to do that I would need to take drastic action.