I Stand Uncorrected!

I’ve happily and contentedly read your column off and on for years, now. It has made me laugh; it has made me cry. However, I’m afraid I finally have to submit my own interjection, about some recent advice you offered.

I’m a 25-year-old male, and I have had my share of love, and loss. I’ve come to understand the repercussions of the phrase “Love will come when you stop looking.” In fact, I used to be the type of person who would meet new people through the Internet, feeling I had to seek out people if I was ever going to find love. I’ve realized that stopping the “relentless search” does allow you to take up useful hobbies. The people you meet pursuing such hobbies share your interests, so they have more in common with you than someone you might meet online.

Making out indiscriminately causes STDs and those women on Maury who don’t know who the father of their baby is. By using phrases like “plan B for boy” and other catchy, yet insignificant and frivolous, phrases, you affirm this type of lifestyle. You suggest people go out and date perfect strangers, who will use you, hurt you, and dump you; unless you use them, hurt them, and dump them first.

Would you advocate the same advice to men? Sleep around and always keep a girl on the side, to be used when you get lonely and then thrown away without a care? That description sounds like the thing I have strived all my life not to become.

Listen here, ya big crybaby . . . before you get all worked up and moist-eyed (!) again, let’s clarify my position. Advocating a fun-haver approach to making out—which includes kissing and maybe a little dry humping; not oral, anal, or vaginal penetration— is about a bazillion light years away from endorsing unsafe sex with strangers.

If a man wrote in, asking me the best strategy for finding l-u-v, I’d give him the exact same advice I gave that woman—which did not include fucking around or treating people badly. In order to survive and thrive in an often hostile and difficult dating environment, it’s imperative not to take yourself too seriously or give away your heart too easily. I never advocated turning Find-a-Mate into a full-time job, either. As an experienced dater, I can vouch for the fact that it is possible for one to date and still maintain a career, an active exercise schedule, and cocktail time with the ladies, while still finding hours to focus on one’s ceramic pig and glass-eyeball collections.

For those of us who work at home, all by our (sniff) lonesome, meeting people online is a very viable option. Especially if you’re on the shy side and are looking for new and inventive ways to procrastinate writing your weekly column.

I have friends who haven’t dated in years and still won’t trawl the online—I’ve even offered to give them my leftover credits! They say things like “It’s not my thing” or “It’s OK for you, but I would never do that.” To that I say, well, if sitting home complaining is more “your thing,” I can’t really argue with that. However, nor will I listen.

The fact is, you’re an attractive nuisance, living in a world where communication is instant and expected. I find your difficulties maintaining cohesive relational thought structure within a sentence amusing. Yikes, this brings me to the subject. The nonexhaustive list of demands one needs to comply with, to peel your panties. I think that list in and its self, could single handily drive a man to celibacy.

Interesting that someone with such a free-styling approach to fragmental, non-sequiturial (is that even a word?) sentences feels inclined to critique my admittedly sometimes-tenuous grasp on the English language. But frankly, I don’t care if you think I speak gibberish.

I’m more concerned about this so-called “list of demands,” as you so harshly put it. I find my potential boyfriend checklist quite reasonable: must be horny, happy, funny (bet you thought I was going to say “hung!”), smart, kind, and horny. (Yes, horny gets two mentions. Sex is important. Deal.)

See? Hardly the dick-shriveling “list of demands” you alluded to. Harumph.

All worked up? Write Dategirl at dategirl@seattleweekly.com or c/o Seattle Weekly, 1008 Western Ave., Ste. 300, Seattle, WA 98104.