Losers on the Romantic Demand Side

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One of the worst things a guy can do — women can do the same thing, but in a different way and, trust me, there’s a reason I’m making this about guys — is to overestimate their own attractiveness, or to fixate on an “ideal” of beauty in a partner. This isn’t really an either/or, because the two mistakes tend to run in tandem.

The Barbie doll/Playboy centerfold dream-woman “ideal” is quite a rare commodity, and the potential demand is practically infinite, so any woman who remotely approximates that ideal can pretty much name her own price, so to speak, in the dating market. As a result, such beauties are seldom without companionship.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

From high school onward, a girl who rates as an “8” or above is nearly always going to have a boyfriend or a husband, and if you ever meet a really attractive woman over 21 who doesn’t have a boyfriend or husband, the explanation is one of two things:

  1. She very recently broke up with a guy;
    or
  2. She’s crazy.

Sometimes, of course, it’s both. If a girl is really good-looking, but crazy, she tends to leave a trail of ex-boyfriends in her wake, but the next guy she lures into her crazy-beautiful trap is going to be too impressed by her looks to notice the crazy. What you often find is that the crazy-beautiful types — the only 8+ type women you ever meet “single” out on the scene — are helplessly attracted to Bad Boys. Despite their good looks, crazy-beautiful women have some kind of damaged ego issue, so that if a guy treats her nice, she loses interest:

“Gosh, he really likes me — there must be something
wrong with him, because I deserve to be treated like crap.”

Some guys never quite figure this out, because they have never really evaluated themselves or women objectively. These guys psychologically separate women into two categories:

  1. Super-attractive women they really want to hump;
    and
  2. Normal women they might actually have a chance with.

Unrealistic expectations — and particularly the Barbie-doll fixation — inevitably produce disappointment, and guys who fall into that pattern tend to end up pathetically alone.

Before proceeding to our example of this phenomenon, let me explain something basic: By the time you are 25 or so, you have probably already dated the best-looking person you’ll ever date. True, there are late bloomers, people who were high-school losers who get their act together by the time they graduate college and suddenly discover that they are more attractive than they were as teenagers, but this late-bloomer effect is very unlikely to occur after age 25. So by the time a guy is in his mid-20s, if he has never dated an 8+, he’s a damned fool to keep dreaming that Cinderella/Barbie/Playboy model will stumble into his life.

Ain’t gonna happen, Jack. Get over it. Life is not fair.

OK, so social media consultant Marc Ensign went to a networking event and exchanged business cards with a guy who didn’t make much of an impression. Afterwards, this guy spammed out an e-mail to everyone he met at the event:

my situation is somewhat unusual in that i am the #1 surgeon of my type in the northeastern US by volume, and have performed nearly 20,000 procedures over the last 15 years, so i really don’t need additional income (which is the unusual part). i’m actually so successful that most of the reason i attend networking events these days is for personal networking, not business networking — i’m trying to meet the right woman to fall in love with, marry, and start a family with (i’m single, never married, and really want kids before i’m old!)
i’ve hired some professional matchmakers over the years, with OK results (eg i’ve dated 2 of the matches for 6 months each, which is pretty good). the services vary enormously in quality and price (with an imperfect correlation). . . .

(Here’s your first clue, see: The guy has been a top surgeon for 15 years, which means he is in his 40s. Why would such a highly paid professional still be single at that age?)

These are my Hard (Objective) Dating Parameters which are NOT Flexible:
(this means I am only willing to pay for introductions if ALL these criteria are met)
(if you want to set me up w someone missing 1 of these criteria, I may accept, but will not pay for that)

  1. Age 27-35 (ideally 28-34)
  2. No kids, wants kids in the next 1-2 years
  3. College graduate, doesn’t have to be a great school, but needs to have finished the degree
  4. Skinny (i.e. dress size 0-2, if you don’t know what that means (many men don’t) it means very skinny)
  5. Caucasian (not black, not Hispanic, not Asian)
  6. Healthy lifestyle (defined as no smoking, no drugs, good diet, no hard drinking,

(OK, this isn’t too much, is it? Skinny non-smoking, healthy college graduate, white ages 28-34. Probably several hundred thousand single women in the U.S. could fit this description and might be interested in marrying a successful surgeon. But . . .)

These are things that I would ideally prefer, but don’t require (i.e. I am flexible about these criteria)

  1. Christian (any denomination is fine, I’m Catholic but not very religious, prefer any religion over none, must be religiously tolerant, will not be compatible with someone who thinks everyone else is damned)
  2. Graduate degree or very good undergraduate school (more compatible since I went to 3 Ivy League schools i.e. Dartmouth, Columbia & Harvard, as well as Emory and my MBA from NYU)
  3. Spent significant time in another country other than the US (either born somewhere else or lived out of the US for a total of a 6 months or more, not on a vacation, doing something like school or work)
  4. Spent significant time (>1 yr) living in a city of 1 million or more (so can live in NYC if moves here)
  5. Likes animals and pets, particularly dogs (because I plan to have a dog for the rest of my life)

These are the Soft (Objective) Criteria I require, but are difficult to match (because they’re qualitative)

  1. Attractive (like an 8 out of the 1-10 scale, 9-10 is actually bad as it comes with a lot of downside)
  2. Nice, normal, sweet, kind, altruistic, selfless, not entitled, bitchy, materialistic, selfish, self-centered
  3. Stylish, fashionable, polished, confident but not vain, superficial, overly concerned about looks
  4. Hard-working, real career, full-time job (unless in graduate school), achievement-oriented
  5. Highly functional Type B (not a Type A because too similar, not a Type B who can’t get stuff done)
  6. Easy-going, sense of humor, doesn’t take life or things too seriously, gets along well with everyone
  7. Good person, follows the Golden Rule, nice and kind to others, never does bad things because of values
  8. Good family, good role models, ideally good nuclear family so can emulate good patterns of behavior

You see the basic problem here? Whatever his accomplishments as a surgeon, this guy can’t be very good-looking — and his social skills are probably minimal to non-existent — or else he wouldn’t still be single. He’s a perfectionist and a control freak, and is apparently embittered by his past relationships (or lack thereof).

When a man seems to be demanding an 8+ woman, but pejoratively remarks about women who are “vain, superficial, overly concerned about looks,” it’s like a red flag. This guy has serious personality problems. Likewise, when a guy boasts about his multiple Ivy League degrees and his career success, and then disparages women who are “materialistic, selfish, self-centered” (note the redundancy), you know he’s got painful broken relationships in his past.  He’s been burned before, see, and he’s not going to get burned again.

In a phrase, this guy is damaged goods. Maybe if he had married one of his college classmates, or some woman he dated in his late 20s or early 30s, whatever his underlying personality flaws, he would have been all right. Instead, his relationships didn’t work out for some reason, and when I say “for some reason” of course I mean, because this guy is a desperately neurotic basket case.

Mama’s Precious Little Boy, eh?

Hate to go all Freudian on this guy, but c’mon — that e-mail is practically a Valentine to his mother: “Nice, normal, sweet, kind, altruistic, selfless . . . gets along well with everyone . . . nice and kind to others.” In other words, he wants complete acceptance, no criticism or disagreement — a mother’s idealized love, in a college-educated non-smoking size-zero package of 8+ Barbie-doll beauty.

This guy is doomed and hopeless, and if he somehow did manage to find and marry a woman who met his criteria, that wouldn’t actually solve his problem, because he is the problem.

Guys: Don’t be this guy. Accept who you are and don’t imagine that your romantic problems can be blamed on women being too “superficial” to appreciate how wonderful you are. If you were really so wonderful, you’d already be married to a wonderful woman.

The fact that you’re still out there looking means you ain’t all that, no matter how precious your mother thinks you are.

UPDATE: It appears that the author of the detailed “demand” e-mail is Manhattan eye surgeon Dr. William Chen, whose rants about a dilapidated property in his Greenwich Village neighborhood went viral in 2010. The question of why Dr. Chen is insistent on having a wife who is “Caucasian (not black, not Hispanic, not Asian)” immediately comes to mind. Is this some kind of “trophy” thing? Or just another aspect of his generally bizarre personality?

 

79 comments

  1. The guy is looking for a commodity, not a woman. Might as well think those centerfolds are real women and not the figment of some pervert’s imagination.

    Some of the most beautiful women I’ve met aren’t all that pretty, but have a sweet spirit that makes a man comfortable around her. Those women marry soon because any man with an IQ over 10 knows what she is and knows those types are rare.

  2. You’ve missed one big point: if he’s that successful a surgeon, he’s been working 60 to 90 hours a week, every week. The only people with whom he interacts are other hospital people, and they’re busy, too.

    Such men often have social skills problems, even if they weren’t too bad off as undergrads; many of them never advanced beyond the college sophomore dating skills set because once they hit medical school, they didn’t have a lot of time.

    I’ve met guys like that, and they frequently wind up alone. If they’ve got money, they can have a succession of girlfriends, but they still wind up alone. The poor ones just get themselves off while fantasizing about Amanda Marcotte.

    Me? I’ve been married for 34 years, 2 months and 21 days, and I’m doing just fine, thank you.

  4. It’s weird how, when you’re a happily married middle-aged man, romantic problems seem so much simpler than they did when you were a young bachelor. Sometimes you look over on the other side of that fence and think, “Hey, what if …?” But then immediately you come to your senses. Good Lord, I never want to be “out there” again!

  5. I’ve got to say that my social skills have degraded as a result of being a blogger. That’s one reason I like getting out on the road for shoe-leather reporting, because when you’re out amongst flesh-and-blood people on a regular basis, it keeps you from slipping into that social isolation you feel when you’re staying home and staring into a laptop all day.

  6. People such as this gentleman are truly sad. It is this sort of mindset which inevitably leads to divorce, because if they do ever marry, they wind up believing they’ve somehow “settled” for less than the best. They’re always on the lookout for something/someone more suitable to their desires/demands and in the meantime, they make their partners miserable for failing to live up to their expectations. As for me, I’m glad my wife “married down” some 25 years ago. [Insert Smiley Thing Here]

  7. If you are having fun, fun will find you. Just go out and do things you really love (or at least like) where there might be the possibility of finding someone of the opposite sex. That means if you are a woman who might enjoy hunting or fishing, you might find it is a target rich guy environment. Similarily, if you are a guy who likes activities that many women like…the same may apply. You can’t force it, because if you are miserable doing it you can’t hide that. But go into these things not to get laid, but to have fun–you might find someone to have fun with.

  9. The source article includes some creepy “gift” offers of cash and Botox, even Lasik surgery as a reward for pimps, um, matchmakers who find a woman for him. Weirdo.

  11. […] There are somewhere around five million words on this site, and I suspect somewhere around a quarter of a million were expended on the tedious task of bewailing my Permanent Singleness. Then again, I am sufficiently self-aware to know why I’m in this state — should I need to identify the culprit, I need only pop open my wallet and look at my driver’s license — which perhaps makes me at least slightly better off than these characters described by Robert Stacy McCain: […]

  13. I am the winner today:

    It is Emil Chynn. He’s a Lasek surgeon. And he attended all the schools that were listed on that email. Plus, in 2012 he posted an ad in one of his alumni magazines offering $10,000 for an introduction to the “right woman”.

    What is the right woman you ask? Well let me tell you. She’s SMART, SWEET and SKINNY. Sound familiar?

    Chynn is 44, and practices in New York. He also lives in his mother’s basement. Ok…I made up that last part. But here is his picture. What do you think? 3.5…4?

  14. 10 seconds??? I listened to the WHOLE THING. I feel like I need to make a phone call now.

    I know a guy.

  22. Whoa! Never trust a person who does not capitalize the personal pronoun, “I.”. Also, WHAT WAS HE DOING IN THE UKRAINE? Hmm? Any time I read about that country in conjunction with a story about a man looking for a wife, or whatever, the Dread Pedo Brett comes to mind….

  27. You know there are Asians in the former USSR territories, right? So the photo of an Asian guy doesn’t preclude having family in Ukraine.

  28. Yes. I checked and he is the US-born son of immigrants from Shanghai. A former classmate of mine with no social skills eventually found a wife via the Ukraine, a total bombshell with no social skills, either. They are very happy together, surprising many. She loved cooking for him.

  30. Yes. I am fully aware that there are Asians from the slavic territories. I studied slavic culture (I speak Serbian). However, the Asians who were a part of the former USSR were generally located in Soviet Central Asia. Not on the western side of the USSR (unless they served in the military). So it would be incredibly dubious that this man had family in the Ukraine.

  33. Something is wrong here.

    Even if he was born in the States, his mother can tap into the network of Chinese mothers with single daughters and find him an almost perfect wife.

    His problem is that he is a total jerk looking for the perfect woman.

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