“Difficult.”
That word came to mind today while I was reading a woman’s account of how, at age 30, she suddenly decided she’s a lesbian.
Before quoting any of her story, let me say that there is a phrase popularized by the pickup artist (PUA) community,”hit the wall.” This term describes the point in a single woman’s life when awareness of her declining sexual market value (SMV) causes her to realize that “riding the carousel” (casual sex and/or short-term relationships) is likely to yield diminishing returns, and she panics about her lack of marriage prospects:
When a woman asks “where have all the good men gone?”, she has hit the Wall.
Thus saith the manosphere.
Now, feminists can whine about “misogyny” and “double standards” all they want, but what they can’t do is change human nature. Nor can the PUAs, despite all their strategizing to beat the odds, because science!
Sex is about reproductive biology. Human beings are mammals, and any eighth-grader can figure out what that means in terms of sex.
Once you understand this scientific definition of sex, everything else is just details. Young people have to figure out how to attract potential partners, how to choose a good partner from among the prospective candidates, and how to negotiate a relationship that will lead toward lifelong monogamous pair-bonding — i.e., a successful marriage — because this is the ideal situation in which to raise children.
Being a Christian, I’m a “be fruitful and multiply” kind of guy. If it were up to me to tell people what to do — and if people would actually do what I told them to do — the typical 30-year-old woman would be married with three kids. However, people don’t pay me for advice and I’ve learned it’s a waste of time to give away good advice for free, so I’ll just point out that atheists are losing at their own game. If Darwinism is about survival of the fittest, where are all these big happy atheist families, huh? Why is it that Bible-thumping hillbillies (not to mention Islamic fundamentalists) produce so many more babies than secular humanists who mock the idea of a divine Creator? If a belief in evolution was so much more powerful than a belief in God, wouldn’t you expect adherents of Darwinism to have far more reproductive success than Christians? But the opposite is true.
This brings us to the 30-year-old woman whose response to “hitting the wall” seems to have been to decide she’s a lesbian. Her backstory:
I’ve always dated boys. Lots of them. At least, lots of first dates. A handful lasted a few months, but rarely, if ever, would they amount to lasting relationships.
Hmmm.
As I say, people don’t pay me for advice, but if a woman has had “lots of first dates,” but her relationships never last more than “a few months,” I would advise that she hit the panic button long before she nears 30. We understand that not everyone marries their high-school sweetheart, but if you reach age 21 and have never dated anyone longer than “a few months,” you may be headed toward the Darwinian dead end.
The “check engine” light is flashing on your dashboard, OK? Most people start dating in high school and, somewhere between age 16 and 19, form their first “serious” relationship. Maybe this adolescent romance doesn’t become Endless Love — cue the Diana Ross-Lionel Richie duet — but if you’re 21 and have never had a relationship that lasted at least a year, you have a problem, and that problem is you. The most common cause of this particular problem is failure to accurately assess your own attractiveness.
This is a typical problem for loser guys, the kind of dude who is below average, but doesn’t realize it. He’s seen too many Seth Rogen movies, in which Seth Rogen ends up with a hot chick, despite being Seth Rogen.
Hollywood is always making movies where the hapless schlub somehow manages to win the heart of a chick who’s way out of his league. The classic of this genre was When Harry Met Sally — a truly great comedy, but let’s be brutally honest: Guys who look like Billy Crystal do not end up with women who look like Meg Ryan, at least not often enough that you actually expect to see such a pairing in real life.
Women who look like Meg Ryan do not date mere mortals.
Nevertheless, clueless losers latch onto the foolish idea that they’ll hit the jackpot and woo a Meg Ryan lookalike and, as a result of this absurdly unrealistic delusion, guys get stuck permanently in Loserville.
Women sometimes make similar miscalculations, although for slightly different reasons. Every woman begins her dating career with one highly valuable commodity — youth. Whatever her other attributes may be, the 18-year-old girl always has the advantage of being 18. If she is even above-average in attractiveness (rating 6 on a scale of 10) the 18-year-old girl never has a shortage of dating opportunities, and if she rates as high as 8 or 9, guys are practically swarming her. It’s easy for any cute college girl to imagine her youthful popularity will last forever. Susan Patton’s famous 2013 letter to Princeton women — advising them to find a husband before they graduate — can be seen as a warning against this error.
Anyway, back to the 30-year-old lesbian:
I started to think something was wrong with me. Maybe I’m too picky?
(Yes, this is exactly your problem, but continue . . .)
Maybe I’m incapable of having a real long-term relationship? One where two people love each other unconditionally, want to spend all of their time together and are attracted to each other in every way possible (physically, emotionally, spiritually, sense of humor-ly, etc.).
(See? You expect too damned much. This Eternal Soulmate fantasy is as unrealistic as Seth Rogen scoring a hot chick, but continue . . .)
I knew I had a lot to offer someone, so what was the problem?
I was searching for the wrong person.
I come from a liberal family, have a great group of open-minded friends and I live in West Hollywood (one of the gay capitals of the world). So, why did it take me so long to figure out that the problem wasn’t that I was incapable of loving, or that I couldn’t find the right guy? . . .
When I turned 30 last June, I discovered that I wanted to be with a woman. Literally, on my birthday, I had a gay epiphany. . . . So many of my friends are gay, my sister is a lesbian, my uncle is gay, other members of my family are gay and it’s possible my dog is gay. I’ve always been surrounded by gay. It just never occurred to me that I might be gay, because gay just never felt right to me. . . .
OK, let’s pause here and ask ourselves: Does this story even make sense? At age 30, she “discovered” her lesbian self which she previously never suspected could exist while she was dating guys — lots of guys — and living in West Hollywood? Oh, her sister is a lesbian and her uncle is gay, but she had zero clue that homosexuality was an alternative? Maybe you’re buying that explanation, but my cynical hunch is that her 30th birthday “epiphany” was a result of her “hitting the wall,” recognizing that her SMV had declined to the point that her best days as a carousel-rider were gone. With no potential husbands on the horizon, she saw that she was doomed to a Crazy Cat Lady future and . . .
I fell in love with a woman, and I’m still in love with that woman. We are going to get married, have kids and do life together forever. I have no desire to be with a man, but I also have no desire to be with another woman. So, for me, it’s not about being gay or straight. It’s about being in love.
What. Ever.
Readers might have noticed I had not previously linked this column, because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. The writer’s name is Jill Layton, and she’s a writer for a website called HelloGiggles “a positive online community for women.” And you can read the rest of that column if you want — or not, because that’s not the surprise.
Here you can see photos of Jill Layton’s 2015 wedding to Becky Hartman and, uh, guess which one’s Jill? (Hint: Not the cute one.)
This goes back to what I was saying about guys who end up in Loserville because they overrate their own attractiveness and imagine that they’ll meet a Meg Ryan lookalike, make a few clever jokes and — boom! — she will realize that he is The One She’s Been Dreaming Of. If any young man is indulging such fantasies, all I’ve got to say is, “What’s Plan B?”
Dreams are dreams, and real life is real life. Sure, there are ugly ducklings and late-bloomers and high-school losers who don’t hit their stride until a little later in life, but as a general rule, by the time a guy is 21, the best-looking girl he has ever dated is likely to be the best-looking girl he will ever date, period. That is to say, if a college senior expects the future to bring a major improvement in the general quality of his female companions, he’s apt to be disappointed. And if you have a problem getting or keeping a girlfriend, the problem is you.
Remember that Eternal Soulmate fantasy, where Jill Layton waxed poetic about a relationship “where two people love each other unconditionally, want to spend all of their time together and are attracted to each other in every way possible”? That’s the chick version of loser guys dreaming of a Meg Ryan lookalike. However intense the attraction between two people, however unconditional their love, real relationships require realistic expectations. It takes more than mere sentiment to hang in there during the hard times and, while people don’t pay me for advice, I would advise parents to warn their daughters against expecting real relationships to be the way romance is portrayed in novels, movies and TV shows.
Frankly, I’d bet $100 that Jill Layton’s lesbian marriage won’t last 10 years, and $20 says it doesn’t last five years. The recent gay-marriage boom will inevitably be followed by a gay-divorce boom, and the odds of a Layton-Hartman divorce are pretty good, because Jill Layton is difficult.
What do you think you would learn if you could survey all of Jill Layton’s ex-boyfriends? How do you think her relationships ended? Do you suppose any of her exes were brokenhearted, devastated by her departure? Or do you suppose they were glad to be rid of her? Do you think any of her ex-boyfriends would describe her as . . . difficult? Or some other synonym like selfish, demanding, erratic, irrational?
Men are called “sexist” when we point out that not all women are good women. Feminism is basically the belief that men are 100% to blame for everything wrong in the world because (a) all men are evil, and (b) all women are perfect. Therefore, no man can ever be permitted to express a negative opinion of any woman. Be that as it may, I know enough about women to recognize certain types, and Jill Layton is not a good type.
Heterosexuality is better off without her. She will not be missed.
