There are a lot of ‘beautiful’ women on dating websites; in fact I’d say that all women on dating websites are beautiful in thier own way. The problem comes, when I run into a beautiful woman who KNOWS she’s beautiful. This is why I always put in my profile that I’d like to meet a woman with a bit of humility, who can laugh at themselves. I mean, some women on dating websites have pictures that look like a photo spread from the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit. Great, I’m glad you had a ten thousand dollar a day lighting team make the sweat glisten on your boobs, but then don’t say “I’m looking for a man who wants me for more than just my body.” Just a thought, but maybe have a picture of you from the neck up reading a book, not a professional body shot with your titties crammed together like factory farmed chickens. I mean, this is a dating website, not a modelling agency looking for your portfolio.
Unfortunately, in this country, we’ve put so much emphasis on beauty with no substance, that some, again, not all, but some can get a real sense of entitlement because they hit the pick six in the genetic lottery. These are typically the women who have very little to say in their profile, instead relying on pictures of themselves sticking their big ass out, making duck lips to the camera, or in what I can only assume is a pre-gang bang photo with six super-hot guys. NOT quite sure how that one is supposed to instill a sense of future devotion from a potential mate, but you do you girl.
This is an example of a profile I recently saw on a dating website; I won’t provide pics, but let’s say she was SUPER attractive, and could use a rubberband as a belt: “106 pounds: (That’s how she STARTED!) divorced, one boy (Most men are still back there at “106 pounds”). Must be respectful (Reasonable request…), a hard worker (OK, I’m that…), well travelled (Not sure what that means, but ok; I’ve been to a few places…), college degree (Why? Do you come with benefits?), God fearing (I mean, I don’t believe that, but I won’t judge you; gotta say though, I kinda don’t like where this is heading…), TRUMP SUPPORTERS ONLY! (THERE it is; WHACK JOB, WHACK JOB! left, left, left, can’t swipe left fast enough.)“
Entitled. That woman feels entitled to be a crazy lady because she’s beautiful and men probably treat her like a delicate flower. I’m not looking for a flower, I’m looking for a friend. Someone who’s more concerned with how I feel than how they look. Someone who’s able to laugh when the waiter accidentally spills wine on the table, and isn’t ready to call out an air strike on the Italian restaraunt because the small stain on thier dress brings them down to a 9.9 in the eyes of nobody who gives a shit.
I’ve gone out with some pretty strikingly beautiful women, who I met on dating websites, and in a lot of cases, I end up having to drag one word answers out of them like the worlds most put upon talk show host trying to interview Robert DeNiro. Me: “Oh, wow! You met Michelle Obama, that must have been fascinating! Were you nervous?” You: “Lil bit, lil bit.” Like their profile that said nothing, some women who KNOW they’re pretty, will just sit across from you with absolutely nothing to say and look, you’ve been on this planet for 27 years (In my fantasy, I’m dating a 27-year-old; deal with it.), unless you’ve been in a hermetically sealed bubble your entire life, you have opinions, stories, friends to talk about; you’ve been places, seen things that made you feel some kind of way, you’ve loved, lost, had orgasms and sometimes not, SAY SOMETHING! Look, I don’t care how pretty a woman is, but she has to bring some personality to the table. I don’t know who told these ladies that looks are enough, but they don’t last forever.
Which brings me to the parable of Carrie.
I met a girl named Carrie when I was a kid. She was in college when I was in high school and she was absolutely gorgeous. I was 17, I think she was 21 or 22. I met her at Great America on a Friday, back when I had the balls to approach women. Carrie was waiting in line for a rollercoaster, with her friends, as I was with mine and I started talking to her. She was drop dead gorgeous. She looked like Jennifer Connelly from “Career Opportunities” (I’ll wait while you look that up….”, got it? Yeah, I KNOW. Ok.) We exchanged numbers, I called her that night after we’d both gotten home from Great America (those high school balls again), we talked until 2AM, then went out on Sunday. She had to pick me up because I didn’t have a car. We made out in her car all night, did hand stuff, it was exciting; fun. The next Friday, I spent the night at her parent’s house (She had to sneak me in.) Within a month, we were in kid love. Couldn’t get enough of each other, of sex with one another, of just being with one another.
Then Carrie cheated on me, broke my kid heart and devastated me to a fucking fare-thee-well. Nothing I could really do about it. I didn’t even have a car to properly kid-love stalk her. She told me she’d met someone else and she was really fucking mean about it. She said he was way hotter than me, I wasn’t hot enough for her, and that I was just something to do over summer break; I mean, it was fucking brutal. She COULD have just said “I don’t think we should see each other anymore” and I would have been hurt, but could have lived with that. Instead, she Hiroshima’d me.
Carrie had a certain sense of entitlement because she was beautiful and she fucking knew it. She didn’t have to be nice about it. I didn’t know how I could go on, but I eventually got lucky, met a woman of both beauty and substance, and did. Thirteen years later, when I was 30, Carrie contacted me out of the blue. She told me that she thought about me often, about our conversations, about how nice I was to her; she told me that she was a different person now, and asked me if I’d like to meet with her.
I’d just gotten out of a nine-year relationship with that woman of beauty and substance I mentioned before, so I was intrigued at the prospect of this meeting. Carrie gave me an address to a house in a very upscale gated community. A far cry from her parent’s modest home. I drove out there, was let in by the guard at the gate, and followed the winding road past huge estates, finally stopping at hers. It was gigantic; not a mansion per-se, but close. I remember thinking that it was like Xanadu in “Citizen Kane”; not in its largess, but in its kind of lonely creepiness. A crow cawed in the distance as I got out of my car, and the crisp autumn air sent a shiver down my spine.
Carrie told me to let myself in when I got there, and I did. The foyer was cavernous, and the rooms to either side were deep and dark. The lights weren’t off, but they were very dim. In front of me, beyond two pillars that sat on either side of its entrance, was the living room. Candles were lit and a bottle of wine sat on a huge oak table. A fireplace roared at the opposite end of the room. Carrie called out from out of site for me to enter and have a seat on the giant leather sofa. I did and poured myself a glass of wine. A few minutes later, Carrie walked in to the room, and I could see by her silhouette that she still had a perfect body. She was wearing a hoodie and in the dark, I couldn’t see her face.
Carrie told me to sit, and I did. I thought this was extremely sexy, and I was already a bit turned on. Have you ever been in that situation where you’re meeting with an ex and you’re super horny with anticipation, thinking of the sex you used to have with them? That anticipation is a great thrill. Carrie sat in a chair in front of the fireplace across from me, the light behind her and her hoody obscuring her face. She proceeded to tell me a story.
About a year after we’d broken up, Carrie was in a car accident. A truck driver fell asleep behind the wheel while she was out with her boyfriend, and hit the passenger side of his car. Her boyfriend was the ‘hot’ guy she’d cheated on me with. He was fine, walked away without a scratch, but she’d been badly burned and scarred. She took down her hood and sure enough, the left side of her face had burn scars and she also had no hair on that side of her head. She told me that she’d gotten a significant amount of money from the settlement with the truck company, which is how she got her house. The boyfriend she had at the time broke up with her because she wasn’t pretty any more, and all she thought about for ten years, so she said, was that I wouldn’t have done that.
Carrie told me that she’d been afraid to reach out because she wasn’t sure how I would react, and she thought that she might not be able to deal with that. She told me that she’d constantly thought of suicide and had seen counselors, therapists and psychologists over the years. She was on pain meds, and anti-depressants, and opioids. She’d gone to India to seek enlightenment, learned to meditate, and found her spirituality. She’d tried dating but could always see the disappointment on men’s faces. And through it all, she told me, she’d thought of how this kid had approached her at Great America, with more confidence than any college guy she’d ever dated, made her laugh more than any boyfriend she’d ever had, and boldly asked for her phone number; she told me that she loved the times we’d just lay together in her bed naked, whispering to each other and trying to hide our laughter so that her parents wouldn’t hear; she’d never had that kind of comfort with another man. Sex was always about what they wanted from her. She said that I didn’t treat her like she was beautiful, but like she was a friend, I was kind to her, and didn’t take her for granted. She told me that she was ready now, to be in a relationship, so she finally decided to reach out to me.
There was silence, other than the fire crackling. After a few heartbeats, I could see tears glistening in her eyes, as she said “well Michael?” I stood up, walked across the expanse of her living room and stood in front of her. She looked up at me, expectantly, with surprise on her face. I cupped her scarred cheek with my hand and she leaned into it like a kitten, closing her eyes and letting out a relieved exhale. I kneeled in front of Carrie and kissed her gently on the lips; the tears fell from her eyes like rivers now, as the fire light reflected off of them. It was a very intimate moment.
I thought of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Nazis finally open the Arc of the Covenant, after all the anticipation, after all the expectation…right before everything turns to shit and they get their comeuppance. Carrie and I looked at each other for a long moment, and I said “Fuck you. Live with it.” And I left.
Ah, gimme a break. I was thirty and still just a fucking kid, but I’ll be honest, I don’t know that I’d react any differently to that situation now. As I sat there on her couch, I actually considered Carrie’s proposal. I tried to weight the fun we had against the shit I felt like when she dumped my ass…hard. I didn’t give a shit that Carrie had scars, but what concerned me is that she didn’t seem to care about the scars that she’d left on me. She never apologized for the things she said, told me that she didn’t mean them, she didn’t express remorse….it was still all about her and what SHE wanted, what SHE was ready for. What pissed me off in that moment was that Carrie was still talking down to me like I was the ugly kid at the dance, who was of COURSE going to drop everything to dance with the prom queen; what she was really saying was that no handsome guy would date her, so she has to take what she can get…me.
Uh-uh; I ain’t the one. You don’t get to treat a person like shit because you’re pretty, and then come CRAWLING back to them because you got ugly. You should have thought about that shit before you tore out someone’s heart.
In any case, it’s a woman’s personality…her character, her drive, the things inside that can only be seen when you look into her eyes; for me it’s her laughter, it’s INTERACTIVE conversation that doesn’t end at a designated time. It’s commonality, but it’s also the differences between us that I find attractive. It’s great when we have common interests, but it’s through our differences that we learn to grow, not only as individuals, but as a couple. THAT’S what really attracts me and THOSE are the things that can be lacking when a woman ONLY relies on beauty to sell herself in her profile.
I’ll be honest, for a long time I was frustrated that women on dating websites, rarely see past my photos. Maybe I have some sort of dysmorphia, but maybe I really am just ugly. I picture these women just swiping left when they see my pics, and not really bothering to READ anything in my profile. Now I’m glad that that happens, because in a way, they’re weeding themselves out. Less work for me. The times I go on dates that I REALLY enjoy, and end up dating a woman for a length of time, are the times when THEY can look past my pictures, and make a comment to me about something I wrote because it can’t be ONLY about looks; sure, looks factor into it, but if I just wanted to see something beautiful that has nothing to say, I’d buy a fucking painting.
The End
General Douchebaggery 
Be a douchebag!