"I'm not perfect, and so aren't you"

A pastiche of excerpts (slightly remodeled) from online personal ads, 2014.

Hey. So what's up? Unicorn here. I haven't been on a date in ten years. Why do men lie? I meet men, and then I find out they have girlfriends or wives. I’m a very hungry caterpillar, and the majority of men here give me a stomachache. I’m tired of online dating so I thought I’d post to the Internet instead. If you are charming, I will eat you and turn myself into a beautiful butterfly. I live in another state; if that is a problem, I understand.

I do not want to date a man who is old. One other thing: It hurts my feelings when people ask me to send a picture of myself and then they make fun of it and tell me it’s not my real photo. Knock it off.

I’m a pretty girl, age 40, who lost weight in the wrong places. I am a saggy mess with no boobs. I need a “face guy” who’ll think I’m sexy when I’m hiding behind nice clothes. I need a man over six feet tall because otherwise I’ll feel like I’m bending over to hug a child. Please do not try to convince me that I secretly want to date someone shorter, and I'm not interested in your classy comments about how you make up for it in other ways. Someone trim and active, too, who will inspire me to shred the rest of my weight off – not another couch potato like me. A little thug appeal would be the icing on the cake. I listen to Miley Cyrus. You must love pit bulls and hamsters. Let’s harvest the honey bud of life.

I’m a Native American girl. We dance to make the weather, and we are fascinated by boys with white skin and blond hair. You know, Pocahontas John Whatever Quetzlcoatl type shit. I need a forever boyfriend before I make it snow.

I’m 30 years old, and I have no one to stand by me. I could use a strong support system behind these walls. I can use all the love and help I can get in here. I prefer people who have their lives in order. Send your address so I can get in touch.

I was born with a syndrome. I hope it does not scare anyone off. I have brown hair and green eyes. I really want to be married at some point. I know the importance of a physical relationship between a woman and a man, but I don't want to focus on sex all the time, so I’m looking for a sexless relationship.

My ethnicity: white and pretty. Where is my punky-looking sweetie? Can you be my knight in shining armor as well as my homie lover-friend? I promise to accept you for who you are and to love you all the more for your flaws that make you unique. (Unless you smoke cigarettes – sorry.)

I am beautiful in every way. I seek an American husband with the objective of immigration. My brother, a former Marine, will screen out the losers. I hope to hear from the right man. Please include your GPS location.

I’m different, not like other women, by the way. Convince me why I should be with you. If I have to tell you what “blow my mind” means, don’t bother responding.

Looking for a guy who wants to be friends and loves dark meat. Hit me up if you’re serious. Be a real man. Successful and classy. Blue-collar and down-to-earth. No one stuffy or prissy. No erectile dysfunction, please. I’m feminine with a touch of tomboy on the weekends. I'm looking for a good-looking, laid-back guy who's fun to be around. That may be asking for too much on this retarded site. I’m job searching. I’m crazy but harmless. I just want an uncut guy for a long-term relationship.

I’m a junior in college looking for an actually relationship. Someone who lives alone, smokes, and likes snakes, and is walking distance from me. I will walk over to your place and we can smoke and play video games. If it’s not too much to ask, I was wondering if my two pet snakes can live at your place for a little while. Also, I need to rearrange my apartment, and my girlfriends and I can’t do it ourselves because we're too short. If you’re interested, feel free to respond.

Once again, someone has flagged my ad for removal, and it has pissed me off. Someone out there is trying to ruin my chances of finding love. Whoever you are, knock it off. You should be ashamed of yourself! For those of you who like my ads, thank you. I miss date nights and I’m looking for a soulmate. If you are interested in me, please respond, and whoever is flagging my posts, stop reading them. This ad is for people who are interested in me.

I honestly don't know what to ask anymore. Or what to even write. I guess what I'm looking for is a guy best friend with whom I can hang out and can text/call constantly even when we just finished doing something together. Actually, I’m just looking for someone to chat with, not a relationship – I am too unstable for that. I've been trying to get help, but no one wants to help me, and they wonder why there are mass shootings.

Remember the days when you had to call a girl to hear her voice? It’s all gone now. Everything is so f–ed up. I’m bored and lonely. I need a guy who is loyal, respectful, not into head games. White only. This Sunday, we could go to the beach or just sit around. We could make dinner and build a relationship that leads to marriage and kids.

Tough divorced executive seeking a f–toy college jock houseboy with passion, stamina, and great equipment. I'm not the slow and tender type. The whole 'I'll please you before I please myself, baby' thing just makes me laugh. Sorry, guys. Nothing excites me more than having command of a well dressed masculine guy. I find myself imagining what type of underwear he's wearing or how well equipped he is. We all have a type. Mine is young, strong, and has an ass that’s real easy to look at. I want it no-strings attached in the hot tub, the car, and the balcony. Get back to me with your most convincing pics.

Whatever happened to chivalry? “Yes, ma’am,” “No, sir,” and the like? I am a Southern belle. Whatever happened to husbands bringing their wives flowers, and children respecting their parents? Whatever happened to Christian values and human decency? There must be at least one God-fearing man who isn't married, locked-up, cheating, gay, or on the down-low who is interested in meeting me. If I wanted a bitch, I’d date broads. If you’d like to take my pain away tonight, send me a selfie.

I’m in an emotional and physical transition right now. I need grounding. Are you up for the task? I work second shift. I’m not looking for a “texter”. Please be patient with my replies. I'm not perfect, and so aren't you. Please don't bring up my past when we’re fighting.

I can’t walk around with a sign on me. My computer won’t allow me to send pics out, but I am attractive. I will “giggle” my hips for you! Don’t send a dick pic, please.

I like blond guys, mulattos, and light-skinned black guys. I like Jews – or guys who might be Jewish, LOL – with names like Jacob. I like guys who smoke pot. I like Chris Brown.

If you’re trolling these messages while eating popcorn and laughing your ass off, hi! I do the same thing! I have always associated this website with sexually transmitted diseases and serial killers, so, before anything sexual can happen between us, you must get tested for disease.

There's more to life than masturbating over fictional characters. At least, I think there is. Not that it can't be fun. But, now that it's a new year, maybe I should try giving my vibrator a rest.

I want a tall man to call my beast. I prefer long hair and a waxed chest. Are you career-orientated? Are you caring like a dolphin? Can you read between the dotted line of love?

I think I am really pretty. I rarely drink. There’s so much more to tell. If you’re not opiate-friendly, there’s no point in talking. We won’t get along.

Here’s the catch – I’m in Rhode Island.

 

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Image credit: Silhouette defining a female body shape. Public domain, from Open Clip Art Library on Wikimedia Commons. Superimposed on the background of a peacock tail at Kuala Lumpur Bird Park by Loke Seng Hon, Creative Commons 3.0, on Wikimedia Commons.

On Settling

Thomas Merton said: "The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little." And if one fights the temptation? According to W. Somerset Maugham, "if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."

How do we square this with the knowledge that the world is flawed, capricious, and limited? That we cannot have the best, the perfect, all the time – or ever?

We must give up artificially inflated and idealized dreams of what the world ought to do to meet our own desires. When we give up unrealistic, unfair expectations, we are better positioned to treat others more fairly and to love and accept more of what, and who, comes our way. This does not mean, however, that we should give up dreams for our own happiness and fail to set goals for bettering and improving our conditions. To do so breeds resentment. The question over whether people should "settle" for a career, marriage, or anything else in life often involves a confusion of these two principles or else a recognition of the difficulty of enacting both simultaneously. How can we be realistic and idealistic at the same time? How can we live in the world, accepting its inherent flaws and pain, and be joyful in doing so, whether we are attempting make it a more compassionate, beautiful place or simply experiencing it as it is?

To make things more complicated, it's hard to explain to others what we are doing. We are coming to terms with the world around us. We are saying "yes" and "no" to it. We are trying to change it. We are living in it, living with ourselves, living with others. And sometimes, when we say "yes," we say "yes" to something that is imperfect. No one – not your coworkers, not your lover, not anyone around you, really – wants to think they are being "settled" for, with all the negative connotations of that word, the way one "settles" for food that is improperly cooked because one needs to eat something and simply lacks initiative to cook something better or get the salt shaker. They may be willing to believe that you've negotiated a sort of deal with them. Even if that's true, however, it places a burden on them to fulfill their end of the bargain, which may be the unspecific and large task of somehow compensating you for whatever you feel you've given them or given up. It's even worse if there isn't the sense of a mutual give-and-take, but simply the intimation that you've lowered your expectations and given up the hope of ever getting what you really want. The resentment will always be there from all sides.

"Settling" is sometimes defined as choosing an option about which one does not feel passionate. This is a questionable definition, since passion does not always lead us to make the best decisions anyway. Sometimes the heart feels that it is settling, but what the heart wanted would have been disastrous, and the choice to "settle" is subsequently revealed as the all-around best choice. This is part of the reason why people feel anxious over the question of settling. No one wants to make a bad choice. The problem is that we don't always know what the best choice is, and whether to go with the heart, the head, a friend's advice, or a coin flip.

We are bad at predicting what will make us happy. (Refer to the 2002 Nobel Prize-winning work of Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman.) Often we believe it's more money, more stuff, that will do the trick. This keeps us on the so-called "hedonic treadmill." We are afraid that getting off the treadmill represents "settling," giving up on the goal of happiness. We don't see that getting off the treadmill might be the beginning of a new, truer way of being happy.

Wendy Plump wrote in Vow about the process – or, rather, the event – of choosing a lover:

This is a person, after all, whom we pluck out of a crowd of possibilities. Magic attends that choice. Or if that word belongs too irrevocably to the World of Disney, then use the word mystery. At any rate, it's a remarkable kind of calculus that makes you look at a field of men or women and quickly zero in on the one person who turns you on most. He could be standing next to someone better looking, smarter, more athletic, richer, in possession of a more interesting physiognomy or at least better hair. And yet it's a rare day that you spend much time on the question "Which one?"
You have already decided. Through some mysterious alchemy, you want this one and not another. Why? I think a definitive answer would ruin it.

Plump's book was also about uncertainty. You make a promise because you don't know. Hence the title, Vow.

Cameron Fathauer wrote about a form of that uncertainty. He was engaged to be married, then was hit by a car and went into a coma. His fiancee stayed with him, aware that the medical road ahead was uncertain:

"Everyone who commits to someone else is committing to a version of that person they haven’t fully met yet. They’re committing to a future neither of them can see. Most people get to pretend otherwise. We couldn’t."

Happiness, love and passion are feelings we have in the present moment. We can't store them up or schedule them for the future. When we feel them in the present moment, they are, nonetheless, often related to a sense of fulfillment, which is a consequence of many choices we have made in the past. Carl McCoy wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

This month, commencement speakers across the country are exhorting graduates not to settle. They are urged instead to find their passion – to 'do what you love.' But it's unwise to build a career on the notion that we should all be paid for our passions. Does the doctor love going into the hospital to see a patient in the middle of the night? Does the teacher love trying to control a classroom full of disrespectful children? Not likely. But the work is performed with a sense of purpose that 'love' doesn't capture. Commencement speakers would send more young people into the world likelier to be happy in their jobs if they talked about love as a consequence of meaningful work instead of as the motivation for it.

So, one relevant question is not just how we can feel passionate, but how we can feel fulfilled. We may have to make some carefully negotiated, analyzed choices, apart from the whims of passion, to fulfill our goals. Is this "settling"? It doesn't sound like it.

And, in the final analysis, we don't control the world. The world gives us what it will. We always settle for whatever we get. We have no other choice. Follow your passion, but your lover will die someday, you'll eventually have to retire from your brilliant career, and termites will eat your dream house. Whether it is now or in five hundred years is not the point. It will all eventually get away from us. The question of whether we ought to settle for it is not even posed.

In which case, the question is not about the ultimate and final outcome, but about all the little outcomes – passionate, rational, desired, compromised, loved, settled for – that constitute the journey. Jeanette Winterson wrote in her novel The PowerBook:

My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp, and tell stories until late at night of those great loves lost and won. The wilderness is not tamed. It waits – beautiful and terrible – beyond the reach of the campfire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man's pocket.

Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn't matter. The journey must be made.

Sources
Thomas Merton, quoted in Bookreporter.com, quoted in The Week, June 3, 2011. p. 19.
W. Somerset Maugham. Quoted in Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1986. p. 22.
Carl McCoy in the Wall Street Journal, quoted in The Week magazine, June 7, 2013, p. 12.
Jeanette Winterson. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001. pp. 78-79.

Image
"Ніжний ранковий світло" by Balkhovitin - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.