The Man Store

See the guys in the photo above? If you could take all the best parts of them, and toss out the rest, you’d probably have the most perfect male being ever created. Smart, handsome, articulate, talented, sensitive, funny, um, (gulp) rich. (And don’t scream at me that I’m a gold digger! But may I ask what is wrong with being comforted by financial security?) Anyway, the reality is, there is no place where such a person is available for your selection. I think we all know at least one woman who hasn’t seemed to figure out that there is no man store. That magical place where single women can go, where the men of dreams wander around waiting to be swept off their feet. Just like anything else in life, you don’t always get exactly what you expected. Having it all your way is fine for certain things, burgers, cars, furniture. But not for PEOPLE.
We certainly expect to be accepted as we are, faults and all, so it’s difficult for me to find the end of my amazement when I meet a woman who wants to find her boyfriend at the Manstore. Really, I’ve just come to see this as a thinly veiled excuse to stay single, blowing off perfectly good guys for the stupidest of reasons. Usually by women who claim that they, “really want to find someone and settle down”. I’m forced to question if that’s really true. Because finding someone to settle down with is not a magical moment that occurs in the blink of an eye. It’s a slow transition between “you’re really great and I want to spend the majority of my time with you naked” to “you’re really great and I think I want to figure out a way to put up with the stuff about you that gets on my nerves”. I’m not sure what psychologists call this phase, but I think it should be called “holy shit I’m exhausted, we need to get dressed and start talking about what we want out of life”. I’m just not sure how women who are totally uncompromising and unwilling to tolerate even the slightest deviation from their perfect man list expect to ever get to the latter phase. And you have to, because that’s how you figure out if you want to be in it for the long haul.
If you don’t want to be in it for the long haul? Totally your decision and you can feel free to bitch away about the most trivial of inadequacies. Since no guy can last more then three weeks under such scrutiny, have some fun, and don’t worry about whether they completely fit the bill. You’ll be on to bitching about the next guy in no time anyway.