Dating : Stop Telling Me to Drop My Standards Just to Get a Man

And telling me to submit to a guy’s leadership? Prove you can bloody well lead first.

I write about online dating a lot, if for no other reason than it’s a constant source of hilarity. Take, for example, the note I got two days ago:

you are a beautiful women (not a typo)

From a guy whose profile photo featured a closeup of his Billy Bob ball cap and about two inches of forehead. That’s all. No face.

That’s actually an improvement over some. I’m not alone.

This comment just came in from Medium peep Victoria Mullen:

OMG OMG OMG!!! YES. Oh, the nostril shot. The hair in the nostrils. The displaying of fish or dead deer with the proud hunter, kneeling. Or decked out in leathers, straddling a motorcycle. Or leaning against a muscle car. Men in their 60s can be sooooooo disappointing.

Nailed it.

Since 1998, I’ve had some kind of profile online. I’ve changed my photos as I’ve changed (as opposed to having glamour shots, soft-focused fake representations and the like curated to present a me that doesn’t exist). My current Match.com profile features shots without makeup, dirty, disheveled and in the field doing what I love: adventure travel. Out of 26 photos, two are posed. One is at my last high school reunion, red dress, hair down, and makeup. After 46 years of bodybuilding, I have badass arms, a damned good figure. I still fill out a red dress in my later sixties.

That’s not a statement of superiority. It’s a statement of commitment to health. A strong body allows me to be in life at a high level. It allows me to study, to think, to work on the self, to challenge my crap, own my shit, and rise above what have been at times extraordinarily crappy circumstances, such as a serial rapist for an Army psychiatrist. A healthy body allows me to do the much more important work around character development. That’s part of a value set, not a nice-to-have. The discipline I’ve used to exercise regularly I have used to study, to finish two books, to deal with eating disorders. It doesn’t matter where you learn it. It matters if you can apply it.

Some folks allow horrible events turn them into lifelong victims. I didn’t. That takes Deep Work. Not everyone wants to do Deep Work. Those muscles are much more important than the ones I sport on my arms. The Deep Work muscles, which have given me the strength to belly laugh at the worst life has thrown at me, are what are going to make me good company long after what little I have left in the way of external attractiveness has gone by the wayside. That commitment is also part of a value set.

Would you rather have a partner that can continue to make you fall out of your chair laughing as you age, or a partner consumed by bitterness that she is no longer young and lithe? How about a partner who is still youthfully lithe AND makes you laugh? Working on it.

I am NOT interested in marriage. NOT in the market for a travel partner. NOT angling to be cared for, paid for, tamped down, reined in or controlled. NOT interested in trading large parts of who I have worked incredibly hard to become just to have a body in my bed.

If I’m that desperate for company in my bed, I’ll adopt a dog.

Otherwise I prefer to sleep alone with my Perfect Man, my teddy Gerry Bear.

I am not interested in wet nurse work or coddling a doddering greybeard who refused to take care of his health and his person, and who feels entitled to a pretty, sexy aid to change out his colostomy bag. If I had married that man, this would be a very different story. That was the commitment. I’m in search of an equal partner. At this stage, it’s even more critical that someone shares my fundamental value sets around balanced health.

Sound harsh? Look. I am done being told I should dump my standards just to have a man in my life. As if that is the sole purpose for a woman: to get a MAN. Will you kindly just please.

But that’s not all of it. I’m increasingly troubled, as other smart(er) Medium writers are, about all that helpful advice from male relationship coaches who wanna teach allus poor lonely gals how to get us’n a MAN.

I just found this remarkable sentence from an article by Coach Corey Wayne:

What an alpha female finds attractive in an alpha male, and how to make an alpha female submit to your leadership willingly and enthusiastically. (author bolded)

I find the use of the terms “make” and “submit” highly instructive. Shall we?

Make (in this context): compel (someone) to do something

Submit: accept or yield to a superior force or to the authority or will of another person. (author bolded)

Force isn’t just implied. It’s stated outright. And this is a relationship coach. He has plenty else to say but I consider this, as his introduction to the article, the definitive choice of terms.

Later in the same article he writes that the alpha female is beautiful, confident, successful, takes care of herself in all areas of her personal and professional life.

This sounds distressingly like the standards that certain white supremacists wrote about in tweets in preparation for the magnificently mindless Make Women Great Again conference.

All due respect to a male coach offering relationship advice about alpha females (who, clearly, HAVE to be beautiful, perpetually slim, can cook but can’t eat their own meatloaf and maintain their 24-inch waists while punching out multiple units), but the use of the term submit fires off every single warning bell in this writer’s watch tower. Of course a deeply-troubled and insecure man is going to demand submission. I’ve been forced to submit plenty of times, at enormous cost. Like billions of us worldwide.

Where does anyone get off demanding to be the leader when the lack of that very leadership is so magnificently on display by so many?

Want to see leadership right now in our conditions? Exhibit #1, New Zealand’s female prime minister Jacinda Ardern. Exhibit #2 Germany’s prime minister Angela Merkel. Exhibit #3 Oregon Governor Oregon Kate Brown. As opposed to our Pus-face who tells us to inject Lysol (be my guest, you moron). Leadership indeed.

Or for that matter, the God of Greed, Jeff Bezos, this decade’s Gordon Gekko.

Alpha women showing competence, intelligence, leadership, sanity, concern, sobriety, compassion, enormous strength.

Yet there are plenty of men who think such extraordinary women should submit to “better” men. Just what are the standards for better? The possession of a penis? This is what makes someone a leader? I might submit that this is the very appendage they trip over most of the time, not because it’s so big but because, of course, they lead with it.

Last night I found this article on Medium asking a perfectly legitimate question:

What a shame I can’t copy and paste every single email I got over the years from itty bitty penis heads demanding that I back off, slow down, rein in, who the hell do you think you are, how dare you…..in other words, submit to their superiority.

And guys wonder why they are single.

My experience of having men in my love life has been anything but a walk in the park. After a history of rapes, which goes a long way towards changing how you experience half the population, a lifetime of groping, grabbing, slimy behavior that has yet to abate even as I march inevitably towards 70, my opinion of Men-as-Partners has plummeted. And then there’s the last BF, to whom I gave ten years. I learned the hard way how good narcissists are at maintaining a Nice Guy veneer until they unleash on you in private, and demand that you give up what you love so that you can wait around forever just to give the BMOC* his blowjob.

Men as Friends? My closest ones I would take a bullet for, no questions asked. I’m ex-military. I mean that in the most literal sense. They mean the earth to me. That kind of loyalty doesn’t quite compute for too many of the men that lurk the online market, at least those who have reached out (or put more succinctly) grabbed at me. The ones who, given the courtesy of a first date, have shoved me up against my car like back-alley rapists.

Expecting me to “submit to their alpha male leadership.”

You cannot imagine how 22 years of online dating has undermined my faith in men’s honesty and decency. And yet I know good ones are out there, for they are my friends. They comment on my stories. They’re married to my buddies. Or to each other. I am regularly and vividly reminded that there are reasons to have hope.

Drop my standards. I’d rather French kiss a bulldog.

I love male company, crave it at times. I enjoy sex. In fact, enthusiastically. By definition that does not mean I HAVE to have a man, especially when it comes to orgasms.The number of men in my long, varied, and nearly-always single life who gave enough of a damn to figure out how to help bring me to (not GIVE me) orgasm I can count on the fingers of one hand. Less, in fact.

Not only does that speak to selfishness, impatience and ineptitude, it speaks to an horrendous lack of understanding of basic female anatomy. Most men I have shared my body with don’t have a clue, and still assume, in that breathtaking way that men worship their penises, that penile penetration will result in orgasm. As though they are owed that.

Sorry Skeezix. For most of us that ain’t happening. In case this got missed the first time I linked to it, please see:

My buddy expected me to give up my preference for men who share my values around being fit, athletics, the whole lot just to have a man. Any man, apparently. To sell off a fundamental value set for company.

Um, kindly, NO.

She prefers to be married. Has been for more than forty years. Last time she dated, Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Not what I wanted. Or want.

I am beyond being advised by people for whom their last date preceded the Crock Pot. The dating world is very different. Given our penchant for lying on our dating profiles (81% of us, as I’ve written elsewhere), these days those waters are fraught with far more than just potential scammers. People foolish enough to trust Tinder overseas can and do end up dead.

So yeah. It would be fair to say I am wary. It would be fair to say I am weary.

I do not find flab or flaccid bodies physically attractive. I am done having people try to change my mind. If anything, the older I get, the harder I work at being fit, the more dedicated I am to maintaining health, the higher a priority this is. As it should be. This is about being as fit as possible at any age, without being sucked into the youth obsession that pulls our brains out through our eyeballs. The kind of value set around fitness that demands that fitness supports development of the whole person.

Physical wellness drives a healthy mind, a healthy attitude, a respect for the life we’ve been given, a better shot at quality longevity, a host of factors. It supports the spiritual journey as much as the quest for a largely disease free-life.

The same friend who harangued me about my preferences is 66, as is her husband, who remains a dear friend. As they have aged, his bad eating habits have led to a slew of diseases, illnesses, physical ailments which have crippled him. While I absolutely respect others’ rights to choose Cheetos over Chinese cabbage, that’s not me.

The great guys among us, and there are plenty (not in my current dating life, however) understand that respect for them is earned, regard given based on consistent behavior. That the best of all women do not need to be made to submit. I might posit that they don’t want submission. They want partnership.

The person in full is one who balances each sphere of self-care. A healthy person radiates.There is a natural beauty that flows out of such people at any age.

And, like everyone else on this planet, I have preferences. Like a guy who prefers Brown women with short spikey hair with tats, a woman who likes her men squared off, solid and bald, I have preferences. Those are my Goddess- given RIGHT. As they are yours.

Just as I do not find extremely handsome men who are as shallow as a pig’s wallow attractive. That was the last BF. It’s about being a man in full. A human in full. With the lifetime of hard work that never ends as long as we draw breath. Where there are richly shared and important values that both of you can stand on when things inevitably get rough.

A Medium commenter once wrote me that a dating expert told him that older women, in her experience, “tended to overprice themselves” on the dating market.

I stuffed a sock in it so that I didn’t eviscerate Dear Reader with my first response.

Then I wrote this:

As you and I age, we gain value- if we work at it. We gain value if we put in the effort to push our boundaries on all aspects of the self, not just one sphere at the cost of all others. Like, character. Humor. Personal responsibility.

Healthy aging men are sexy as hell, as long as they also develop the balanced sphere of the self. Healthy aging women are sexy as hell, as long as they continually add value to the balanced sphere of the self.

I prefer, as is my right, men who are emotionally mature, athletic, self-reliant, have their own homes, lives, sources of joy and happiness, ways of being without being utterly dependent upon a mate, incomes, hobbies and fascinations, are deeply secure in themselves, vulnerable, have a wicked-ass sense of humor (which implies intelligence), understand the importance of giving back, and are well-traveled and still have great passions to sustain them.

Because that’s what I offer. And because I work hard on those things I genuinely enjoy my own company. Because I refuse to lower my standards.

*BMOC acronym for “big man on campus”. That is, a popular guy on a college campus.