Is Being Picky a Good Thing or Are We All Just Giant Assholes?
LatestI know a lady who cannot, under any circumstances, be with a dude who doesn’t have straight teeth. She just can’t get into that, and the flipbook of her dating past is a parade of guys who all fit the profile: gleamingly straight chompers with nary an errant angle. I’ve lovingly mocked her many times for being too picky, because WTF? But I’ve often wondered: Are we entitled to our picky preferences, which are perfectly normal — even a good thing — or are we all just shallow, entitled jerks who need to loosen up?
In an XOJane post titled “I’ve Been On Way Too Many Dates and It’s Because I Won’t Settle,” the author lays out some of her dealbreakers for dating a dude — can’t be bald, must be settled in a career, can’t live in the suburbs — all within the neatly framed caveat that she wants to find a guy just like her dad, but she’s pretty sure that type of guy doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s not a newsflash that women are typically presented as being pickier than men, or that when they are, it’s to their detriment, mainly because our preferences for mates are always framed as if every choice is a path to the altar.
But whether it’s a study indicating that women are pickier about one-night stands, or a piece arguing that women who are still single are most likely to be in the possession of an itemized laundry list of preferences ruling out most men in the general vicinity, in the vast, dicey history that is How Men Are vs. How Women Are, pickiness is our very specifically designed cross to bear.
The alleged explanation is as old as the cobwebs on a single lady’s Hope Chest: Evolutionarily speaking, it pays for women to be choosy. The uterus is a picky little nest, and it wants only the best genetic setup for its offspring with the most likely to stick around semen-provider in the tribe, whereas men are happy to just pump out little replicas, regardless of how crooked those teeth may be.
But duh, men and women are both picky. Need recent proof? This NY Mag sex issue piece on dating.
You might say, so what? Every romantic choice is not a precursor to forever. Choosing a love interest is not an act of charity. In the course of an average life, I think it’s perfectly defensible to like what you like and not have to spend enormous energy parsing it. Who does it hurt? What do you lose, liking what you like and not liking what you don’t? A “connection” is a “connection” — a mystical thing we can’t really explain. Attraction is irrational.
Still, who doesn’t know someone, male or female, who seems “too picky”? The guy who won’t date anyone with small boobs, the girl who only likes super beefy lovers. The person who can’t date someone with a Yahoo email address. Pickiness is fine to a point, it seems, but if it prevents you from meeting new people or giving someone a chance who might be a great friend or mate, all because of some shallow physical attribute or cultural misstep, doesn’t that make you a big asshole? Pickiness is ultimately judginess, and we say that judginess is a bad thing.
Whenever I start going down this road of thinking, it always dead-ends at “types.” Having a type is having a very specific set of preferences that manifest in one specific way. You like men who are tall and athletic. You’re interested in girls who are petite with long dark hair. I once dated a guy who talked openly — and at length — about how much he liked girls who were “club kids.” (The ’90s, you guys.) And they had to be short, and petite, and basically look like this. Needless to say, we didn’t last.