Dating in Boulder EXCERPT
The very occasional time one of them ventures into scary, unknown territory, like inviting you to dinner and actually making some effort to converse, the instant he senses that you may be flawed in any way, that you do not perfectly match the every personality whim of his fantasy mate (oh, you like cats? I have a dog—see ya; Oh, you drink coffee? I only do chai—I’m outta here; Oh, I see you have brown eyes--I only like blue), or that you may actually have any needs or weaknesses (what, there’s hereditary illness in your family?—I am so outta here), he does the about-face and disappears. One astonishing fact is that it doesn’t matter if he hasn’t achieved perfect hair or financial security himself, is carrying a pesky extra ten pounds in spite of a disciplined exercise regimen, and has hereditary illness in his family, too—he’ll summarily reject you for the same flaws he unquestioningly accepts in himself. (Speed dating has made this process ever so much more effective.) Also unsettling is that passé is even the questionable nicety of the polite let-down phone call or end-of-date excuse, involving the white lie—no, he simply vanishes, and even has the gall to just look away if he sees you in town next week. It’s as if you ceased to exist—well, you did, for him, as soon as he decided you weren’t perfect. You were never really human, for him, in the first place—you were just an “applicant” who ended up failing his tests, a talking Barbie doll who scared him because she seemed to have a personality and—even scarier—some foibles. You are way more than he bargained for—or wanted--simply by virtue of being a real person.
But why? What has happened in society for men to have developed this strange fear and avoidance of normal dating, and of men’s traditional responsibilities and supposed human needs and desires (like being close and intimate with other human beings, especially women, their natural counterparts)? I suspect that this phenomenon is at least not wholly international; it seemed absent on a recent trip I took to Havana. When I explained the phenomenon to a Cuban male friend of mine, his jaw dropped, he salivated, and fervently cursed the political powers that be, because, Dios mío, the abundance of lonely women! He meant this in a much more okay (i.e., feminist) way than you’d think—he genuinely wished he could come to the U.S. immediately and, to hell with all those “stupid idiot American men,” satisfy all our needs--rather the way James Taylor advertised back when he sang “I’m your handyman.” He was crushed that governments were keeping him, incidentally, from females lacking attention.