I am a 35-year-old Seattle-dwelling male who has been horribly single for 13 years.
This is an incredibly soul-crushing thing to endure. My very well-meaning friends have thrown a ton of advice my way, much of which I have followed, and followed to failure, but the most common thing I have been told is this:
“Mr. Seattle, your standards are just too high!”
I hear this over and over and over. “You just like girls that are too pretty! You’re too picky! Lower your standards!”. What baffles me is no one seems to realize just how absurd this advice is. Lets word it more directly:
“Be attracted to people you’re not attracted to!”
Seriously? That’s the advice I’m getting? It’s regoddamneddiculous. No one in their right mind does this, and no one who follows that kind of advice is going to wind up in a happy relationship. Physical attraction is part and parcel of a relationship. It gets people together so that they can then develop a more personality-based relationship, and both of those elements combined are what result in a real, genuine, healthy relationship. To dismiss the physical aspect entirely is both stupid and insulting, and pretending it’s not an issue doesn’t work anyway.
So here I am, constantly told I’m too picky, that my standards are too high. I’ve been hearing this for over a decade. After awhile, I began wondering, just what is wrong with me? Am I broken? Have I been manipulated by television and magazines and the internet to desire a physical standard I cannot obtain?
I really started to believe this. I look around and I see other men that come here and after complaining for awhile, finally give up and chase after women they are not attracted to because, lets face it, after a long enough period of time most men will stick their dick in just about anything. I am not one of these men.
Again I wonder: am I broken?
I just got back from a week-long business trip to Melbourne, Australia, and that was a real eye-opener.
The first thing I noticed was that there were a tremendous number of women my age that I found immediately desirable. Well, okay, sure, there are pretty people all over the place. But after a few days I noticed that they smiled at me. They were friendly. Wait! No! They’re flirting with me! It’s such a rare thing that it took me three whole days to actually notice it, and then I really began paying attention to the people around me.
Have you ever heard the phrase “She’s pretty. Well, she’s Seattle pretty.”? I dismissed this as typical male jerkery, but now I find out it’s not even an exaggeration.
I am Average Attractive. I’m not Mr. Super Handsome, and I’m not Ugly. I’m Average Attractive. In general, men who are Average Attractive are attracted to women who are also Average Attractive. Normally this works out just great. Very Attractive women tend to go for Very Attractive Men. Average Attractive women go for Average Attractive men, like me! And herein lies the problem:
Seattle has a disturbingly low number of Average Attractive women. The fallout from this, combined with Seattle culture, has been disastrous.
The typically small number of Very Attractive women is even lower in Seattle, and the number of Average Attractive women is so low that they got bumped up a notch on the Men They Can Chase After scale. This has seriously depleted the pool of single Average Attractive women, and this then pulls up the Not So Attractive women into the slots normally reserved for those who are Average Attractive.
The Average Attractive women now consider themselves Really Pretty, and because of the vacancy they left behind, the Not So Attractive women now consider themselves to be Average Attractive. I have been in conversations where I watch the Not So Attractive women constantly tell each other how pretty they actually are. “Oh, she’s so pretty!” they’ll say, and I’ll be silently sitting there thinking “what the fuck are you talking about?”. “She’s so beautiful” they claim to each other, and they start to believe it. What’s worse, they now expect Average Attractive men to be genuinely interested in this huge group of Not So Attractive women, and they will be insulted if you’re not.
“What’s wrong with you??”, they cry. “She’s pretty! Your standards are too high!”.
No. My standards are not too high. My standards are smack dab in the middle of where they should be. I am a Decently Intelligent, Fairly Interesting, Average Attractive male and I am drawn to women who fall in this category. Don’t point at some dumpy, mildly intelligent, kind of interesting woman who I am not drawn to in the slightest and then get all insulted because I don’t immediately fall into worship at her feet.
This is what finally getting out of Seattle for a bit has shown me: I am not Broken.
On my walk back home from grocery shopping (just a few blocks) I saw five, five couples consisting of an Average Attractive man with a Not So Attractive to Downright Ugly woman. The woman, without fail, has a visible Attitude and the man just looks unhappy. There’s this gleam of desperation in their eyes and I now understand it’s because they bought into the “your standards are too high” lie. They know something’s wrong, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. Well I can point to the problem, and it’s walking right next to you with that smug expression and sense of self-entitlement.
(Missoula, Montana has a different problem: it’s a small university town, which is great if you’re a young college student (I actually had girlfriends back then), but when you hit 26+, if you’re not Very Attractive, you’re fighting some really bad odds.)
The lack of a proper number of Average Attractive women in Seattle has completely skewed the man/woman dynamics, throwing it completely out of whack, and our sense of political correctness has led this city to declare that the light bulb isn’t broken, dark is actually light!
For the Average Attractive man, the Seattle dating scene is fucked.
