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Why Can't Women Find a 'Good Guy'?
By Julie Fairley
He's not my type. The date was boring. I didn't feel anything...
According to dating coach Evan Marc Katz, the list of reasons women give for never seeing a man again can get ridiculously long.
"I sent out an email to women to find out (for men) what guys were doing wrong on first dates" Katz says. "I thought I'd get a
list of a few things: the guy didn't pay, he was rude to the waiter, he didn't ask about her life. But they sent back 300 things!
I didn't even know there were 300 things I could do wrong on a first date. Ten, maybe. Not 300! Imagine how picky you have to be
to be able to name so many things that would make you not go on a second date."
"They (the women respondents) said things like, 'He shouldn't talk
in any other voice, even if he does the greatest Austin Powers impression in the whole world', 'He shouldn't tell her that nothing will stop
him from watching the big game', and, 'He shouldn't wear a brown belt and black shoes, or vice versa.' I tried this with men, and (between all of them) they only named a
few common things that wouldn't lead to a second date : 'she wasn't attractive enough, she wasn't stimulating enough, she wasn't warm.' "
Lisa Clampitt, a professional matchmaker,
says her male clients are often more open-minded than the women. If she asks a guy to consider moving his upper age limit from 30 to 35 he usually will. If she asks him to consider a woman a few
centimeters shorter or taller than his specified height range, he probably will. Not so the women, who usually won't budge on such preferences. "Men are less judgemental" Clampitt says. "Women have a lot of rules about who they'll date and who they won't. They usually can't get over their fixation with their (imaginary) 'ideal guy.' "
Behavioural economist Dan Airley studied more than 20,000 online daters and also found that women were pickier than men. The men didn't micro-analyse
dating prospects for income, education level, what kind of work they did, height or race to the degree women analysed men in those categories. Says Airley, "If the woman was above a certain threshold of
physical attractiveness and seemed warm, the guy was interested." Not so with the women, who appeared to be awarding cumulative 'penalty points' for any number of arbitrary transgressions from what they considered to be their 'ideal guy.'
So, why are women saying they can't find a good guy? David, a funny 29-year old University Professor, thinks the problem is that the good guys are out there, but women don't recognise them as the good guys. "A woman broke up with me because she didn't like the clothes I wore" he says, "but now she's madly chasing a guy who dresses well but doesn't call her."
Dan, a 32-year old colleague of David's laughs at this - he's been there before. "Women never want what's available", he says. "If they're not with the 'perfect' guy (who probably doesn't really exist anyway) by the time they're 30 they move on hoping to find someone better. But they don't learn from this. Five years on if they're still alone they keep getting even pickier (think 'cougars!') Then they're almost 40 and still alone and start to regret having broken up with us. But by then we've moved on and we aren't interested any more."
Kurt, who's 38 and engaged, says that's exactly what happened to him with his exes. "And those 'perfect' guys, if they do exist, [would] want to date maybe the top one per cent of 30 year old women. Every 30 year old woman I know thinks she is in that top one per cent, although statistically 99% of them can't be. All women want a 10, but are they all 10's?"
There are probably good evolutionary reasons why women are so picky, which made good sense in the past times when the number of available males to choose from was much smaller. Women have a lot more biological investment in making the best choice of mate than men do because there is a correspondingly greater biological investment in each child they produce. In the hunter gather days when a woman would maybe meet 100 eligible unmarried males in her lifetime at best, being picky so as to choose the best mate possible from amongst these limited options made perfect biological sense. Nowadays when there are potentially thousands of eligible bachelors whom a woman could meet in her lifetime, perhaps being so picky has become counter-productive? Women are literally spoilt for choice, holding out for their imaginary 'perfect guy' who 'must be out there somewhere', and consequently a growing proportion of women end up alone.
But there are also cultural factors that are relatively recent, that may be causing many women to undermine their biological imperative by being much too picky. Women these days tend to be well educated with good careers and have higher self esteem compared to previous generations. Nothing wrong with that. But is it possible that women today have correspondingly higher expectations of a "perfect man" than previous generations did, and that such high expectations are ultimately unrealistic given that men haven't necessarily improved that much in the last few decades?
If he's someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh and appreciates you, isn't that a good foundation on which to build a relationship? There are probably plenty of men who are a bit older than your ideal, a bit balder than your ideal and/or a bit more overweight than your ideal who have all the above qualities. Considering all men eventually end up getting older, balder and fatter anyway, isn't it worth broadening your horizons to consider finding happiness with such a man? It's either that or, for a growing number of women, be alone forever. Remember, there's probably no "perfect man" out there anyway (and even if there were he probably wouldn't be interested in you), so why not forgive that guy the brown belt and black shoes (or vice versa) he wore on the first date, and give him a chance at a second date. Which may lead to a third...and eventually maybe to wedding bells. And if you're looking for fidelity and longevity in a relationship consider this : Once you're happily married you may appreciate the fact that every other woman in town isn't chasing him because they can't see past his brown belt and his black shoes and his thinning hair to the really good guy he is.
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