Well we’ve reached the point in the year where I watch rom coms in the same loungewear for approx. 6 days in a row. Ten minutes into The Holiday and I was reminded why I love it so much: the deep recognition of how truly awful (albeit exhilarating) unrequited love is. You love it, you hate it, you end up crying about it on the subway. And in the bar. Also in the street. In the dressing room at TopShop...you know the drill. It’s enough to make you want to escape to an adorable cottage in the english countryside, replete with a judgmental terrier and mini cooper.
It’s this trash feeling that led me to date online, which led to it’s own adventures in misery. And joy, which may be another post (oh who am I kidding, the misery might be one, too).
All of this leads me to the most recent #datingtruth I’ve come across, courtesy of Ask Polly. Particularly this part:
What if you don’t have to improve anymore? What if there is no way of measuring where you stand relative to other women? What if you’re beautiful and also a little ugly, gorgeous to some and monstrous to others? What if you are incredible and also scary, exciting and sexy and also a little bit too intense to tolerate? Because you are. We all are. And the guys who want more mystery, who want more quiet, who want a better body, who want more suspenseful waiting time between texts? Those guys can go chase one of a million self-made shadows, shiny ghosts that are always disappearing around the next corner, harpies who shriek in eerie minor chords that make every threatened, mystery-addicted dick for five square miles grow rock hard in milliseconds.
We don’t want those dicks.
We want to be complex and concrete and unnervingly real instead. We want to be monstrous and glorious and openhearted and deeply wrong. We are not publicists, and we don’t need to hire them, because we are not looking to draw in as many clients as possible, into the theater/the bookstore/the auditorium/our beds/our lives. We are not looking for the best possible human male specimen that we can find, one that matches our advanced degrees and our amazing jobs and our salt-of-the-earth friends. We are just looking for someone who makes us laugh and sees us clearly.
When someone sees you clearly, PR, you won’t think of how many standard deviations you are from the norm. You won’t consider where your face falls on an objective numerical scale of beauty, if such a thing has ever existed. You will be sparkling and lit from within. You will have way too much to say and you will say it all, and he will ask you to say even more, drunk on your scary, idiotic, gorgeous, brilliant words and your delicious, unreal, elastic body.
That is the magic you seek. It’s a sloppy kind of magic, one that does not require strenuous self-improvement. So: Do not refine your product-testing procedures. Do not edit and clarify your questionnaire. Do not sharpen the core message at the heart of your brand. Admit that you are a little odd (in ways that are neither adorable nor “quirky”). You will always care too much, and that’s not attractive to most people, because most people are really fucking weak and frightened. But seriously? Fuck them. Stop looking for hot, frightened guys because you think you’re scary, because you think you require another gold star, because you love an impossible challenge.
So I’m gonna (try to) go into my 30′s with that in mind: no refining, no manipulating myself. No reframing or hiding. Just me.
And, hopefully, an adorable cottage in the British countryside...and maybe a terrier or two.
romaincrisis
amandla
kianamaiart
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