What're You Looking For?

I don’t understand how you can complain about finding the right one but you are on the way to the club.  Do you really think you are going to find the right one at the club?  Go to the supermarket, church, PTA meetings, or anything that is respectable.  If you go where positive people lurk, you are bound to find it.  Yes, I said supermarket.  At least you know they can cook and not gonna feed you fast food everyday.  Church, because at least they are trying to better themselves.  PTA meetings because they care about their kids’ future.  Go to the right damn places.  You ain’t gonna find shit in the club.  That is all.

~Twitter rant from @CutzDaGod

When I saw this show up in my Twitter feed, I busted out laughing.  He is right, but then he is wrong in so many ways.  He is right that a woman should surround herself with positive people in the hopes that she may meet a positive man.  Yes, you can find a man at a club, but that’s a little bit like bargain shopping.  You can also find a man at a supermarket (LOL), church, a PTA meeting and the dumpster in your apartment building.  You can find a man anywhere.  My biggest problem with @CutzDaGod’s statement is that a woman has to find a man.

Desperate, lonely women everywhere are on the hunt for men.  You see, ladies, the problem is that you are looking.  Stop looking for a man.  Start looking for yourself.  Women who say they cannot find a man are going about it all wrong.  I believe that a woman has to find, know and love herself before she can find, know and love a man, and for him to love her back.

I am not going to pretend that I am some kind of love doctor.  I am not happily married.  I am not even in a relationship, and haven’t been in one for a very long time.  I wish I had a beau just like all other single women out there, but I have to laugh at a mental image of me running up and down the aisles of a supermarket looking for a man.  I had this daydream that I was in Safeway going up to random men.  “Will you be my boyfriend?”  One guy says no because he is already married.  Another man says no because he is gay.  A third guy says hell no because he doesn’t find me attractive.  In my daydream, I got upset that I could not find a man.  I found three of them, but none of them were for me.

I tweeted back to CutzDaGod and asked him if it would be okay for me to go to a PTA meeting to look for a man even though I do not have children.  I am not a Christian and I do not often go to church, but I was thinking about going to one to find a man.  Would this be acceptable?  This is all just laughable:  the very idea of me crawling through the pews at church, scoping out single men.  I will have found many but who is to say that any of these men are compatible?  That any of them will even be attracted to me?  That any of them might be The One (whatever that is)?

That is the problem with “finding a man.”

I have a friend who trolls dating websites looking for a man.  She has found many men but not the one she’s looking for.  Thankfully, none of them have been psychopaths, but many of them are losers who don’t appreciate her for her worth.  Yet, she continues looking for a man on these sites anyway.  I have another friend who frequents happy hours.  She goes to a different happy hour every night of the week all over the city, looking for a man.  She gives her phone number to anybody that asks.  Also thankfully that she hasn’t given her phone number to any serial killers, but she has found many married men, men already in multiple relationships, men who just want sex and men who are not sure what they want.  She complains all the time that she cannot find a man.  I say to her, “But look at all these guys!  There’s so many.”  But none of them are what she’s looking for.

Both my friends are nice women with decent jobs.  They are attractive.  We all have our problems, but they don’t have deep-rooted issues that would scare anybody away.  Yet, even though they go out on plenty of dates and have an iPhone full of phone numbers, they cannot find a man.  I want to tell them that a man isn’t what they should be looking for, but I know they may not understand what I’m saying, or they may not care, coming from a woman who is just as single as they are.

For my own part, I know that I will not be single forever.  One of these days I’m going to meet somebody truly special, and it’s not going to be because I was searching and hunting, like I’m looking for a bargain at a K-Mart.  The few women that I do know that are married or have stable relationships don’t say, “Girl, I found my man at Wal-Mart!”  They tell me interesting stories about how they met, or how they got together after knowing each other years, or some such.  None of them say anything about, “Well, I was trolling the aisles at Giant and I found him hiding in the meat section!”

Eventually, it’s gonna happen.  It’s hard to be patient.  It’s hard to not look so desperate.  It’s hard to not feel jealous at other women’s happiness, but none of these things is going to put you in a real relationship.  Stop looking for a man because everyday you find one, but then you say that’s not what you’re looking for.  Then you can say, “Well, I’m looking for one that is 6 feet tall with muscles, a college degree, his own house…etc” and this laundry list of qualifications, making it even more impossible to find what you want.

And anyway, why are we looking for them?  Why are they not looking for us?  Ever thought about that?