Alright, first of all,
I’ll come right out with it. You already
know I consider “just be yourself” to be perhaps the most dangerous and
certainly the most generic bit of attraction advice I’ve ever heard.
And with that bit of
housekeeping behind us, I’m going to suggest that you instead avoid trying to be
someone you are not.
At first glance, I’m sure
that comes off as simply a semantic variation upon the same worn out “just be
yourself” cliché. Kind of like the
“mirror image” of it or something.
And were it such, it
would be a throwaway. I
agree.
Except there’s this issue
that keeps nagging away at me. As much
as I want to change things, “stop trying to be someone you are not” is
absolutely the most elegant possible utterance of an undeniable truth. A truth that many of us willingly and
defiantly ignore.
And that’s keeping us
from greatness with the opposite gender.
So, in the interest of
getting your attention, today I’m going to illustrate what this truism entails
in a way you may have not heard before.
After all, it’s typical of dating advice clichés that they be delivered
in a decidedly “hit and run” manner.
Elaboration in any shape or form is practically unheard of.
Consider this example:
Person A: “I just met someone great, but not my type at
all.”
Person B: “Well, you can’t choose who you fall in love
with.”
Person A: “What does that mean?”
Person B: “You know…you can’t choose who you fall in
love with.”
Person A: “How do you know that?
Person B: [changes subject to the Red Sox and/or Kobe
Bryant]
Conveniently, “Person A”
above has provided me with just the segue I need to stay
on-task.
This whole business of
what “type” we like. We talk about that
a lot, huh? But have you ever stopped to
consider what “type” YOU are?
And here’s an even deeper
question: Are you YOUR OWN TYPE? If you’ve ever found time to ruminate upon
this subject, then you may have some idea of how you tend to be categorized by
MOTOS (Members Of The Opposite Sex). And
here’s the money question: Are you okay
with that?
See, it’s like this. Most of us, unless we’ve signed an NBA
contract and are penciled in for a future episode of MTV “Cribs”, probably have
one car. In order to get that car (or is
it a truck?), you went shopping. My
guess is that you knew up front whether you were going after a four wheel drive
SUV or a 2-seater sports car. Yeah,
maybe in real life it was a minivan or an econobox, but for the sake of decorum
here lets stay on point here.
If you need an SUV, the
2-seater won’t cut it. But if you want
the wind in your hair and autocross trophies, a foot and a half of ground
clearance and a tailgate is not the hot setup.
So if you are SUV
hunting, you’ve got lots of options.
Most of us in that position would rather land a Hummer H2 in our garage
than a Kia Sportage or a Jeep Compass (which I wouldn’t personally wish upon
anyone).
Sports car guy? It’s the Porsche GT3 over that new Saturn
lawn-mower wannabee. (Does that thing
even take real gasoline?) But the
Ferrari F50…yeah, well. That’s what I
call “never settling”.
Many options of varying
degrees of quality—all easily categorized under their appropriate
“type”.
I once saw a Hummer
commercial that exhorted me to “Experience The H2”. Poetically, all that is entailed with
piloting a Ferrari was long ago coined “The Italian
Experience”.
So which “Experience” are
you?
Some great women are what
I call the “Redhead Experience”. Others
are the “Exotic Experience”. Still
others the “Girl Next Door Experience”.
Some are the “Tomboy Experience”.
The list goes on.
Some guys are the “Clean
Cut Jock Experience”. Others are the
“Artistic Poet Experience”. Some are the
“Executive Experience”.
Etcetera.
Where the rubber meets
the road here there’s an ironic truth.
We can CHOOSE which type we LIKE when it comes to MOTOS. If that’s related to sports cars, we can also
then go out and DESERVE the F50 over the ’91 Mercury Capri (Ha…remember those?).
But when it comes to
ourselves, let’s face it…there’s a “type” that we almost always fall naturally
into. That’s how others “experience” us
as individuals.
And we aren’t always our
own “type”. So we try to change the
“experience”. And that can
backfire.
Emily happened to flip
the channels a couple of months ago while cooking dinner. From the other room, all I heard was “OMG…why
is this kid wearing BLACK NAIL POLISH?”
That’s was pretty much my introduction to “The Pickup Artist” on
VH-1.
Indeed. The “kid” should have thought twice about the
black nail polish. Not his
“experience”. Then again, were I to try
and dress up like Sean Connery’s James Bond later tonight, I’d probably more
likely be assumed to be going as Alex Keaton from “Family Ties”.
It’s all about the
“experience”.
Ladies, tell the media to
“stick it” and avoid the “Blonde Experience” or the “Supermodel Experience” if
you are the “Brown Eyed Girl Next Door Experience”. Trust us when we as guys tell you (or at
least a solid percentage of guys tell you) that we’re fine with your “type”…even
if YOU AREN’T.
Yeah, we may kick tires
on SUVs, sports cars and maybe even a three-quarter ton pickup truck when the
mood strikes us. But ultimately, after
all the test drives, we’re only going to be parking one such shiny object in our
respective garages.
Who knows, we may have
been somewhat drawn to the “Blonde Experience” or the “Supermodel Experience” at
first. But maybe her tank always seemed
to be on “E”, or we read a consumer report that told us the electrical systems
tended to fritz out.
But I’ll tell you, when we meet the “Brown Eyed Girl Next Door
Experience” in her ultimate iteration, that could stop us dead in our
tracks. You know, she’s the one who
DESERVES WHAT SHE WANTS. At that point,
all of us who are shopping on that lot will know we’re dealing with the Ferrarri
F-40 of her type, instead of the Mercuri Capri with the Earl Scheib paint
job.
Meanwhile, I’ll be over
here…at peace with the fact that I can’t fake “Cary Grant”, but that plenty of
women (including “Brown Eyed Girl Next Door Experience”, F-40 such that she is
over in the next room) are all about The “Alex Keaton Experience”. So, I’m cool with that. I stopped fighting what I can’t control years
ago in favor of being the best damn version of my “type” possible instead of a
poor man’s version of some other guy.
Perhaps not
coincidentally, I always loved how a four-door Audi RS4 (read: “station wagon”)
can smoke a Corvette. Whatever your
“experience”, go with it instead of fighting it. Then become the ultimate version of
it.
Just somebody get my
Mother-In-Law to stop pinching my cheeks, will you?
