The Girlfriend Experience? Yeah, We Offer That Here

by Alicia Costa

“I think that dating is awful. I just don’t understand people that can go out with someone and be so relaxed about it.” –Natalia, Girls

I’ve been dating for about a year and a half. This was after a substantial hiatus of over five years where I did a lot of work on myself. All the while I silently snickered at the articles I’d read about women in their 20s and 30s online dating and having a terrible go of it. Oh the horror stories! I’d sit there behind my computer screen stroking my cat on my lap and smirk away. I’d think to myself, “That won’t be me! I am a catch! I have my shit together! When I am ready to dabble in online dating I will pick good and sensible men and not get jerked around!” No really. I really thought I’d sign up for a online dating site, meet like three guys, and one of those guys would fall for my adorable good looks and charm and that would be it. Bam. Consider me off the market boys.

Ha.

I’ve met a handful of men (I’m picky and you have to weed through A LOT of crap to find any decent guys. LIKE A LOT) and overall I’ve been pleased. They have been charming, good looking, educated, have jobs, have dreams, don’t live with their parents, and are genuinely nice humans. And they love their mothers and sisters (my mother always told me to judge a man based on how he treats his mother and sisters). But they all seemed to enjoy, what I have dubbed “The Girlfriend Experience”, in that they want to skip over the actually dating part right to the sweatpants and sex.

I am not a fancy gal. I’m not interested in being wined and dined by someone I barely know. All of these men I’ve met for a quick coffee and let it progress from there. Which usually brought us to my apartment. And I’ve had a really nice time entertaining a few of these gentlemen.

The evenings usually consisted of sharing a bottle of wine on the couch, some good conversation, and heavy petting. And while I am not one to shy away from casual sex it really isn’t what I am looking for at this point in my life. I need something more. Don’t get me wrong: I love comfy pants, wine, and sex. But didn’t we skip a part? Like the part where we get kicked out a poetry reading for making out and groping each other? Or having sushi and going for a walk along the ocean? Or exchanging dirty texts at 3 a.m. on Saturday night?

And after this happened to me a few times with a few different guys I named this behavior “The Girlfriend Experience.” After a while you start to feel like the girlfriend they have been with for a couple of years who they come home to, unload their day on, drink beer with, and give a quick bang to. Then you don’t hear from them for a week or more until they are lonely and want something comfortable to slip back into.

A good friend of mine calls this the “Comfy Sweat Pant” (where a guy treats you like a old pair of sweatpants they can throw on and veg out in). So how did we skip all the fun and get right to the part where you text me daily updates about your car repair and hectic work schedule after we’ve hung out twice? Or tell me you have “mild managed depression” yet have a bathroom full of anti-psychotics and only call me when you need someone to listen to your disturbed ramblings?

Now I am not trying to make this sound unpleasant. Like I said I’ve had nice experience with a few guys where the wine/couch/conversation/hot making out was a very enjoyable experience. However, this would lead any lady to the place where she also feels comfortable to expose herself to him by telling him how she constantly gets herself stuck in/between things because she often misjudges just how much room her voluptuousness actually requires.

Now if a lady is telling you one of the their secret shames then she is comfortable with you. Comfortable enough to text you something like, “Hey man I think you’re rad, I like spending time with you, and let’s get naked again soon.”

To which I believe the guy reacts like this:

Whoa now, crazy lady. What did you think was going on here?
Read more

Posted on April 7, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, My Reality 2 Comments

Cuddling Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Does… Apparently

by Jasmine Peterson

Dating – it’s exhausting.

At first I thought it was fun (being new to the dating scene, and never having really done the dating thing in my younger years), but as time has gone on, I’ve discovered that it can be really, really exhausting.

I’m a pretty open and honest person. I’ve put a lot of myself out into the ether of the internet (from discovering myself to be polyamorous to the health repercussions of my breakup and consequent brief personal meltdown). So when I’m dating, I’ve got no qualms about being honest about my intentions, my feelings, and my desires. And because I’m such an honest person, an open book really, I often expect that others will be the same. I’ve discovered that this is just me projecting my own qualities onto others; they are not always coming from the same place of transparency as I am.

How much easier would dating be if we could all just be honest about our intentions? I’ve met a few men who were pretty upfront about exactly what they were looking for – whether it was to settle down into a relationship or strictly a relationship of a sexual nature – and it made knowing how to proceed so much easier. What I want keeps changing, it seems, but I articulate it as I go to ensure that any man I am seeing knows that. I’m a work in progress, and I can understand that what someone else wants might also change, so I like to keep the conversation open and evolving to accommodate that.

But what I’ve found to most often be the case is that men are reticent to admit to wanting to have sexual relations, as though admitting that is somehow going to result in some catastrophic implosion of the dating universe. At first, I found this baffling.

“Do you want to cuddle?” a guy would say.

And if I didn’t, I would say no. But some nights, I really did want to cuddle and would accept the offer. Little did I know, “cuddle” is apparently a code word for sex. Because every single time a guy would come over to “cuddle”, he would start making sexual advances. Read more

Posted on October 28, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 11 Comments

Don’t Blame Science if Your Women Friends Don’t Want You

by Christopher Lewarne. Christopher is a New York lawyer-in-training, waning French Master’s student, general afficionado of truth, reason, and common sense. Lawyer by trade, advocate by passion.

An Article published in Scientific American this week demystified a commonly held colloquialism – Rachel and Ross knew it, Monica and Chandler certainly knew it (ok, Phoebe and Joey didn’t know it, but they were kinda clueless): men and women can’t be “just F•R•I•E•N•D•S“.

The article, according prolific feminist blogger Elizabeth Plank, was “hilariously accurate.” She quotes the study:

“Men were more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.”

While the merits of the study have been questioned because of its small sample size, what’s interesting is what motivated the study in the first place – the need to ask the question at all. I think most of us intuitively feel that we can maintain platonic friendships with members of the opposite sex, even – gasp! – the attractive ones. But the need to ask if men and women can be “Just Friends” comes from a particular heteronormative discourse about male vs. female sexuality. It’s a discourse that’s conjured (or maybe revealed) by the reactions elicited by the study. What followed the Scientic American article initially were the suspected remarks by the usual suspects: men making evolutionary and biological arguments to justify their skewed sexual egoism. Read more

Posted on October 27, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment

For Girls who Wear Glasses

I was in Grade 10 when I decided to ask out a guy from English class.

He was tall, dark, and as close to handsome as you got in the group of band geeks I hung out with. So one day when we were waiting for the bell to end class, I approached him and said, “I was just wondering if you wanted to go to a movie sometime.”

He turned to look behind him, then turned back and with eyes wide, asked, “Me?”

“Yeah?” I said, suddenly less sure of my plan.

“Um….um….” he stalled, opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

“Oh. You can think about it and tell me later,” I said, my heart sinking. He looked hugely relieved.

“Ok, cool,” he said. Just then, the bell rang and he literally turned tail and sprinted down the hall to get away from me.

Just in case I hadn’t got the message, he ran away from me after each class for the next month.

When I came home crying and asked my mom why boys didn’t like me, she said, “Boys are just intimidated by your intelligence.” Of course, being 14, my immediate reaction was to wish to God that I wasn’t smart. If she’d said it was because of my clothes, that could’ve been fixed, but I couldn’t not be smart! I was sure I was going to be alone forever.

And I wasn’t the only one hearing the message. “My grandma used to say, ‘Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,’” recalled one friend.

Another remembered seeing a matchmaker who told her she was an “extremely difficult case…because [she's] so successful at such a young age.”

The smart girl myth is perpetuated in pop culture and fashion. A few years ago Abercrombie and Fitch were forced to pull a line of shirts with slogans like “With These, Who Needs Brains?” (written across the chest).

And online dating coaches like Evan Mark Katz keep doling out advice like this:

This doesn’t mean you should play dumb…It might mean, however, turning off some of the things that make you “successful” at work. This is a bitter pill to swallow…Still, it doesn’t change the fact that “hard-driving, opinionated, and meticulous” are not on most men’s lists of ideal feminine traits.

This is me intimidating men, apparently

But Christine Whelan, author of Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women found that women with graduate degrees or top salaries were more likely to marry than others. And even if the myth were true, why would a smart woman want to date someone who wanted them to be stupid?

So what do you do when you’re bombarded with messages that say you have to be dumb to get a date, and you have to get a date or else?

Guardian columnist Barbara Ellen’s advice is to “enjoy being fab and brilliant, hold out for the guys who’ll appreciate it and tell the ‘lower 2 percentile’ that, sadly, you never mastered the international language of Thick.”

And in my favourite response, John Green agrees, stating: “The venn diagram of guys who don’t like smart girls and guys you don’t want to date is a circle”:

So, girls with glasses, stay strong, and stay smart.

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment