Seriously, who gives out their number anymore?

I remember having a drunken bonding moment with a really cool guy in college a few years ago, and he asked for my number. I asked for his screen name instead. I mean, IM-ing someone is so much more casual, and so much less stressful. You don’t have to feel your heart thumping through your chest as the phone rings. Is he going to answer? Is it going to go to voicemail? Is he blocking me? What do I say if he picks up?

With IM, you can see if he’s away or idle, and choose your own adventure from there. You can leave a casual “Just wanted to say I had a great time last night” IM, rather than starting a phone call with the same line and then struggling to make small talk. Likewise, you can make small talk behind the shield of the IM window, where he can’t hear your voice crack, and where you can copy and paste the whole convo to all of your girlfriends and get advice while you try to weed out his intentions.

And then came Facebook. The social network has made quite the mark on the dating scene. There’s the poke, which can be viewed as casual, flirty, or creepy. There’s the “it’s complicated” label for the relationship you’re in (finally- you can be open about having a f*ck buddy without warding off the rest of the male population!); and of course, there’s the wall post, which makes the casual IM seem like the awkward phone call of yesteryear. Read More »

I used to have physical standards for guys. I really did. In fact, I would go as far as to say that I had a “type”. Every time a skinny, tattooed, gorgeous guy with dark hair came into a room…my friends knew to not even bother asking me what I was doing afterward. They already knew that the answer would be…well…HIM. I liked the fact that I could seemingly always get the gorgeous guy…or at least gorgeous to my own tastes.

But after three years of f*&king around with my own personal runway of boys that couldn’t offer me much more than unreliability; I started to get bored.

And since that time, I have legitimately at least SORT OF fallen for FOUR guys who I would have called ugly pre-boredom days. And while I won’t run off with the idea necessarily that they too were all unreliable assholes (even though they pretty much WERE), I will say that I was wrong.

I was wrong to justify my attractions to not-so-hot boys with my certainty that they redeemed themselves in other ways. Maybe Luke WAS brilliant. He could spell EVERYTHING right and his talent was jaw dropping. But that didn’t make him any more emotionally available to me. That didn’t make him NOT ignore me when we were out in public. And it certainly didn’t make him any more attractive during the mornings after. Read More »

I am crossing my fingers my boyfriend will never read this post, because I have a confession to make: I didn’t think he was hot the first time I saw him. Come to think of it, I didn’t think he was hot the second time I saw him, either. Or the third time. Or… well, you get the picture.

The point is, I think he’s hot now. But I’m not sure I would have come to that thought without the hours I’ve spent hanging out with him, laughing at his jokes and learning more about what makes him tick. Yeah, I think he’s good-looking, but that definitely wasn’t the first thing I noticed about him.

So I guess that means he’s grown on me. In fact, I’m positive he’s grown on me, because I didn’t even want to go out with him the first time he asked me. I didn’t have anything more than a mini-crush on him at the time, and he had to pester me almost nonstop for three days straight before I finally agreed to be his girlfriend, just to get rid of him.

Two and a half years later, you can see that strategy kind of backfired on me. Read More »

As if avoiding any sexual contact with my own co-workers wasn’t concern enough, now I’ve come to realize it’s best not to get freaky with anyone‘s co-worker.

Explanation:

My friend, I’ll call her “Alyssa”, works in finance. So obviously, all of her co-workers are hot men. She’s kept things platonic there since she’s smart and now these cute money-makers are her pals. This means we all hang out on a semi-regular bar-going basis, thus allowing male/female attraction to develop.

Now my roommate, “Kelly”, has had her eye on one of these fellows for a while, and the two of them have been flirting for months. So it was only a matter of time before they wound up in bed together.

I mean, I wasn’t surprised. But Alyssa, well, she was kind of pissed. Read More »

A few years ago, while working as a ski instructor up north at some unnamed resort, I made friends with an awesome guy.

A youth instructor like myself, we spent our days holding up languid 3-year-olds on the bunny slope and chasing screaming kindergarteners down larger hills, hoping against hope no one slammed into a tree in the process.

Being in a high stress (and FREEZING) situation supplied us with an instant bond, and we soon found ourselves skiing together during our free time and discussing our lives on chairlifts.

During out time together, it began to dawn on me that he was everything I had ever looked for in a guy: smart, funny, good with kids, active, gentle, and giving. He liked his parents, wrote music on his off time, and always waited for me whenever I fell into a giant snowdrift.

Basically, he was awesome. The only issue? I wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest.

He wasn’t ugly. It didn’t hurt to look him in the face or anything; he just wasn’t my type. Nothing about him made me jittery or full of butterflies, my heart never jumped when he walked into a room, and those long chairlift rides were never awkward with anticipation.

I didn’t fantasize once about kissing him. Read More »

My dad is not hot.

My best friend’s dad… well, that’s another story. Any of these dads… definitely doable.

But my dad… not at all.

Sucks for me because, according to a recent study, I’m more likely to date guys who are daddy look-a-likes.

The study found that women who had good childhood relationships with their fathers were often attracted to men who resembled their dear old daddies. The same did not go for women with bad father-daughter relationships.

And of course, I am the ultimate daddy’s girl. Grrreat. Read More »