Dooce has a blog entry on Relationship Dealbreakers with tons o'hilarious comments, and I bet some of your Disastrous Date Stories would fit right in. XD
Hee. There's some real winners there. There's also some people who obviously have bad associations with some perfectly innocuous traits and so are rejecting them like mad, but we all have our personal issues to deal with. (Rejecting someone because he tucks his T-shirts in? Come on! Once you're dating, you casually mention that untucked T-shirts are a sort of turn-on for you, and if he's got half a brain cell he'll never tuck one in when in your presence again. Problem solved!)
I suspect that a lot of what they think are deal-breakers are more guidelines in practice. I know there's traits that annoy the hell out of me in some people that I really don't mind in others, because there's other aspect of them that make up for it.
I've got one clear deal-breaker for me, though: in highschool, I was on the phone with a guy who was interested in me. At one point he said, in a way that was clear I was meant to take it as a compliment, "Man, you're smart and you can draw, too! That's more than a woman oughta have!"
Uh, yeah. And he didn't see what was wrong with that statement, too.
see, there are asshole comments-- that was one that he made-- that can be dealbreakers. not gonna argue that. but "he wears a gold chain" or "I don't like the way his pants hit his shoes"... shallow.
And the one who wrote "Someone who's IQ is more than I0 points below mine. I don't know what my IQ is, but my kids' have IQs over 150, so if genetics work, I'm holding my own." (it's comment #90)
No, actually, if you still fuck up who's/whose, you're not, in fact, a genius.
These people make me want to hit some of them. With a stick.
Not arguing with you on the pants-hit-his-shoes thing, but I suspect that what they're arguing against on the gold-chain thing is a cultural sterotype: the sterotype of a gold-chain-wearing man is straight out of the 70s if he's white, where he's an oily disco lounge lizard, and from the rap world of a playa if he's black. I think dooce's readership is primarily white, so it's mostly the oily lounge lizard with his gold chain and wide-lapeled shirt unbuttoned a few buttons that they're thinking of.
I think my only pre-set dealbreakers are men with politics radically opposed to mine, religious men who want to convert me, smelly men, boring men, men who are cheating on someone else with me, and men whom I, for whatever reason, do not find physically attractive.
(I am always surprised by the number of women who do not find that last to be a dealbreaker. If I didn't care about physical attraction, I would date women.)
However, men just keep giving me dealbreakers I'd never thought of before, like...
wears a shirt with a naked woman on it to a date
brags about accepting stolen money
tells me on a date that he wet the bed
(all three above were the same guy, btw)
highest ambition in life is to leap out of a plane without a parachute
wants to keep our relationship a secret
won't admit that we're in a relationship
idea of kissing can best be described as "a vacuum cleaner with teeth."
I think it depends what you mean by physical attraction - where are your standards? And for me, physical attraction comes third after intelligence and compatible sense of humor (NO PUN ADDICTS I HATE THOSE AND THEY INFEST FANDOM). And my standards for physical attraction also depend on the guy, but there's a few things I just can't deal with - bad teeth is the A#1 thing, extremely weak chin is another.
I had a dealbreaker a couple of years ago, although I was actually not looking and I think I was a decade odler than he was and significantly more socially savvy. But I had a guy attempt to chat me up in the manga section of a Barnes & Noble, completely missing the hints my monosyllabic replies and fixed stare on the shelves were attempting to send. And then I noticed ... he spent the entire time he was talking to me attempting to dig his pants out of his ass. I almost burst into laughter.
What I mean by physical attraction is that I think he's hot, and I want to touch him and kiss him. I don't actually have any set... set of physical traits that make me feel that way, though there's certainly physical attributes that generally turn me on or off. But I've been attracted to men who aren't my usual type, for sure, and not been attracted to men who were objectively very good-looking. Intelligence and sense of humor are turn-ons, but there has to be that subjective feeling of sexual attraction too. If intelligence and sense of humor was all it took, I'd be hitting on you. ;)
If intelligence and sense of humor was all it took, I'd be hitting on you. ;)
Then we must be star-crossed, unrequited, tragic lovers!
(I watched a kick flick starrign Jet Li not too long ago where the character of his mother disgused herself as a man to fight a neighboring fmaily's mother, who'd sworn to marry her daughter only to the person who could beat her, so that Jet Li could marry the daughter and of course the other mother fell in love with Jet Li's mother in disguise. And one of the best things they did with that was later on, when the other mother died of ... I don't remember, a wound or a random mysterious illness or something - by then she'd figured out that Jet Li's mother was really a woman, but still confessed her love anyway, and Jet Li's mother held her as she died and seriously promised that they'd meet again in their reincarnations. Too bad most of the rest of the movie was sort of dull.)
What I mean by physical attraction is that I think he's hot, and I want to touch him and kiss him.
After a few too many first dates with nice, funny men I would have loved to spend time with in any non-kissing context, I finally realized how important that is. It honestly takes more than an attractive personality to make me want to kiss someone, and I don't see the point in dating someone I don't want to kiss.
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I've got one clear deal-breaker for me, though: in highschool, I was on the phone with a guy who was interested in me. At one point he said, in a way that was clear I was meant to take it as a compliment, "Man, you're smart and you can draw, too! That's more than a woman oughta have!"
Uh, yeah. And he didn't see what was wrong with that statement, too.
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And the one who wrote "Someone who's IQ is more than I0 points below mine. I don't know what my IQ is, but my kids' have IQs over 150, so if genetics work, I'm holding my own." (it's comment #90)
No, actually, if you still fuck up who's/whose, you're not, in fact, a genius.
These people make me want to hit some of them. With a stick.
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"the odds are good, but the goods are odd."
strikes me, somehow.
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(I am always surprised by the number of women who do not find that last to be a dealbreaker. If I didn't care about physical attraction, I would date women.)
However, men just keep giving me dealbreakers I'd never thought of before, like...
wears a shirt with a naked woman on it to a date
brags about accepting stolen money
tells me on a date that he wet the bed
(all three above were the same guy, btw)
highest ambition in life is to leap out of a plane without a parachute
wants to keep our relationship a secret
won't admit that we're in a relationship
idea of kissing can best be described as "a vacuum cleaner with teeth."
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I had a dealbreaker a couple of years ago, although I was actually not looking and I think I was a decade odler than he was and significantly more socially savvy. But I had a guy attempt to chat me up in the manga section of a Barnes & Noble, completely missing the hints my monosyllabic replies and fixed stare on the shelves were attempting to send. And then I noticed ... he spent the entire time he was talking to me attempting to dig his pants out of his ass. I almost burst into laughter.
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Then we must be star-crossed, unrequited, tragic lovers!
(I watched a kick flick starrign Jet Li not too long ago where the character of his mother disgused herself as a man to fight a neighboring fmaily's mother, who'd sworn to marry her daughter only to the person who could beat her, so that Jet Li could marry the daughter and of course the other mother fell in love with Jet Li's mother in disguise. And one of the best things they did with that was later on, when the other mother died of ... I don't remember, a wound or a random mysterious illness or something - by then she'd figured out that Jet Li's mother was really a woman, but still confessed her love anyway, and Jet Li's mother held her as she died and seriously promised that they'd meet again in their reincarnations. Too bad most of the rest of the movie was sort of dull.)
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After a few too many first dates with nice, funny men I would have loved to spend time with in any non-kissing context, I finally realized how important that is. It honestly takes more than an attractive personality to make me want to kiss someone, and I don't see the point in dating someone I don't want to kiss.