Out of the fire and back to normal, that’s how I’m feeling right now about the world of dating and mating.
Every so often, I decide to try for a real social life, one involving a person or people other than my family and circle of friends.
This usually requires some new clothes and a fair amount of psyching out. Hope reigning eternal, I figure with each passing decade, the men my age will change and their values will shift from whatever they were when we were in our thirties to a more mature perspective now that we are in our fifties and sixties.
Not.
Psychologists and entrepreneurs can try their best to quantify compatibility, and more power to them.
The tests and analyses probably work very well for people who meet the minimum criteria for that old devil bugaboo, physical attractiveness. For the rest of us, though, it’s unrealistic to think “there is one man for every woman” and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
Not, again.
Helena Rubinstein once said, there are no ugly women, only lazy ones. With all respect for her business savvy, Ms. Rubinstein was wrong. There have been numerous studies on this, and I don’t have time to research them all, but trust me on this one: there are objective standards for beauty as well as cultural norms.
I have to admit that watching the makeover reality shows on TV has become my guilty pleasure. The pricetag, as I’ve written before in this weblog, is around $50k for the surgeries, the veneers, the personal trainers, etc.
But success assumes that you can “hang” the results on a skeletal frame that is socially acceptable, and for women, that means small-boned. And no surgeon in the world is skilled enough, or would be reckless enough, to change that.
I spent the last couple of weekends in unsuccessful experiments starting with the “goodbye look” and ending with, well, handshakes.
I have to admit, it was fun to be fussed over by my girlfriends, who “did” my hair and makeup. It was great to feel in my thirties again. But I don’t miss the rest of it, especially being relegated once again to the androgynous role of “parody of a real woman”.
I have a good life: friends, a comfortable place to live, three adorable grands, work that is creative and intellectually challenging. That should be enough. It IS enough.
Enough, already.