Your Ex-Boyfriend Will Hate This (2015)

Chapter Four

Buyers and Sellers

If there is one common theme to this book, it’s that the dating “problem” most people face is one of perception, not reality. If dating were a person, he or she wouldn’t be ugly. Yet many people describe dating as something (or, in our case, someone) so unsightly and vulgar that you wonder how dating gets any action at all.

Dating isn’t ugly but, like all of us, it can seem far less attractive from certain angles or in a certain light. A girlfriend of mine loves to take pictures whenever we go out, but she always insists on taking them at an angle from slightly above us. She explained that doing this makes one’s face look slimmer and more angular. Consequently, I look best in the pictures she has taken when we were out together, and it’s not because I suddenly get much better looking when she’s around.

It is the positioning of the camera that does it.

How does it apply to dating and this enigmatically-titled chapter? By allowing us to reposition the lens through which we view dating and see it for the fresh, attractive person it always was. Your past pessimism was actually a kind of reverse beer-goggles, by making something ugly that was handsome all along.

People have often described certain singles’ bars as a “meat markets.” Although it’s sort of a grotesque metaphor, it demonstrates a couple of instructive points. First, it underlines the essential pessimism with which most people view modern courtship. Any euphemism that describes a butcher shop won’t exactly fill one with positive associations.

“It was so romantic the first night I met [Boy A]! We met at a meat market, and we danced all night on the killing floor!”

As repellent as it is, the image of a “meat market” is somewhat useful. Dating does take place in a “market,” one that isn’t much different than the capitalist market that guides our economy.

Most people have taken basic courses in economics at some point during their education, so you’re probably already familiar with the concept of “supply and demand.” Suppliers or “sellers” provide products that compete with similar products for the spending dollar of consumers or “buyers.” A seller’s primary motivation is to sell his product. Full stop. The price he gets is entirely dependent on the amount of existing demand for the product. If there is no demand, he’ll drop the price again and again until the product sells. Moreover, he doesn’t care who buys his product, as long as someone does.

The buyer has a different motivation, to find the best product in the marketplace at the best price possible. Not only does he not have to take the first product available, the buyer is expected to survey the marketplace before making his decision. The buyer weighs each product against the others, noting their various features and determining which one most closely mirrors what he’s looking for. If he is patient, discerning, and knows what he wants, the buyer will find the product that best fits his needs at a price he can afford.

Look at these different motivations and ask yourself: in the dating “marketplace,” am I a buyer or a seller? If you’re reading this book for any reason other than recreation, it’s likely you’ve been the seller more often than the buyer. Don’t feel bad about it. Our culture has been telling you since you were born that is the way it’s supposed to be. Turn on your TV and look at the way your gender is regularly objectified for profit.

Ad execs love to say that “sex sells,” but if you look at the gender iniquity in how men and women are portrayed, it’s more honest to say that “the female sex sells.” The fact that occasional ads in which men are ogled stand apart so memorably proves just how pervasive the objectification of women really is.

So don’t feel bad if you feel like a product for sale. Our culture keeps telling you that you are.

You aren’t a product. You’re a wonderful, flesh-and-blood modern woman. You weren’t put here to serve anyone, and you sure as hell aren’t some object to be obtained, used, and discarded. The time has come to flip the gender script that has been insidiously fed to you from the moment you first sat Indian style on the floor in front of your television.

You’re the buyer starting right now.

This new approach introduces an entirely different set of questions. Any queries about motivations other than your own are no longer relevant. In fact, you can completely relinquish the following questions:

“Does he like me?” and its cousin, “How much does he like me?”

“Will he call?” and “When will he call?”

“Is he really attracted to me?” and “Is he attracted to other women more?”

“Is he seeing someone else?” and “Does he like her more than me?”

These questions make a common, but crucial, mistake. They employ the wrong pronoun: he. Forget what “he” wants, and ask questions the questions you can solve, the only questions that really matter.

“Do I like him?” and “What is it about him that I like?”

“Do I want him to call?” and “Why do I want him to call?”

“Am I attracted to him?” and “If yes or no, what is it about him?”

“Do I want to be in an exclusive relationship with him?” and “Do I trust him to be faithful?”

The latter set of four example questions is more important, because it gets at at the root of your choices. Understanding your own motivations is an essential step in your self-exploration. Introspection about your own preferences will lead you to seek out traits that make someone a complementary partner and avoid those men that don’t. In addition, you may find that you’re seeking negative traits (selfishness, narcissism, possessiveness) without knowing or choosing to acknowledge it.

Of course, not all of your motivations for choosing a mate will be immediately clear to you. Research shows that we all have a series of unconscious predispositions that influence our choices, sometimes even more so than our stated desires. The MHC factor presented earlier is one of the stronger ones, but it’s far from the only example of our secret motivations.

Not only do women emit pheromones during ovulation that make them more desirable to men, a study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that women are 24 percent more likely to engage in sex during the most fertile period in their menstrual cycle. Many studies have demonstrated that women are more likely to cheat or have one-night stands during this fertile period as well. Even women’s preferences change during this period, as they’re far more likely to choose rugged and overtly masculine sexual partners than during periods of infertility.[vii]

Some other influences discovered by science seem almost arbitrary. For instance, studies have shown that, across genders and even cultures, people are attracted to the color red. In one study, people examined a series of photographs and assigned a number rating based on the level of sexual attractiveness to each person shown. Participants consistently rated higher those people wearing red. This result applied even to previously viewed photos in which the clothes were then digitally altered to red. Test subjects rated people in exactly the same photos as more attractive when they wore red.[viii]

The likelihood of sexual contact on a first date can come down to something as simple as what kind of movie you watch. The experience of fear (like seeing a scary movie) with someone you’re attracted to reads as arousal in our brains.[ix] When that killer in the movie makes you jump and clutch your date, your brain is quietly but insistently whispering, I know what you should do with him after the movie…

This confusion of fear and attraction goes both ways, so if you really want to see a certain someone naked, don’t rent The Notebook. It will definitely not prompt subconscious desire, and your tears will actually produce a hormone that dampens the male drive to procreate.[x]

So if you really want to get laid, watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with him while wearing a red dress and ovulating. Science puts his chances of resistance at somewhere between slim and none.

I bring up these fun facts to show that we’re motivated by factors both conscious and unconscious when choosing a mate. Most people look for a particular “type” of partner, whether for a lifetime or just a few delightfully sweaty hours. In the next chapter, we will examine your “type” and ask the burning question:

Is my type kind of an asshole?