LITMIR.BIZ

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much do first appearances matter?

      “I’ve tried that,” Nora said, “but I can’t make myself become attracted to someone. You have to feel it from the beginning. If you aren’t physically attracted when you meet them, you’re always forcing it and it never works.”

      At first I was surprised by how readily the twenty-somethings dismissed this cute guy without even considering starting up a conversation to learn more about him. I mean, this wasn’t college, where the playing field was pretty evenly matched in terms of available romantic prospects. This was the adult world, where people were pairing off and getting married, where the pool of single men was getting smaller, where there wasn’t a built-in mechanism for meeting like-minded people the way there’d been in the past.

      But then I remembered myself in my twenties, when the possibilities still seemed tantalizingly endless—even if they weren’t.

       DESPERATE BUT PICKY

      Ah, the difference a decade makes. A few nights later, five single women in their late thirties to early forties met me at the same bar, where I asked the same question: Why is it so hard to find a good guy? I filled them in on the conversation I had with the younger women about boredom and loneliness.

      “Check back with them in ten years,” Stephanie, an attractive 39-year-old pediatrician, said. “If they’re holding out for Prince Charming, they’ll be bored and lonely. The job won’t seem as exciting anymore, drinks with the girls will get old, and on holidays, they’ll be hanging out with their married friends and their kids, or their nieces and nephews, which will only make them depressed that they don’t have a family themselves.”

      I admitted that I related to those younger women, who wanted to be in a relationship but had a very specific idea of what that guy would have to be like. And as I got older, I explained, my dating life slowly became this lethal paradox: desperate but picky. They knew exactly what I meant.

      “That’s so true!” said Liz, a 37-year-old screenwriter. “I want to shake younger women and say, you know, the guy who laughs too loud in public may not love the way you chew raw carrots at dinner parties, but it’s not a deal-breaker for him.”

      These women could easily list their former deal-breakers—the reasons they didn’t pursue relationships when they were younger. Here’s what they said:

       • “He was very loving but he wasn’t romantic enough. On Valentine’s Day he made a mix tape of my favorite music and gave me an hour-long massage, but all day at work, whenever I saw the flower guy going up the hall delivering flowers to my colleagues, I kept thinking, where are my flowers? I wanted a guy who sent flowers.”

       “He brought me flowers, but cheesy ones that just spoke to bad taste—and the sense that I wasn’t worth something more thoughtful.”

       “He wasn’t exciting enough. I felt like we were already married, which was nice in a way, but this was supposed to be the courting period.”

       “He had long nose hairs and they grossed me out, but I didn’t have the courage to ask him to trim them, so I stopped seeing him.”

       “He cried. The first time, I wasn’t thrilled, but okay. The second time, I bailed. I felt he was too weak for me.”

       “He was too predictable. Then I started dating guys who always kept me on edge and I never knew what to expect. It was terrible. Now I’d give anything for predictable.”

       “I was embarrassed by his voice. Sometimes when he’d answer the phone at my place, people would think he was me, because I have kind of a low voice. But otherwise, he was very masculine. And a great guy.”

       “He was too optimistic. He was so cheery all the time, even early in the morning when the alarm went off, and I found that grating. He always found a silver lining—‘The stove broke, let’s go out to dinner!’—but I’d be upset that I had to buy a new stove. I didn’t want to ‘look on the bright side’ all the time. Then I dated a guy who was more cynical and after a while, it depressed me. So I tried to get the optimistic guy back, but he told me I was too pessimistic!”

       “He was completely bald except for one of those rings of hair around his head and a little tuft poking up in the front. It was such a turnoff, but I tried to get over it because I really, really liked him. My friends said, ‘He has a nice face, he has a nice body, and besides, most guys lose their hair eventually.’ But he was only thirty-five. I’d always been attracted to guys who had the kind of hair you could run your fingers through. Now I’m lucky if the guys I meet have any hair at all.”

       “He thought it was funny to make up strange words, like ‘fabulosa.’ He did this a lot—and in public, too. Once he said to someone at a party, ‘Being a doctor isn’t just one fabulosa after another’ and I was so embarrassed. I broke up with him the next day.”

       “He loved me too much. I felt like he was too much of a puppy dog, always looking at me with those adoring eyes. I wanted more of a manly man.”

       “He wasn’t refined enough. He couldn’t order off a wine list. He’d never seen Casablanca. I wondered, how can you be thirty-two years old and not have seen that?”

       “I just wasn’t feeling it—and now I think, what was I supposed to be feeling? Because, actually, I liked being with him more than any of the guys I felt strong chemistry with before or since.”

      Listening to these women, I thought about the reasons I’d passed up guys when I was younger, often sight unseen. One of the most memorable is Tom, a client of my lesbian hairdresser. She’d told me he was a handsome, charming, brilliant chemist and wanted to set us up on a blind date.

      “He’s the only guy who does it for me,” she said, which sounded like quite an endorsement. Add the fact that I have a science background, and this guy seemed incredibly hot. But I said no, back when I was 29, because when my hairdresser said that Tom had red hair, I didn’t think I’d be attracted to him. I just knew that red hair wasn’t going to work for me. (Apparently, my bar for men was higher than that of a lesbian.)

      There was also the cute, smart, funny lawyer I went on several dates with until I lost interest because he overused the word “awesome.” I remember telling a friend, “Everything is ‘awesome’ with him. It’s not ‘great’ or ‘wonderful’ or ‘interesting’ or even ‘cool.’ It’s always ‘awesome.’” I tried to get past it, but it irritated me every time he said it. (Somehow, the fact that I said “like” and “you know” all the time didn’t seem to irritate him.)

      In my early thirties there was the adorable software developer I met at a party who gave me his work number and told me to call there anytime because, he said, “That’s where I always am.” I didn’t want to be with a workaholic, so I never called. It didn’t occur to me that maybe he was at work all the time because he was starting his own firm, or that if he had a girlfriend, he might have more of a reason to leave at night. Nor did I bother to find out, because I always assumed there would be another setup, another guy at a party, or another online prospect. And even when the available guys and the opportunities to meet them seemed scarcer as I edged into my mid-thirties, I only got into serious relationships with men who met my rather strict and, in hindsight, superficial criteria. I had the attitude of, “I didn’t wait this long searching for The One, only to end up settling.” But would I really have been settling with the red-headed chemist, the lawyer who liked the word “awesome,” or the software guy who happened to work until midnight as he launched his business?

      I’ll never know.

      Like me, the women I met with at the bar were embarrassed by the way they’d dismissed men in the past, evaluating every guy as either too-something or not-something-enough. These guys didn’t fit our image of the person we thought we’d end up with, leaving us to end up with nobody.

      I asked the group if these types of things would still be deal-breakers for them now.

      “If

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