Dinhternet

Guys love to rate girls on attractiveness.

We’ve got every­thing from the basic 10-point scale to some pretty com­plex coör­di­nate sys­tems:

And we’re con­stantly cre­at­ing and dis­sem­i­nat­ing new ones because we’re afraid the “code” has been bro­ken. (If only we had hotty windtalk­ers.) I’m reminded of a quote from a TV show I saw a long time ago when two guys are rat­ing a par­tic­u­larly hot co-worker. They agreed she was an 11. A third guy comes over and says he would rate her 8.5. The first two turn to him incred­u­lously and he explains, “I use the Richter scale.”

Of course, some scales (like the above graph) were cre­ated because guys felt the need for more infor­ma­tion that just appear­ances. Don’t hold your breath though, ladies, this added infor­ma­tion is usu­ally still pretty shal­low. Con­sider the Hot/Crazy Scale or the Attractiveness/Accessibility Scale. A while back, Jeremy J told me about the “Area Code” sys­tem, too.

We also try to make games of it. Will N intro­duced me to “Color/Time/Number”, where you name the color of the shirt, the clock direc­tion, and the attrac­tive­ness of a given target.

So now that you know all this, I wanted to ask… do girls have a rat­ing sys­tem? I’ve seen when two (or more) girls will spot a cute guy, share a know­ing glance with each other, gig­gle, and lean in to whis­per. What is it that you whis­per about? And is it in Gib­ber­ish?

As I men­tioned on Twit­ter, I didn’t really enjoy He’s Just Not That Into You. For one thing because it makes girls seem crazy and guys seem like ass­holes. But it also seems to send a mes­sage that you should just resign your­self to fate.

I don’t know if I can accept that no mat­ter who I choose to pur­sue, fate will just drop some­one into my lap, and it may or may not be the per­son I’m pur­su­ing. Like the cyn­i­cal the­ist (See the Terry Pratch­ett sec­tion near the botom), I will take my chances with pur­suit if it will hap­pen with or with­out my involve­ment. Like Style said, it would not have hap­pened if he hadn’t put him­self out there for her to choose him.

Do you believe in “The One”? Is there an alter­nate uni­verse of poten­tial mates bat­tling it out on a zig­gu­rat for your affec­tions? If there was, maybe it would look some­thing like this.

I hope you all had a great Valentine’s Day!

Once again, I was sin­gle, but I didn’t let that stop me from hav­ing fun with some friends. I’ve actu­ally been form­ing this post in my head all week now, and I was going to post it on Valentine’s Day, but I didn’t have access to a com­puter, and didn’t want to write a long post on my phone.

Dif­fi­cult break-ups are immor­tal­ized in “the major­ity of white per­son art” with a spe­cial focus on first loves. (Yes, I know Hikki’s not white, but she grew up in New York City, so she was exposed to white culture.)

When I read The Game, one of the things Style men­tions is that the pick-up com­mu­nity devel­oped for nerds who for one rea­son or another lacked nat­ural social skills, and the train­ing gave them those tools. He also men­tions that because of this lack of nat­ural skills, a lot of pick-up artists were unsuc­cess­ful with their first loves. They then “put the pussy on a pedestal” and that fix­a­tion leads them to the pick-up community.

It reminds me a movie I saw a long time ago. I don’t even remem­ber the title, actors, or major­ity of the plot line any­more, but it involved a group of friends doing a road trip across the coun­try. The girl in the group had a child­hood romance with a neigh­bor­hood boy, but it was bro­ken up before any­thing really hap­pened because her fam­ily moved away. She ide­al­izes this old flame and all her rela­tion­ships since then have been mea­sured against this ideal and failed. Well, since they are doing a road trip, they decide to stop by her old home­town and see if her first love still feels any­thing for her. Turns out, he’s mar­ried with kids, and a bit of a jerk to boot. But the kicker is that she meets her first love’s lit­tle brother, who was always into her and kept the keep­sake she exchanged with the older brother as she was mov­ing. He also reveals that the older brother was only try­ing to hit it all those years ago any­ways. (By the way, if you can tell me what movie I’m talk­ing about, I would really appre­ci­ate it… it’s been bug­ging me since I first started think­ing about this post.)

There seems to be a bit of truth to the idea. I don’t con­sciously make com­par­isons between love inter­ests, but I can under­stand how your first expe­ri­ences can influ­ence your atti­tudes towards love. So tell me, how did your first love turn out? Are you a Mar­shall, who is still with your first love and every­one else is jeal­ous of what you have, or a Bar­ney, whose first love was a dis­as­ter and you have dif­fi­culty with rela­tion­ships now, or some­thing in between, which I guess Ted is?