Streets Are Different

Confession before we start: I didn’t write this today. I wrote it post-divorce, after three different women handed me the same conclusion three different ways. It’s been sitting in my drafts ever since. Time has passed. Additional data has been collected. The working theory remains intact. I needed to post something. I did not feel like writing something. You do the math…

I have not had to date for most of my adult life. So coming back to it now, in my fifties, post-divorce, has been a study in how much the language around it has shifted. It has been four or five years. I have dated four dynamic women in that stretch, and what has helped me most is being okay with not trying to force everything to work.

I keep hearing the same things. She wants a man who is “old fashioned.” She wants someone who leads. He needs to be six feet, or six-two, or taller than her in heels. She wants consistency while she communicates inconsistently. She wants intentions and attachment styles and exclusivity named before there is anything actually there to name. The list is specific and it repeats.

I understand the impulse underneath it. What most of these preferences are reaching for is a feeling of safety. Protection. Being held. That is a real thing and I do not dismiss it. What I do question is whether the metrics actually deliver what people think they will.

A taller man is not necessarily a safer one. A man who insists on leading is not necessarily going anywhere worth following. “Old fashioned” tends to be code for a fixed set of dynamics that, in practice, can be more about control than care. The packaging looks like protection. The substance is often something else.

I don’t have a type. I have things I like. Things I notice. But I am not building a checklist that filters people out before I have had the chance to actually meet them. What I want is connection. The rest is decoration.

There is also something worth saying about what gets called security when what we really mean is performance. A man performing leadership is not the same as a man who is steady. Therapy vocabulary used fluently is not the same as the work it points to. “Protecting peace” can quietly become a way of avoiding the discomfort that real intimacy requires. Attention is not intention. Anyone can text all day. Fewer can actually show up. The performance can be present and the substance can be missing. We have all seen that movie.

I have some intuition about fit by now. I can usually tell when being with someone would mean modifying my behavior to the point that I am no longer my whole self, or changing my attitude toward my own preferences and beliefs in order to make things work for her. I will not do that. I have stopped trying.

I am not interested in playing a part and I am not asking anyone else to play one either. I would rather meet a woman where she is and see what is actually there.

From Here,