Girls Just Wanna Have Dessert
When I first started dating, I thought my options were limited because I was fat, and in that there is definitely some truth worth unpacking, but as far as being treated badly by men, that appeared to be universal. Thin women get treated terribly. Thin women get cheated on and objectified. Thin women are abused and mistreated and mislead. Thin women are just as miserable. I didn’t always feel this way though.
There was a time I really thought it was because I was fat that I couldn’t get a man to see me as a human being. As a fat woman, I couldn’t get men to stop wanting to fuck my body (my body, my body, but never me). As a woman, I was just a jar of doll parts to them. They all just wanted to unscrew the lid and stick their dick in. An adventure, one would call it. Another said, “I’ve never been with a big girl before.” The next would add, “I want to fuck an older woman like you,” and they must have heard him across all the waters of earth because after that they all started to say it that way. A fat woman. An older woman. So fixed and fascinated on it. I was a car accident or a bank robbery or a murder scene. They wanted a taste; they wanted to dip their finger in my blood and smear it across their lips. They wanted a little tragedy in their life.
And who was to blame? Someone had to be to blame. Someone had to be responsible. To have so many men—not just one broken solider but an entire army—act this way. I couldn’t help but think about what a terrible job their parents had done. Why did they all want to fuck up when I was always fucking down. They were monsters and somehow my only options.
Advice from people about dating comes in two forms and two forms only. It’s both that I need to be more open and give guys a chance (this advice comes from people who’ve never met men) and that I should be a much better judge of character, far more restrictive and basically only willing to date age-appropriate, incredibly intelligent men whose social awareness probably needs some tuning but are likely generally good people (this advice comes from women who’ve spent their lives shrinking for men). But that’s a whole lot to balance and know in advance. It’s hard to be open but selective and know people before you’ve gotten to know them. So, I cast a wide net and regularly get lost at sea.
I say, “he rejected me.”
I say, “we only went out twice.”
I say, “he was too young, but…”
They answer, “he was probably intimidated by you.”
Someone asks, “Did you even like him?” and the answer is sadder than you’d expect because probably not. I say this not because I’m hurt, or defensive, but because it’s the truth. I rarely date men I actually like, they’re simply not in my pool of fish. I don’t know where the witty, intelligent men are but very few of them like fat women.
Did I like him? I wonder after every rejection. Maybe I just liked the idea of him. Maybe I liked who I was in his gaze. This pain is a pain I need heard. To not have my tears fall on deaf ears, but things have gone silent, so I have stopped crying in public. I cannot let my heart be tended in this way, so it becomes untenable.
My thesis advisor wrote in the margins of one of my drafts: Tell me how he looks, describe how attractive he is. Don’t just say that he was too good looking. But I don’t because my attraction is not your attraction. The point isn’t that his hair was soft, it was that I had wanted to touch it. The facts are not important. What matters is that when I say he was too good looking for me that you feel it. You imagine someone out of your league in whatever ways you’ve always felt just a little bit less than. The point is to push your fingers into the soft spots, the places where bruises exist too far under the surface to be visible. The point is the discomfort and then the relief. The point isn’t to travel far away from yourself, it’s to look inward. The point is to press my heart against yours and feel just a little bit less alone. Or maybe I don’t know what the point is at all. My characters do not have faces because, after all, they are not characters but memories. The faces have faded, the mirage is all that’s left.
Every so often, when dating is at its worst or some particular man has disappointed me in some unique and jarring way, I wonder why I continue. I ask myself why. To the eyes of an unfaithful observer, at least on the surface, it seems that men are entrenched in my veins, wrapped tightly around my heart like ivy or arteries. All my life I would’ve expected to be stronger by this point. This heart wasn’t built for attacks.
I should take more breaks from dating. I should focus on myself and nothing else. I shouldn’t expect anything from men so that they never disappoint me. Not every lesson can be learned in a day (or a decade). Logic can only get you so far when your heart refuses to show it the map.
Ignacio and I meet through Tinder and after an appropriate number of messages, I suggest he adds me on facebook. I didn’t used to think adding someone on facebook was a good idea. Now, though, now I’m tired of all the ways men risk nothing and women risk everything to date. I know most people aren’t as public and open as I am, but I need to anchor him with something. I’m tired of finding out a man is not for me (read: a total loser) after meeting. I want to save myself the hassle and the time. I want things to be easy for once. But he says no almost immediately. Facebook is only for friends and family.
I understand in so much as that’s his right to have a boundary for himself. Nonetheless, my interest is immediately lost. He wants me to risk potential death (or maybe some mild awkwardness) to go on a date with him without risking anything himself? Hard pass. I don’t unmatch, but I stop answering quickly. I stop answering questions (enthusiastically) and no longer ask him any of my own. I’m not sure he ever really notices. He reads my hardly interested as hard to get. We spend the next four months—which is not a typo and instead both an insane and completely factual amount of time—locked in a battle of apathetic (on my part) and unaware (on his part) messaging. Long after I actually think we’ll ever go out; he shows up in my People You Might Know on Facebook and I add him because why not—what’s the worst that can happen at this post. He accepts the request (well, I didn’t see that coming).