Too picky

Yesterday, as I was roaming the city with my camera, my lens cap flew off one too many times, so I ducked into a camera shop on Stockton (or maybe it was Grant) in search of a lens cap leash. I found one, and as long as I was there, I asked the guy to price both a 70-200 lens and a 70-300, and asked his opinion on which he thought was better. After a few minutes of chatting about photography, he got a bit flirty and asked if I was single. I could clearly see he was wearing a wedding ring and he could clearly see I wasn’t, so I shrugged and said yes. He said he found that surprising, given my looks and personality — okay, I do like a nice compliment — but then he said it: “I bet it’s because you’re too picky.”

Now, I realize that the cultural zeitgeist has currently decreed that a straight woman over 30 who’s not coupled up is stubbornly and shallowly holding out for a mythical Perfect 10 rather than giving a fair shake to the poor 6s and 7s she’s overlooking for the minor crime of not having enough money or enough hair. (I also realize that there are, in fact, women who do that, just as some men out there are convinced that even though they’re pretty damn average, they need to stay single because Heidi Klum is going to show up on their doorstep any day now.) And given this ongoing frame that single women are single not only because they expect the moon and stars, but because they don’t realize that’s their problem — this man felt free both to leap to conclusions about me and to voice them, despite knowing nothing about me other than my predilection for Canon cameras.

Yet many women are single not because they expect too much, but because they don’t expect enough — or to be more precise, we expect disappointment. We believe another pernicious canard: if we want love at all, we have to endure the unreliable, uninterested, or unavailable. That’s all that’s left, so we should make the best of it. We know we’re dating frogs and not princes, but we think maybe if we just kiss them enough…

The thing is, if I was judging the state of modern man based only on the festival of misogyny that was yesterday’s Super Bowl advertising, I would be convinced that it’s raining frogs. Madison Avenue apparently believes that if it sank a drill into the male psyche, it would release a gusher of fear and resentment toward women so powerful that we should be terrified to be alone in a room with any boy older than, say, 14. In the world of Sunday’s ads, men now consider women such universally emasculating killjoys that only buying Bud Light, Dockers pants, and a Dodge Charger will prevent their penises from falling off en masse.

And not wanting this makes women too picky?

Fortunately, I have many men-friends who prove Madison Avenue wrong. They’re contentedly, even blissfully coupled and feel their lives are bigger and better for it. If one defines “too picky” as “At a bare minimum, I deserve someone like that, someone who thinks I’m so wonderful that he wants to enjoy my company frequently and exclusively,” well, then, picky is well worth aspiring to be.

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