My Ideal Woman

My mother dated the same guy for a very long time and they went through all sorts of dramatic ups and downs.  According to her, he was a guy who just loved the drama and the chase of getting back together.  Once their relationship was completely over, Grandma said to mom, “tell me about your ideal man.”  She mentioned all the traits that were important to her and why it was that they were important.  She didn’t get into minute details like blonde hair, blue eyes; she kept it more general with things like, “big and strong” because she wanted a big teddy bear.  About a month later she is at a party and she happens to meet the teddy bear.  Within minutes she was able to tell that this guy was everything she told grandma about.  There are all sorts of theories and concepts as to why those sorts of things happen.  It could have been coincidence, it could have been that she was finally paying attention to the proper wavelength, or it could have been a gift from God.  Today’s topic is about finding a soul mate…not the science behind getting anything you want.

After my split with my fiancee, my mom told me that I also need to come up with a list.  I couldn’t think of the real important traits off the top of my head, so my first reaction was to build myself a white board and just figure it out.  I never built the white board, but I kept tossing around ideas in my head.  I kept coming up with all sorts of positive traits, but none of them really felt right.  They were things that seemed like they’d be really nice, but I didn’t feel that they were worthy of basing a relationship of them.  On top of that, some of the ideas were even negative.  I’d say, “she should be exciting”…but really that’s because I was thinking, “she had better not be boring.”  But what real underlying trait, that if some girl had it, would make all other things meaningless?  I knew there must be something, that if a girl exemplified it, then she would end up doing or being all the other things I desired.

How I got here

The story really starts with my first major girlfriend in recent history (ie. post college).  She was pretty, smart, reasonably attractive, and extremely successful.  I thought I had a winner, but our relationship quickly became routine.  After work she’d cook me dinner.  After dinner we’d take the dog for a walk.  After the walk we’d watch the news and follow that with Jeopardy.  Bor-ring!  Turns out this girl loved the simple life.  I could never get her to go out and she only wanted to hang out with the friends she had since high school.  Getting her to go anywhere that would warrant bringing a camera was next to impossible.

So for my next girlfriend, I went around saying, “I want a girl that is exciting”.  I took a few days off work to attend a real estate conference.  While I was there, there happened to be one cute girl.  And by the way, she was single and my age.  Score!  On top of that, she was hispanic…everything was a production and filled with emotion.  Even a simple conversation with her had so much energy that it was exciting.  Sounds like a winner; a lifetime full of excitement, right?  Well it turns out that I found two major flaws (for me).  First, she didn’t really carry herself like a lady.  Her vernacular lacked certain bits of politeness and tact and she just didn’t conduct herself in a graceful sort of way.  The other problem was a severe deficiency in work ethic.  She owned her own business but gave poor customer service.  She’d quit working at 4:30 because she felt like she put in a good day’s worth of work, even though she wasn’t done with all of her clients.  On top of that, work for her didn’t even start until 10am.  I would have been embarrassed to have a wife that put such little effort into her business.

On to the 3rd major relationship.  Third time is the charm.  This girl was so different from the previous; I was in hog heaven.  She was very smart, very beautiful, talented in all sorts of areas where I’m deficient, and was one of the most proper and well spoken ladies I had ever known.  On top of that, she was actually quite helpful with remodeling my house.  This one was a keeper for sure.  Better than anything I had ever known, and better than anything I could even fathom as existing.  So what happened?  We finally split over differences in what we liked to do.  Her real passion was to read and play online chess.  Funny how it went full circle isn’t it?

After each relationship I was too focused on finding a girl that didn’t do that bad things the last one did.  I was ignoring all sorts of other warning signs because I was so hell-bent on making sure the problems of the last one weren’t an issue in the new one.  The previous girl’s bad traits were never present in the next girl, but a lot of the good traits weren’t there either.  Now I finally know what I need and it has nothing to do with an ex.  The next girl gets to start with a clean slate where all attributes are judged on a completely even scale.

What she is like

So it took me 2 months to finally figure this out after mom asked me.  And at first when I was generating a never-ending list of “must haves”, it seemed like I was going to get so specific that I’d never find anyone.  No one could fit the bill.  My list has finally ended with just a few personality traits.  She is a strong, confident woman who takes charge and enjoys doing a lot of the things I don’t enjoy doing.  When I say, “strong & confident” or “takes charge”, I’m not saying in the drill instructor sort of way.  I am very disinterested in being with a gal who is bullish or pushy.  To me it means that she sees things that need to be taken care of so she takes care of them.  She doesn’t wait to get permission or wait for me to tell her to do it or (even worse) wait to tell me to take care of it.  She’ll also ask (never tell) for assistance if she needs it.

The part about differing interests is also just as crucial.  I love to fix and build things.  I love to make money and manage it.  If she is good at those things, it would be really cool but probably not super helpful.  There are multitudes of things that I’m not very good at or just have no interest in.  Cooking is an excellent example.  Plenty of people out there love to cook and then clean up afterwards.  To me the entire process is excruciatingly painful; I could think of 10,000 things I’d rather do.  I don’t want to plan to make food, I don’t want to go through the effort of making food, and I don’t want to clean up afterwards.  I’m certainly not sexist and in no way to I feel that a “woman’s only place is in the kitchen”.  But unless she takes charge of the cooking, I’m going to fulfill my role as the hunter by bringing food home from the closest fast food joint; together we will suffer the future of associated weight gain and clogged arteries.  She also needs to enjoy being the inspiration for vacations.  I’m always so caught up in my work that I never think to schedule down time.  Sometimes I will find myself with some free time, so I’ll make a few calls and do something spur of the moment.  The problem is that it’s really hard to pull off a big trip at the last minute.  If I actually had someone encouraging me to plan some vacation time in advance, I’d certainly be doing a lot more vacationing.

I can’t tell you with certainty that this is the absolute way to go because it’s not like I’ve used it to get married, but now that I have my solid direction I feel more confident.  Although I went out with a girl last week whose favorite activity is sleeping, I felt compelled to call her back anyway… just because she was so pretty…but fortunately I didn’t.  I knew after one dinner, she was definitely not my “take charge” kind of woman so any calls would have been a waste. Being able to quickly filter out any that aren’t true keepers is one more step towards infinite happiness.