Dear Every Girl in America and Parts of Canada,

What’s wrong with you? No, seriously. Wait, don’t answer that question. I think I’ll do a pretty good job telling you. And it won’t be couched in Dr. Phil-isms. And it won’t be couched in reactionary, self-help book aphorisms proving you’re only assholes because those men do what they do.

My dad, by all accounts, has led a pretty shitty adult life. The way he has treated his kids, his wives, and his mom probably ranks somewhere near 4 out of 10. I’ll grade him on a curve because being absent and cheating is better than being openly abusive. From what I hear, he went to therapy some years ago, and multiple hours of discussion led him to believe that his mother was the cause of all of his problems.

At some point I’ll post “Grandmother #2" up here, and it will be clear that his mom is crazy. Not “burning vodka in a pie plate” crazy, but zany in her own way. Her biggest faults are being stubborn, independent, proud and moderately controlling. There are alot of people who grew up with parents like that and didn’t abandon their kids, do drugs, and cheat on their wives.

My point is, any woman who heard this story would say, “Shut up, dude. It’s not your mom’s fault. You made the choices.” Yet when male-female interactions are so hard, women feel hurt so often, and it’s so hard for people to find someone without monumental levels of bullshit involved, every woman on the couch blames men.

We’re shallow. We’re only looking for one thing. We fuck and then disappear. We never open up. We’re constantly cheating. We idolize porn stars. We’re afraid to be intimate. We won’t commit.

As Judd Nelson said in The Breakfast Club… “no, what about you?”

Entire industries — entertainment, self help, fiction, travel, alcohol — are built around the hardship women have in finding the right guy. I need to emphasize this: the right guy. The reason I point that out is because too often women shorten this to “find a guy.” Which is as ridiculous as a farmhand in Upstate New York craving an apple, and, sigh, just not knowing where to start. The right guy is a different story. I will never begrudge anyone, man or woman, for struggling to find someone who is a fit for them. I will begrudge them for two things.

A) Whining about so much that it becomes an institutional right of passage.

There is no such thing in the male world as the search for a soul mate. You meet people, you date. You have restless years. You have years of committed relationships. And somewhere along the line you realize the person you’re with is right. But you’re not singing the opening act of a Broadway musical, asking the heavens if true love will ever find you. Meeting people is hard, but it’s not a cosmic burden being inflicted on the female of the species.

B) Blaming the apples because you can’t find one you like.

I’m a relatively big guy. When people meet me, they often ask if I played football in college. Sometime this year, I plan to pack up everything I own and move to central Spain. I’m going to get a job in machine factory working 12-hour shifts. When my shift is over, I’ll be starving, and the only place open to eat will be tapas bars serving tiny little portions. And as I walk home hungry in the night, all I’m going to do is complain about the fucking portions at the fucking tapas bar. The next night I will tell the manager that his portion size stinks and he should serve real food. I will go on Yelp and write scathing review of Tapas de Oscar for leaving me hungry.

Then, and only then, will I understand what it is like to be woman. To be a victim of… the choices I make. Damn. I guess you could look at it that way. After those long days in the factory, I should just sit with my fellow laborers on my living room floor, drinking Rioja out of oversized glasses, and complaining about all the restaurants that underfed us. And sister, after I maxed out my credit card on that place, I looked myself in the mirror and said, “What are you doing?” I mean, you think I would have learned my lesson after that Nouvelle Cuisine place I went to in college. I mean, one asparagus tip and a single slice of duck breast? Don’t I deserve more than that? Where are all the good restaurants? Then I read a book called “He’s Just Not Putting That Much Food Into You,” and it told me so much about myself.

Adam Carolla once said eloquently, if you wake up, start your day, and you run into a few assholes during the day… those people you met are assholes. If you wake up, start your day, and EVERYONE you meet is an asshole… then you’re the asshole. Yet for the girl who constantly complains about all the guys she dates sucking, somehow she’s a hero, she has (my favorite) bad luck with men, or guys just suck.

Newsflash. Guys haven’t changed in 1,000 years. Dorag the Elder and Mubarg the Svelt both farted around the campfire, looked at wenches to whom they were not betrothed, and apologized for not performing when they drank too much ale.

So let’s analyze this idea that there are no good guys out there. Women’s anguish with dating is rarely about true inactivity. Women date. But it’s all about starts and stops. It’s about crushes and heartbreak. It’s not that women are driving around and there’s no good restaurant to stop at. It’s that they keep getting halfway through the appetizer and realizing they picked the wrong joint.

A woman would argue, “yeah, but the chef promised me all of these wonderful handcrafted dishes, and all I got was a microwaved burger!” I would argue that the golden arches were a tip you weren’t getting fine dining.

Discovery does not always mean deception. But when a woman spends a couple of weeks getting to know someone, and she realizes he’s not right for her, there seems to be this sense that the guy had somehow fooled her up until then. The guy could be a perfectly nice person — just not date-worthy — but any mention of his name by her friends gets a roll of the eyes and an “Ugh! That guy.” Per Adam’s rule, if you go out and everyone you date is un-dateable, then maybeeeeee…..

I’m, sorry Every Girl in America and Parts of Canada. You are all way too fucked up for me. You’ve made it your mission to take the relatively simple act of meeting people, figuring out if you like them, and either settling in or moving the fuck on… you’ve taken that and turned into an odyssey. An odyssey born of your own conceit. Yes, you’re conceited. Because if it’s this gigantic story of a heroine looking for the love of her life with tragic heartbreak at every turns, and villainous fiends trying to ply you with their fancy cars and rounds of drinks and trying to stick their members in various holes! Yet you overcame and found true love. If you make it into that, then your relationship, whenever you found it, is all the more special. It’s why girls always ask and always tell the “How We Met” story. Guys don’t give a fuck.

But you’re also conceited because want to absolve yourself of your role in making it hard in the first place. Guys only want chicks who dress slutty. Who is it dressing slutty again? A girl who was probably you five years ago. Or do you figure she was wearing a tweed pantsuit yesterday per usual when a band of Argentinian kidnappers drove up in a white van, whisked her away to the edge of town, cut off the suit with a carpet knife, and squeezed her into a halter. I know, sister. You just have to keep up because guys won’t respond to anything else. Because there was SURELY no sex happening in Victorian England where women wore dresses that Tyrion Lannister could hide under!

This horrible horrible person I had the curse of going on a first date with also wrote a blog about finding love in the city. I should have told the “knockout game” guys where to find her just for that. She told me she had a policy of not fucking a guy she’s dating for three months because she wanted the guy to be into her for the right reasons. When I read her blog, she had at least three posts where after torturing other guys for months, she fucked a couple of guys on the first date. Not that the long term guys were saints or that sex is deserved by anyone at any time. But re-read this paragraph. Who created this mess?? Certainly not the jet-ski tour guide who’s getting drunkenly ridden in the back of his cousin’s van (straight from her blog).

So once again, my ladies of NAFTA. I bid you a “get the fuck away from me.” Because the one thing that drives all sane people crazy is the person in line in front of you who doesn’t know what the fuck they want. And that’s all of you. You’re like an evil dictator that controls the supplies, controls the lines of communication, and controls the media. You have everything we want, you decide when we get it, and you can paint this gigantic mythology that we’re the bad guys. Yet you wonder why we let our phone go to voicemail from time to time.

But I have news for you. You are one technological leap away from losing this battle for good. Because pretty soon we’ll all have Google Glass, YouPorn, and a handful of Jergens. And then you’ll be able to find the right guy. He’ll be napping on the couch with a smile on his face.

Sincerely,

Why Are You Still Reading This?