The Dates of Wrath

Continued from part one if, like me, you need to remember what the frotz I was talking about. Ah yes.

So do you know what your type is? Are you sure?

3. Look at your exes

The thing is, it’s not always easy to see exactly what you fall for.

Sometimes it’s only when you look back over your exes that a pattern emerges, and you get some kind of aha moment. Or often, it’s your long-suffering friends who can call you out on the trends evident in your choice of partners. Example: at university, a roommate of mine dated exclusively petite, thin blonde girls under five foot six. One after the other, BAM BAM BAM (or maybe BIM BIM BO). I don’t think he ever recognised he was wearing those blondie-blinkers.

So what’s your hidden pattern? For those chaps raging with the yellow fever – a meme I hesitate to reinforce even more but, fuck it – perhaps a look back through your relationships resembles a sex tourist’s itinerary through East Asia: a progression of doll-like Thai, Chinese, Korean and V-throwing J-girls.

For the ladies, perhaps looking back at your boyfriends reveals a lineup of older, authoritative, tweed-clad men who on closer inspection all look strikingly like your Dad.

A couple of things become pretty obvious from an archaeological dig of my exes, regardless of what I think I go for:

1. It’s a fact that every girlfriend I’ve had has been dark- or red-haired. No blondies, not a one. Evidently I don’t like my girlfriends to have more fun.
2. There’s also a fair occurrence of what might accurately and revealingly be described as ‘Jennifer Connelly eyebrows’. I’m going to attribute this directly to the fact that I was full of sex drugs for most of the 1980s and early 1990s, when this was the trend. See: Miss Connelly, Madonna, Belinda Carlisle, Brooke Shields and [voice becomes oddly strained] Sherilyn Fenn.

4. Types are a tendency, not a rule

When someone of the opposite sex tells you their type, it’s easy to take it personally when that doesn’t match you. Resist that feeling!

This is the good news for jealous types: my nineteen-year-old self should have chilled the fuck out, rather than obsessing over my GF’s crushflavour. Having the features that she liked – long hair – might bump her opinion of someone a few percent in a good direction, but that’s not going to dramatically change her normal M.O.

This idea of feature X bumping up your opinion of someone slightly becomes very clear when you’re online dating. You’re spending a lot of time looking at faces and – unless they are DOING IT WRONG – bodies. If you’re paying attention, you can deduce from your own actions what eye-colours, what shoulder-shapes, what arbitrary body-things give your brain the holy fucktingles.

Because those things are many, and they are cumulative.

5. My type

It’s not like you can just point to actor/musician/minor TV celebrity X and say, exactly like them. Face facts sunshine, you’re not going to score with someone off the telly. In reality, there’s a bunch of small things that add up to lust, and they can combine in different ways.

Here’s a rough guess at what things work for me, based on how much my reaction will be swayed if those features come up. I’m going RPG-style here and assigning a percentage of opinion boost to each feature. Bear with me:

• Tall: +20%. Over 5’8″ maybe? Not sure. Tall is good.
• Long, straight/wavy hair: +20%. Feminine, touchable. The opposite: scratchy wire-locks.
• Dark hair: +20%. From mid-brown to black, darker the better.
• Red-auburn hair: +40%. Oh god. In chronological order of trouser-twitching: Molly Ringwald, Tiffany, Geena Davis, Gillian Anderson, Kate Winslet, Christina Hendricks.
• Freckles: +10%.
• Playful, irreverent conversational style: +40%. Going into the non-physical here, but to me this characteristic is deep-fried, gold-flavoured platinum from the moon.
• Curvy: +50%. A note of caution: this is an abused term. Technically the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was super fucking curvy, but as we know he was also the ultimate boner-assassin. Curvy does not mean ‘cakey’. It means that your silhouette goes out at the front, and then again at the back. On the spectrum towards TV slagamuffin Kardashian, but in mortal realms. Honestly, there are days when I won’t click on a Match link if it says Fit, Athletic or Slender. Curvy makes my brain happy.
• Full lips: +10%. Straightforward.
• Broad shoulders: +50%. An odd one; likely an early girlfriend influence here. In Wikipedia terms I’m talking apple, banana or hourglass.
• Defined jawline: +30%. It’s hottt and I have no idea why. And after five minutes research, thank you goggle for this niche gem, fuck me.
• Shortish platinum-blonde hair: +20%. A weird outlying attraction I don’t really understand.
• Defined hips: +20%. Waist smaller than hips: important. Hand-shelves.

Note that some of these are mutually exclusive; you can’t have short platinum hair and long dark locks at the same time, but they’re both magic.

How does this work? Well let’s say, hypothetically, I meet Joan from Mad Men:

I’m going to be in serious fucking trouble. My reaction is going to be [feverishly calculates] something like 210% more positive than is strictly rational.

And to reiterate: if a girl technically scores no bonus points – hello short, flat-chested blonde girl – but is amazing, I will still notice she’s amazing. It will just take a normal amount of time.

6. Lust will fuck with you

It’s become clear to me that some random attributes just make you fall for people faster. It’s irrational, it’s out of your control, and it’s terrimazing.

This lack of control is the joy and pain of dating. It can lead you to make bad decisions and emerge in hurtful situations. Often I wish it wasn’t this way; that you could be totally rational about people.

But when it works, you get the fizzing excitement, the uncontainable teenage joy, and lightning strikes of a truer, higher feeling. And that, we all need.

What are your random juice-generators? Clavicles? It’s fun to list them out – let us know.