Gena the hooker cont'd

If that song and/or video makes moral sense to you, something has gone deeply wrong with your character.

I had a post up last week about girls who advertize for sugar daddies and how deluded they are. The really interesting thing here isn't that some young girls get sucked into what is just prostitution so easily. What fascinates me is how much self-delusion involved.

Here is another example of what I mean. There is an article in a publication called Psychological Science in the Public Interest about online dating. Social scientists have studied the services offered and found they don't work. You can listen to a podcast about the article here.)

In discussing reasons that online daters don't have a high success rate, the researchers suggest that the chemistry of the online interaction isn't right, that the algorithms that the computers use to match people up aren't as good as was thought and that there are key bit of information that aren't being evaluated. No one, however, wants to say the key thing out loud.

Because if there is one thing that everyone who uses online dating has in common it is that they have not been able to make a relationship work any other way. No one picks online dating as their first choice to finding a partner. It's the thing you go to when the normal ways of doing this haven't worked out for you.

Sinatra once did an album called Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. I mention this because, he'd originally planned to call it Sinatra Sings for Losers at Love. It's not hard to figure out why he changed the title. No one wants to be thought of as a loser.

More importantly, the people who most fear being thought losers at love are ... well, they are losers at love. And, sorry to hurt anyone's feelings, that is what people who use online dating are. They think they tried the usual stuff and it didn't work but it was them that didn't work.

Okay, "loser" is a harsh word. Put it that way and, well, "Are you telling me there is something wrong with me?" No I'm not. Life is.

You could try changing. Work on your appearance a bit, your social skills, your moral character. Maybe your expectations are out of whack with your actual status.

But no one wants to face that so we don't start thinking about our appearance, our attitudes and our expectations. We blame circumstances instead. "It's so hard meeting people these days." No it isn't! You walk by hundreds of people every day. You work with people. You live next door to people.

I'm sorry to have to put it this way, but most of us meet people we could easily fall in love with without trying. I'm married and most decidedly not looking for someone and yet I meet women and start talking to them casually and bang, something clicks. It's at that point that I make some excuse to casually bring up that I am married.

Which brings me back to Gena. Why does she, and why do the other women (girls really) using these find-a-sugar-daddy services need to advertise in the first place? If she as really as hot as she says she is, likely sugar daddies would pursue her. All she'd have to do is smile at the man making eyes at her at Starbucks and then start a conversation. Any stupid comment about the weather would do.

Gena's primary problem is that she isn't nearly as hot or desirable as she thinks she is.

Let's try coming at it another way. Why does she want this relationship? It's not because the sex is going to be so good. Is it for the gifts? The answer to that is that it's not for the gifts themselves but for what they symbolize. They are her market value. If an older man is willing to spend the cash on dinners, shows, nice clothes and stuff, then she must be really desirable. She must be worth it.

She's not getting this from boys her age. They just want sex. They don't want a relationship. Hell, they don't even want to ask her for a date on the way to getting it.

Or maybe she has a boyfriend but she thinks he only tells her she is hot because he is in love with her. She needs attention from other boys to validate her sense of self worth.

Whatever it is that she needs, she isn't getting it. And she thinks the the problem is all these barriers. It's not her. Never think that.