I try my best not to cringe when my friends and family give me advice about finding love. I know more often than not, they’re just trying to be encouraging and keep me from becoming a bitter cat lady reading romance novels alone in New York City (gulp)—but sometimes, it can be a little irritating to hear what someone else thinks about my dating life.
Or even worse—when my friends make offhand comments that I’m sure they mean well by (but irk me more than anything else). To name a few: “You know, maybe you should go out more,” “You maybe should go out less, no one meets people at bars these days,” “Have you tried online dating? My friend’s brother’s cousin met her husband that way,” “Maybe it’s because you online date, those guys are just strange. Why are they online anyway?”
The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that everyone—from your grandma to your co-worker—has a different idea about what you should be doing to meet someone. And even more interesting, they all have varying visions of what your future hubby will be like and look like. So it’s kind of hard to take anyone seriously when all of their visions are contradictory.
But then again, I suppose they do know me better than the algorithms on OkCupid or the perfect-date-formula developed by Match.com. They might not be dating experts—but maybe their opinions on The One for me could, at the very least, help me a little. Or better yet, give me a few ideas to expand my eligibility horizons—there could be a whole pool of men I’m overlooking that I could be really into but aren’t on my radar.
And let’s be real: After three plus years of being single, I’m open to anything.
So I went out on a limb, tucked away my pride, and asked some of the important people in my life who they imagined me marrying one day. The result was…interesting…and it's probably something I'd suggest to any single person.
The thing that surprised me more than anything was the personality types they saw for me, and how strangely different that was from who I typically date. If I look back at my dating history, it seems like I go for the same type of guy. They might look different, come from varying backgrounds, and have different careers, but if you put them in a room together and gave them a case of beer, you’d see how similar they actually were. For whatever reason, I’ve found myself drawn to these dynamic, life-of-the-party, egotistical—and even at times rude and sarcastic—type of men. They have full personalities and (somewhat) successful careers, but I’ve never really dated someone who, well, was a really genuine, good-hearted guy.
But when it came to my best friends, my mother, my father—and probably my pup Lucy, too, if she could speak—they all said I needed a quieter, more loving, ridiculously kind-hearted, romantic guy.
I like the way my friend Jenn said it best: “He's incredibly sweet and gentle. He has a warm personality, he’s a little mushy-and-gushy—but you like that!—and he can't keep his hands off of you, which you need. He will do anything to make you happy and to assure you that he's here to stay.”
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Though I’ve had several boyfriends, my biggest complaint with all of them is that sense of comfort—or lack thereof. I always feel like they have one foot out the door and they aren’t falling for me in the same way or at the same speed that I am. And I may be putting my foot in my mouth here, but maybe it’s because I keep picking the interesting-yet-unavailable man instead of considering the nice, funny, perhaps goofy marketing dude in the corner holding a bouquet of flowers and telling me I have pretty eyes.
So what did I learn from this little experiment? That maybe I should give my friends and family more credit. Reading what my favorite people believe I need in a partner really made me think about what matters the most to me—and that I should open my mind a little more about dating. I could try to go for a more reserved, quiet kind of man. Perhaps I should take a break from dating guys with a certain career and a certain height and venture out a little more.
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If you’re willing to give it a shot, I suggest picking people you know from different periods in your life and who know you to different degrees. I’m close with my family, so I asked them. I also asked a friend in a long-term relationship and one who is single, plus my married roommate from college and my current single roommate. I asked women who have dated in NYC for a decade and ones who have never been on a date out of college.
Keep your questions breezy, too—you don’t need them to get terribly specific, you’re just taking a chance to see how other people envision your dating life instead of looking through the same lens you’ve been wearing for hundreds of first dates and happy hour drinks.
I’m not sure how much will change about how I date and who I call back, but I’m at least going to take their advice to heart instead of being offended by it. And I’ll try my best to not roll my eyes when they promise me that my love is (definitely, one day, eventually) on his way.
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