One thing to clear up before we get to this Thursday’s letter…
JJ72: WTF? Being bald is not an “disadvantage.” To some it’s attractive, to others it’s not. But that’s true about every physical attribute.
JJ72 is talking about the opening paragraph to the first question in this week’s Savage Love:
Your inexperience isn’t the enormous disadvantage you imagine it to be — read a newspaper — but even if it were a disadvantage, TBD, everybody’s got disadvantages: short guys, bald guys, bi guys, old guys, guys with niche kinks, guys who are living in their parents’ basements. But telling yourself that no one could possibly want you because you’re short, bald, bi, etc., is the biggest disadvantage of all because it stops you from trying.
As I pointed out to TBD in my response, his lack of experience — he’s a virgin at 22 — will make him more attractive to some women and less attractive to others. But it’s not a wash: the women who find him more attractive because he’s inexperienced and the women who don’t care are going to be outnumbered by the women who won’t want to date him due to his inexperience. But he shouldn’t let his inexperience stop him from putting himself out there.
Same goes for bisexual guys: lots of straight women are into bi guys, lots don’t care, and some even fetishize bi guys — the letters I get from women who are dying to watch their boyfriends suck a cock! — but straight women are into/open to bi guys are outnumbered by straight women who aren’t. (And we have data.) So, to some being bi is attractive, to others it’s not… but, again, not a wash: being bisexual clearly puts hetero-romantic bi guys at a disadvantage. But that shouldn’t stop bi guys from coming out and putting themselves out there.
Same goes for baldness: many women (and men!) find it attractive, many don’t — and it seems pretty clear that the former are outnumbered by the latter. I mean, all those balding men flying to Istanbul for hair transplants are evidence that balding men themselves perceive baldness as a trait that disadvantages them. It doesn’t disadvantage them with absolutely everyone, obviously (and I didn’t say that it did), but most guys aren’t indifferent to losing their hair due to a real (not just perceived) disadvantage.
There were a couple of lines in that response that I removed because 1. the column was long and 2. the point seemed obvious: Yes, short guys, bi guys, bald guys, etc., are at a disadvantage. “And yet you can find plenty of short guys, bi guys, bald guys, etc., with wives and girlfriends, so being disadvantaged in some way doesn’t mean a guy is doomed to be single. And since every guy with a wife or girlfriend (or a husband or a boyfriend) was completely inexperienced at some point in his life, we can infer that being inexperienced is not fatal to a man’s romantic prospects.”
Hey, did you watch my video about “The myth of ‘The One'”? Not anything I haven’t said on the show — not anything I haven’t been saying for years — but reading through the comments just now, it sure seems to have resonated with a lot of people. Watch here.
Okay, here’s this Thursday’s letter…
There’s a middle-aged woman in our circle who constantly complains about her sex life with her husband. Or rather, her lack of a sex life. Basically, her husband hardly ever fucks her.) She complains about this all the time, even when her husband is sitting next to her. He just stares into space. When I asked her what she hoped to accomplish by doing this, she said she wanted her friends to persuade him to give her more love. But their sex life is not our business or our problem. I strongly suspect that the man is borderline asexual. I recommended counseling but she said that they had had YEARS of counseling, and it didn’t work because the counselors all told her she had to accept her husband the way he is, and she absolutely refuses to do that, because it would be “giving in.” I’m tired of all our social events being hijacked by her rage and self-pity. Can someone like this wake up from their self-inflicted nightmare, or should we just dump her?
Feeling Really Irritated, Eying Dumping Someone
Got some advice for FRIENDS? Drop it in the comments.