The Rhythm Of Life

"Back To The Cave Beeotch!"

Writing Stats:Sunday, July 27, 2003@02:33 p.m.

A beautiful, intelligent girl ignores the nice ones around her to date the first Neanderthal she can find. Instead of wising up while dating said stone aged throwback, she does nothing but bitch and moan about how wonderful he is but how miserable she is. She fails to listen to friends, family, and co-workers hammering one simple fact home in her brain…the guy you’re dating, he’s a TOOL!

And what usually happens next? Aside from beating a dead horse (or did they ride wooly mammoths back in those days?) women bitch and moan the following: “Chivalry is dead”. I’ve got news for you ladies out there who have ever uttered those words, Chivalry isn’t dead, you just don’t want to know it really exists.

Case in point: Almost every guy I’m friends with. We’re all the same, we’re genuinely nice guys who have had it exceptionally rough in the dating field. In High School I had a girl break up with me because I was, as she put it: “too wholesome.” What the fuck does that mean? What did I do wrong?

Thinking back, I did everything right…I opened doors for her, I unlocked her car door first, held it open for her, and closed it tight behind her. I lit her cigarettes, I gave her the umbrella designed for one when it was raining, I paid for dinner, the movies, EVERYTHING. All she had to do was sit back and enjoy the attention but she didn’t. A few months later she was dating the asshole she’d been seeing off and on for years and I found her screaming at the top of her lungs one day: “Chivalry is dead! Chivalry is dead!”

Chivalry: Let’s define it first of all. Chivalry: The qualities idealized by knighthood, such as bravery, courtesy, honor, and gallantry toward women. It is also a manifestation of any or all of these qualities. Basically the only one that doesn’t really apply towards me (at least, in my humble opinion, though maybe some of you “Dave Exes” out there might prove me wrong) is bravery, because when it comes to standing up for myself, I usually back away. I call it being the bigger man, but we all know what that REALLY is. Still, I generally fit the description above, as do Jake and Nick, two other friends in a similar boat as me.

So if these gallant knights DO exist, why do women swear up and down that they don’t. Pardon me while I now turn off my entire female audience with the answer. For one million dollars with all three lifelines still intact, my final answer is: Because it’s much much easier for women to bitch about it not existing, than it is for them to admit that it does. Shall I clarify? They like to bitch about their lack of a meaningful relationship because to go out and actually HAVE a meaningful relationship takes too much extra energy. They have nothing to complain about.

Lets face it. Women, you will spend an entire afternoon in a shoe store trying on everything until you find the perfect pair. You buy them, you wear them ONCE, ONE TIME! FIVE HOURS FOR ONE FREAKING PAIR! So if you can buy throw away shoes with so much thought and so much reason put into them, WHY IS IT that you’ll go home with the first guy who buys you a beer? What happened to your iron clad reasoning abilities?

Again, before I turn everyone off and the rapidly appearing links to Rhythm of Life disappear from websites everywhere, let me support my argument to the best of my ability, AND point out that there are exceptions to every rule. There are women out there who sought out the knights, and there are a trail of Neanderthals along the way. There are men out there who wear the suit of armor but actually just picked it up and put it on because it was shiny. From the experiences with the women I’ve liked, and the experiences my friends have had, it’s just led me to the fact that women aren’t completely blameless for relationship failures themselves. About 50% of them THINK they are, but I’m sure the actual statistic, should Stanford ever do a study would be somewhere around 10-15% of women who actually ARE.

That however, does NOT mean that 85-90% of men ARE to blame, sometimes these things just don’t work out, and there’s no actual blame to be assigned. But women, at least the ones I’ve met are much more content to find a cave man who will beat them over the head with a wooden club and drag them back to the cave by the hair shouting “MINE” to all the other cave men in his path, than they are to find that quiet shy cave man in a corner who would actually wallpaper her kitchen in rabbit hides and occasionally let her sleep when the cave babies started crying.

I’ve beat the cave man metaphor to death, so lets jump into modern times. You’ve all seen those blasted teen movies where the girl dates the asshole while her best friend sits in the wings going “OO! OO! PICK ME! PICK ME!” at the moment of reckoning. Thanks in part I’m sure to Hollywood and Melrose Place, these are the situations the vast majority of the people in our generations like to get themselves into. The exact reasoning behind it? I’m a little unclear, perhaps it makes our lives more interesting, or at least seem that way.

Lets take a look into Kara’s vault. This is a pre-Jed story. Kara, while interning in her district this past spring, took it upon herself to fall for a Neanderthal. It just so happened a Knight was waiting around the corner, though the Knight was busy stealing cars, and the princess drove past him several times without even noticing he was there. Kara fell for a man who gave himself the nickname: “The Dominator” His friends at school thought it was so bloody ridiculous that he would give himself a nickname, that they gave him a new one, and to this day he’s still called LuLu.

“The Dominator” would make plans with Kara and instead go drinking with friends forgetting all about his plans with Kara. Kara would call “the gang” we’d get together sit on her balcony smoking and listening to her rant about how much she disliked the damn guy. To us the solution was obvious: “DITCH HIM!!!!”

Like you did to Jeremy…I thought to myself as a tagline. Jeremy was actually the closest thing to a knight Kara had dated in the time I had known her, he was a bartender at a bar (a different one from the bartender we’ll meet in a few minutes) who basically did nothing but treat her very well. She dropped him like bad long distance coverage.

But Kara held on to “The Dominator” for about a month. Twice did I meet this guy, and twice did he make a bad impression on me. Kara would stick up for him saying “he makes bad first impressions” but my experience has been that nine times out of ten, the first impression is the actual person, and if you don’t like it you’re probably stuck with him. We’d go out his friends and Kara’s friends, and he would make it a point to move to opposite ends of the bar with his friends and Kara, while Jake and I sat there with our drinks going “oh I’m so glad KARA drove tonight, now we’re stuck here in ignorance-ville, population US!”

Desperate for Kara to do SOMETHING without “The Dominator” for once, we ended up taking her to Bells one night when he ditched out on their plans and she was feeling her usual early evening “The Dominator Ditched Me” depression. We talked, and Jake and I spilled out feelings towards “The Dominator” as we had about fifteen different times. “He’s making you miserable” “He’s making you irritable” “He’s making you Bitchy” “It’s like you’re on the rag 24-7.”

The thesis of our argument was basically: “You’re unhappy, you need to get out before you’re in a relationship with Zeke again.” She’d smile nod that we were right, but then turned around with arguments such as “But he’s a really great guy once you get to know him.”

Stop right there. Women, if you EVER hear yourself saying that to your FRIENDS, the ones who have known you for EVER, about someone you just met a month or two before that EVERYONE is saying is quite possibly in Guinness for being the worlds biggest TOOL, either shoot yourself or actually end the conversation.

That same night however she got a drunken phone message from “The Dominator” and found out he had misled her with his actual plans for the night. She got so pissed off that she ALMOST left with the bartender...

Jake and I had seen her go off to talk to him, he’s someone we’ve known for awhile anyway. We both had the “This sucks lets get Kara and get out of here” conversation when we turned to look for her and saw her sucking face with said bartender. Not a quick peck, this was a sweaty, tongue in someone else’s cheek groping around to feel each other’s bodies up kind of deal. Our jaws dropped to the floor and we ordered another round.

When Kara returned we grilled her for close to twenty minutes. Now not only was she still pissed at “The Dominator” but she was pissed at herself for what she now considered her cheating on him.

It was a lose lose situation. Jake and I got her out of the bar, and about a week later things finally ended with “The Dominator” Kara had wised up, but what had she learned from this relationship?

Negative reinforcement. From her relationship with Zeke she left with trust issues, and now not only did she leave her relationship with “The Dominator” with even more of those than before, she now had added insecurities with not being able to trust herself in a relationship. This has carried over into her relationship with “Sir Jed”

So, this weeks message: The moral of our Story: the sugar in the pie, whatever you want to call it: Ladies, before you say Chivalry is dead and start hating men for the way they treat you, ask yourself this: Are you in a relationship that you’re actually getting something out of other than a prescription for Prozac, or are you genuinely happy and just going through a little bit of a rough spell. The Knights are out there, granted they’re fewer in number than they were back in medieval times, but they’re greater in numbers than they were in the stone age. Neanderthal or Knight? Which one are you dating?