The Man Guide

I thought it only fair to add the different kind of men that are out there. I know I’ve been at least one of these guys once or twice and maybe one of these guys all the time. I didn’t want to just generalize the wimmins.

The Friend Zone: Ladies, this is the guy who over hears you talking about how your relationship isn’t going so well and he all of the sudden is asking you all the time how things are going. After you break up with your boyfriend, your new friend is asking you to hang out with him all the time. He never lets you know what his intentions are, for he is waiting for you to notice his perfect listening skills and almost girlfriend like attributes. He starts calling you his best friend and things go well until you meet some guy and after you tell your friend about him, your friend gets a little uptight. He’ll tell you how much the guy sucks and how he isn’t good for you in hopes that you’ll forget about this guy and notice him. After you start dating someone you’ll notice him latching on to some other girl whose relationship is in the whirlpool waiting to spring. There is no sex with a Friend Zone.

The Emo Eyeliner: He is the sad eyed misunderstood artist. He’s in the corner at the party brooding. Don’t fall for his trap; he is just baiting a nice codependent girl to ask him if he’s okay. If you fall for his trap, you find him looking away in sadness and being an emotional mystery. He gives you moments of romance and is often creative in his hand made letters and mix tapes that always include the Smiths or Belle & Sebastian. Some nights when you decide to hang out with the ladies he’ll call and text you to say he’s having a hard time and that he needs you. He’ll plead with you if you decide that you’d rather finish drinking wine and discussing if the Paleo diet is healthy or not, but he is a persistent little crybaby and you’ll finally get over to his apartment and find him playing his bass guitar and you wait for him to stop playing and then he tells you he doesn’t want to talk about it as he broods. This will be a terrible ex boyfriend because he’ll make sure you never forget him. Sex starts off strong, but you’ll end up having to initiate every time because he needs to feel wanted.

The Chad: This is the Friend Zone’s morbid enemy. The Chad is the beefcake buffoon. He’s ruggedly handsome and a brutish rogue. He’s loud and loves to have a good time. His little sexist and homophobic remarks are almost cute at first. He takes charge and makes decision like a boss. Some of your friends are a little concerned about your choice, but you assure them that he is a cupcake behind close doors, which he is at times. His romantic skills are simple, but he tries. His idea of dressing up is to wear pants instead of his plaid shorts. He spends a lot of time with his homies and will make excuses why he can’t hang out with you and your friends. The Chad goes bad a few different ways. He might become abusive and/or unwilling to change his rude obnoxious ways, or he will cheat on you with some girl he met at a sports bar during a college football game, or he will just grow bored or scared a few months down the road and dump you. He is confident in the bedroom. Sometimes he tries to act like he’s in a porn movie too much.

The Professor: He is older and he’s been there and done that. You might have met him through some friend’s older brother or at an AA meeting, but you love hearing his stories of the good ole days. He’s also intelligent and knows how to treat a lady. He courts you by taking you out on actual dates. Sometimes you don’t get what he’s talking about and sometimes he doesn’t get your jokes. You find the cultural differences in age to be frustrating sometimes. You become annoyed with him because he’s stuck in his ways and finds your cultural tastes to be annoying and sophomoric. You realize that he’s not going to change and you haven’t run your race, so you leave him to pursue you race. He is crushed and cries like a little bitch as you take off on your bike. The sex was great. He knew what he was doing and wasn’t afraid to put his mouth to work.

Dennis the Menace: They take the best part of the Emo Eyeliner and the worst part of the Chad to become a Dennis the Menace. You get the romance and the mix tapes, but you get the lack of emotional attachment and Dennis the Menace never ever wants to grow up. Its fun at first riding your bike around and hanging out in parks and at hipster bars every single day and night, but you realize that you need sleep and it starts to get boring. He went to some junior college, but right now he’s working part time as a bar back or a barista and lives in a tiny closet under some stairs at a house with nine other dudes, so he stays at your place all the time. Laundry starts to happen, his friends stop by and hang out on the front porch till 3am and some days you leave for work he is asleep and when you get back from work he is still asleep. You start to feel like his mother with asking when he’s going back to school or get a better job, but he just wants to hang out and doesn’t want to work for the Man. Sex is great until you start having sex with him sober and he’s wasted on PBR. You start to get annoyed with him because he won’t get to your house till four in the morning, has sex and goes right to sleep. You hopefully break up with him.

The Aristocrat: He’s good looking, he dresses well and he’s rich. You met at an art gallery and your friend who did the art knows him because he paid her to paint a mural in his downtown loft. He wines and dines you and you feel less than adequate when he spends his money on you. Almost right away he makes promises of trips to Europe and staying in his mountain cabin – in Aspen. You meet his friends and you notice that he talks about you like you are being presented as a possession rather than a lover. To end any uncomfortable situation, he buys his way out with gifts, but never addresses the issue that causes the fight in the first place. You see him when its convenient for him and sex is almost a business transaction for him. He usually breaks things off because of work stress and usually starts dating someone a few weeks later.

The Relationship in Theory Guy: This guy has spent a lot of time reading books, going to lectures and talking to his therapist about how to do relationships. You might think, what could possibly go wrong? A lot actually, for he is doing all of this based on wisdom gleamed from books and teachers and hardly has time to feel anything. He will want to process every little thing you guys do, he’ll dictate rules on what days you guys can hang out and what days you guys will need for yourselves, he might try to get you to join him to therapy. You never get any of that passion early relationship feeling because of how much he has spent squashing it with anxiety inducing monologues about relationship theories. Sex will probably be bland and vanilla because he is scared of turning the relationship away from love and towards lust. You will break up with him and he’ll want to come by for some closure.

The Hot Flash: This guy is passionate and full of love – for two weeks and then dies inside. He blasts you with romance and talk about how much he wants this relationship to work. He has all the right qualities and does the dating thing right with flowers and picking great restaurant, but then after two weeks, you find yourself wondering why he hasn’t called all day when he used to call, text, email, stop by, Skype, Facebook post and comment several times a day. He usually takes a week or so before making the move to separate. If you haven’t had sex in awhile, then you should take your chances with The Hot Flash because he’ll rock your world for a week or two, but don’t get too attached because you’ll be left cold.

Your Ex: He was so young then and going through all that shit with not having a job and being depressed all the time, but now he’s older, has a job and seems a little better now. You guys get to skip the getting comfortable with each other part and just get right to business of being in a relationship. Maybe it works for a while, but then all the things that made the relationship fail the first time is still present and never got better. While the sex is great right away due to comfort boundaries already set, you will find that the sex wasn’t as great as you remember it.

The Misogynist: He’s with you because he doesn’t know he doesn’t have to have a girlfriend. He hates you and he hates his mother. She must have done a horrible job raising him and he thinks you are going to do the same thing: abandon him in his time of need. He thinks you are going to cheat on him – he might think you are already cheating on him. You had no idea that he was so untrusting and suspicious when you first got together. You start to get the idea that something is wrong because he doesn’t talk to you about plans and he second-guess your decisions. When you try to talk about the relationship with him he gets defensive and annoyed that you always have to process everything. Sex is weird and you almost think he might be gay with the way he seems uninterested in your body. Usually he cheats on you and when you break up with him for it he hates you for the rest of your life and you help him know that all women are horrible.

The Perfect Guy: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I hope this will help you ladies. I’m not saying that there aren’t any good guys out there, but they are few and far between and they are usually already taken.