Dategirl

MY BITTER SARCASTIC personality attracts women. It's pretty good at drawing them in... until they realize and finally believe that I'm actually a bitter and sarcastic person all the time. I don't imagine that a dour attitude is attractive. I'm pretty confident that unending negativity is not what most people look for.

Yet if I go to a party and drop a few nasty witticisms, women love me. The first date usually goes well, and then they still want me to call again, only to then flee two dates later when they learn it wasn't a pose.

So, I have four questions. First, why are women attracted to bitterness? Second, why do they expect it to change? Third, if they do think that the bitter nastiness was a pose, why would they glom onto a poseur? Fourth, how do I sort it out and actually find women that will enjoy and accompany my negative attitude?

Angry About Nothing

Women are attracted to bitter dark men because you guys generally appear to be smarter and more interesting than your average beer-drinking, sports-consuming, fart-lighting mook. I'm, ahem, well-acquainted with your type. You're generally white, well-educated, employed and well-read. You grew up in a two-parent home and probably wanted for very little as a child. Chances are there was a white picket fence and a dog named "Lucky" or "Sparky" involved. I'm betting you were in the gifted children's class, and each year your family went on a two-week vacation to some kid-friendly resort town. In short, you had a perfectly idyllic childhood.

Inexplicably, this pisses you off. So to cope, you develop that most annoying condition known as the White Boy Mope, or WBM for short.

WBM manifests itself in several ways: The subject is self-obsessed without being remotely self-aware, and while he has no problem laughing at others, he wouldn't dream of poking fun at himself. He's a textbook narcissist, but cloaks it in a shroud of pseudo self-loathing. Anything imperfect in his life is somebody else's fault, but since there's no junkie dad or child-molesting priest skulking about in his past, he has to look a little harder to find someone to blame. When his band doesn't make it, it's because only pretty boys (or pretty girls) get record deals. When he gets passed over for a promotion at work, it's not because someone else is more qualified, it's because he's not a minority. Sound familiar?

At first glance, the White Boy Mope appears to be funnyin a dark, sarcastic, slightly mysterious way. Who wouldn't find that appealing? And when a WBM likes you, it's as though you've been admitted into an exclusive club with only two membersafter all, he hates everyone. Everyone except you. So you start to date, and at first it's really fun. You, being sane, like having fun and get happier as a result. He, being psychotic, twists the good time he's having with you into something ugly. He mutters profundities like, "I have no good in my heart," and, "I'm too twisted and dark to ever give you what you need." Yet you know he went to an Ivy League school, has never indulged in the ritualized torture of small animals and comes from a gene pool where baldness and obesity don't exist. His parents are still together, and as far as you can tell, there are no bodies buried in the basement. You search and search for the source of all this angst, yet keep coming up empty.

The reason you keep coming up empty is because there's absolutely no good reason for this jackass to feel so sorry for himself. From there it's a short leap to figuring out that there's even less reason for you to stick around and listen to his incessant whinging.

Which, Angry, is why these broads dump you after a couple dates. It's not that these ladies think you're a poseur, they just assume that meeting a cute, smart, funny dame who gives impromptu blowjobs at the drop of a pant and never ever asks you what you're thinking might cheer your whiny ass up. When it doesn't, weI mean, theysplit.

As for finding a woman who will feed and nurture your bleak outlook and rampant misanthropy, that's not as difficult as it might sound. The first trick is to look for someone very young and well-educated, though at the same time, not very bright. Ideally, this girl will also be extremely pretentious. She's that chick in the corner of the coffee shopthe one cultivating the ever-popular naughty librarian look. You'll know her by the dog-eared copy of Discipline & Punish (in the original French, natch!) resting next to her soy chai. She'll sigh often and loudly. She'll use "journal" as a verb.

The two of you will smoke imported cigarettes and indulge in endless, disaffected talks about the futility of life, the myth that is love and the wretched darkness of your over-educated, cursedly privileged, white-people souls. Everyone within hearing distance of you two will want to jam searing red-hot forks into your eyeballs, but that's just fine with you, because really, life is so ugly anyway