I Only Love Men Who Are Hard To Love

A guy told me once, “I could never be with someone who wanted to be with me.” I told it to my coworkers recently when we were trading dating horror stories and we all laughed because, that’s so clearly a harmful way of thinking. How will you ever be happy? You will always be chasing and never finding. It’s setting yourself up to fail.

And then I realized, my own dating ethos is just as faulty.

Maybe part of it is studying philosophy, where you don’t look for the easy kill. It’s a better exercise of your mental muscles to consider why the dominant opinion is wrong. So I do this, constantly. I’m not a Christian, in the traditional sense, but I defend them constantly because it’s such an unpopular opinion to have that people rarely put thought into insulting it anymore. I might be becoming a republican because I want to be aligned as far away from this desire ban discourse in favor of not offending anyone talk that’s going on. I have a compulsive need to cheer for the underdog.

The harder the opinion is to hold, the more appealing it becomes to figure out how I can rationalize having it.

With men, I think there are plenty of them that feel they are a catch–and that’s fine, it’s basically your whole job as adult to find a way to feel this way. But I like the ones that haven’t figured this out yet. Of course, this is a difficult path to romantic success, and not one I can measure by outcome. But in the moment, I think, I can’t imagine anything being more fulfilling than showing someone that they are wrong about the low esteem in which they regard themselves.

So, I want to love people that don’t think they are worth it. Because it’s entertainment for me to convince people of things. Because it’s boring to agree with someone (when they already believe they’re worthy). And, because everyone deserves love, inherently, and I want to give it to someone who isn’t going to find it without me.