Piece of Advice #44: Take a good hard look in the mirror

It is always a good idea before embarking on any venture to tally up your assets and liabilities. Business owners who do not do the math have an exponentially higher chance of going bankrupt. Job seekers who do not eagle eye their talents and abilities will find they won't go as far or find a position that fits their skills as neatly. And when dating, if you are not honest with yourself, you will find heartache and humiliation sure as not.

People hold dear the idea that love is about finding your soulmate and that those brave enough and with good hearts and intentions cannot help but find him or her in the dark miasma of the dating world. This is a lovely thought, but it's bunk. There is not a lid for every pot, no matter what your grandmother told you. Some pots have no lids.  Some pots throw away perfectly good lids in search for the best, most smoking hot lid possible. Some pots stay on the burner so long that their contents boil out and they crack. If you approach looking for love in a more practical way, you may, however, find more success.

The fact is that while there may not be a lid for every pot, there are quite a few lids out there, enough for most pots if they are not overly picky or completely full of themselves. It is essential then, that you do that very hard exercise of evaluating yourself as objectively as possible to see what you bring to the table.

One of the things women prefer not to think about is how visually motivated men are - meaning if they like what they see, they'll pursue it.  If not, they move on.  A woman can have a host of fantastic internal attributes and external accomplishments, and she's still subject to the "Hot or Not" rule.  It ain't fair.  And for those woman who are smarter than they are pretty, it really burns.  But it is what it is, so evaluate what you've got physically and see what you have to work with.  Be honest.  Be brutally honest.  The more honest you are, the more you sooner you can get working on your trouble spots.  While it's true that most of us get the faces we are born with, we do have control over our weight, the way we dress, and how put together we are generally.

Last night I wasted a good hour and a half watching Battle of the Bods on Hulu.com.  If you haven't seen it, the premise is that five women present themselves very scantily dressed to be ranked by a panel of three men.  There are three rankings: face, one body part (selected by the women as a group), and whole package.  The women have to guess how the men will rank them.  If their rankings match the men's rankings, they win money.  So there are battling incentives here for each woman: the need to be perceived as the hottest/most beautiful and the need to go home with some cash.  And because the money is won as a group and distributed evenly among the women, they need to nail down who is hot and who is not quickly and ruthlessly.  There isn't time for diplomacy.  

Here is one of the episodes I watched last night:



Some observations:

• None of these woman are beautiful.  Only one is really "hot" and she has a hard face with a masculine aspect and a stripper's mannerisms.  
• The four average or just above average women are all hanging on by their fingertips to the idea that they are beautiful.  And not just beautiful, but more beautiful than the rest. 
• One wonders, if you took away everything that is fake about all the women's appearances - boobs, makeup, hair color, tanning, etc. - and then re-ranked them, would anything change?
• Some of them are not only not beautiful, but pretty bitchy as well.
• The men evaluating them are completely comfortable with this process and don't hesitate to knock the less attractive women down to the bottom of the heap.

What would also be interesting to see is a numerical ranking from the men, not a ranking of the women relative to each other.  Because I think some of these women would be surprised to find themselves rated a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 (or below).  What seems to be the case here is that all these women think they are 8's and 9's and expect to be able to date and keep men who are also 8's and 9's when in reality they are out of that league except perhaps for short flings.  If they were more honest with themselves, they might 1) be able to address their physical flaws or, alternatively, work on their personalities 2) lower their expectations of what they can expect to attract on the dating market.  Clarity of vision might save them some heartache down the line as well as spare the male population their overweening hubris.

I have to say, it is beyond me why anyone would ever want to go on this kind of show and subject themselves to this.  You couldn't get me on Battle of the Bods unless you held a gun to my mother's head.  I do think, though, that a smarter strategy for one of these girls would be to immediately claim the #5 space.  This strategy would both disarm the other girls' suspicions and hostile competitiveness, and save face - because if the girl was hotter than the #5 space, the others would be forced to admit this publicly or lose money.  In any case, she would be in no danger of losing anything by being self-deprecating: she either is #5 and admits it, taking the sting out of the judgment, or she isn't and everyone else has to "persuade" her to take the higher ranking which makes her look two kinds of good.