Pigs and Condoms

I ran across an ad in a particularly well-selling women's magazine today. It pictured a crowded restaurant in which every table was occupied by a beautiful woman and a pig.

Now, when I say pig, what I mean is...pig. This isn't an analogy. These perfect-10 ladies appeared to be enjoying cocktails with curly-tailed, dirt-rolling, H1N1-carrying piggies.

Needless to say, the image got my attention. Bravo, Madison Ave. I took a closer look.

Standing in the midst of this sea of odd couplings, a particularly lovely young woman was talking to the only human male in the room. The two appeared to be getting along, their smiles and body positioning indicating high interest levels.

Across the bottom of the page the tag-line read: Choose the one who uses a condom every time.

"Oh IIIIIIII get it...," I thought to myself.

The pigs represented the scores of men who send the fox into numerous hen houses without a helmet --those filthy animals. The only real man in the room, bless his heart, was the rose among thorns...that one-in-a-million guy who wraps it up each and every time he lets his horse out of the barn. Ah, the difference a little latex makes.

I felt mostly impressed with the ad's creativity, but an unidentifiable sense of annoyance was also looming over my head. I couldn't pin down what exactly was triggering it, so with a little sigh of appreciation for a product well-sold, I flipped the page. It wasn't until I was halfway through an article on the dietary benefits of roughage that I realized what about the clever little ad had bothered me.

"Wait a minute," I thought, flipping back to the page and getting a closer look at the stud in the pumas, "all a man has to do to be a prince among pigs is to roll on a condom before he plows every field in town?"

Hogwash!

How about he keep his tiller in the tool shed to begin with? It's not like the world's a big orgy and random sex is compulsory!

When did it become so mainstream to treat sharing bodily fluids like sharing a bowl of ice cream: just use a different spoon to avoid germs? Call me old-fashioned...call me delusional, even...but I think sex is the kind of transaction you reserve for special relationships, the kind that take more than a crowded bar and a few shots of tequila to cultivate. Yes, condoms protect against STD's, but that's not the only gross thing about doing a stranger. To me, the most unappealing thing about random sex is that it's random sex, a characteristic against which latex wields no power.

I'm not suggesting we all choose celibacy, but don't expect me to swoon for a man-whore just because he's health-conscious. I'm looking for an actual gentleman, a guy who (dare I say it...dare I even dream it) doesn't sleep around. I don't think that's too much to ask.

Until I find this dreamboat, I'll surely avoid being set up by any condom company execs. Clearly, our ideas of a "real man" are very different.

All the Things He Wore

What is it about uniforms? They're like crack to us single girls. I swear, you could put a 5'2", balding, uni-browed, video game addict in a pair of dress blues, and we're sold.

At least, I am.

Maybe this explains why I stayed with Matthew for so long. Maybe I couldn't see the truth under all that camouflage.

For six months, I dated this strapping G.I. Joe, a real war veteran with so many bars and metals and patches strewn across his chest he looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. It's every girl's dream, right?

Wrong. So, so wrong.

In fact, the whole romantic saga was more like a nightmare for both of us. I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say, we played our fair share of patriot games, and we both ended up exhausted.

What's bothering me now is the fact that I stayed in it for so long, when I should have gone AWOL months earlier. The thing is, I seem to do this chronically, draw out bad relationships, that is.

Now, I'm asking why. The uniform is one explanation, but I think it's something deeper. What keeps us with men we know aren't Mr. Right? When it comes to bad relationships, what are we fighting for?

I didn't have to ask too many friends this question before I found myself awash in a sea of similar stories. It seems that every girl I know has had an experience similar to mine: girl meets boy, girl dates boy, girl realizes boy doesn't really love her, girl lays down like a doormat while boy walks all over her for months, and finally, girl dumps boy and packs ice around her heart.

And even though they were all different types, every boy I heard about wore his version of a uniform.

"Chris was the 'life-of-the-party',"Suz told me, "the guy who did back flips in the middle of the dance floor. How could I let go of that?"

"Kevin was a 'bad boy'," Amelia explained. "Sneaking around with him was an adventure to me."

"Mark was a 'deep intellectual'," Shelly described. "He made every subject so rich and intriguing."

These guys sound great, each of them a walking, talking fantasy for a certain segment of the female population. Matthew was the same way. I mean, he was an American Hero, for Uncle Sam's sake! I gushed about his merits for hours.

The thing is, Matthew wasn't just a soldier. He was also pretty impossibly aloof, and he wasn't the only one who looked different underneath all his bells and whistles. Chris was a cheat, Kevin was perpetually in trouble with the authorities, and Mark...well Mark was a pot-head.

Still, we stayed with them. And I don't think it was because any of us were too daft to see what was going on. I think it actually has very little to do with the guys at all.

After much info-gathering and analysis, my expert opinion is that the thing keeping us in doomed relationships...is fear. We are so, so afraid.

Of what?

Being alone, of course.

We're afraid that we'll be shunned without popular Chris, that we'll be bored without edgy Kevin, that we'll find no meaning in life without philosopher Mark. And, maybe most of all, we're afraid that if Sargeant Matthew isn't our hero...no one is. In short, we're afraid this is the best we can do. So, we settle.

I wonder what would happen if we stopped feeling so afraid, if we waited for a our hearts' real champions, instead of settling for a bunch of bums dressed up like them. How many doomed relationships wouldn't make it past the first date? How many guys with an intriguing exterior would be forced to do a little work on the interior? Best of all, what would we find if we were looking less for the right gear and more for the right guy?

It wasn't easy to say goodbye to my soldier, but as I watched him walk away in his camouflage, dog tags jingling, for the last time, I reminded myself of one thing: what I had with Matthew wasn't real love, and real love is the only thing worth a fight.