"…But You Get The Honey Badger For Free!"

“I’d like to buy this television.  It’s got the high definition I’m looking for.”
“Good news!  This wide-screen TV also comes with a complimentary honey badger, at no charge!”
“…a honey badger?  Isn’t that, like, the meanest animal on earth?”
“We prefer to think of it as ‘fuzzy-wuzzy destruction.’  But it’s totally free!  You’ll pay absolutely nothing to have in your home, destroying your couch!  Biting you in your sleep!  Devouring your other pets and vomiting up their bones!”
“Can I just have the television?”
“No, no, you don’t get to decline.  We’ve already put the honey badger in your car.  It’s chewed off the knobs on your radio, so you’ll definitely need the additional entertainment of this brand new television!”
“Couldn’t I just buy another television?”
“Did you not say that this TV had the high definition you were looking for?”
“…yes.”
“Then I think your choice is clear.  Sign here.  Quickly!  Before the honey badger gnaws through your brake line.”
“All right, fine.  But what do I feed my honey badger?”
“Neighbors.  Homeless people.  Ultimately, nosy policemen.”

Now, obviously, this is a silly example, but I see too many people in relationships with a single, extremely positive aspect  – great sex, a partner with a good job,  a lover who tolerates your depression, a partner who would do anything for you.
…then there’s the honey badger.
The honey badger represents all the things that don’t work about this relationship – the furious outbursts, the emotional withdrawal by way of punishment, the sneering disdain of all your other passions, possibly even physical abuse.  There’s usually more than one in this kind of relationship.  And when you point out how obscenely dysfunctional this pairing is and how ultimately unhappy it makes them, they always say the same thing:
“But s/he gives me X.  I just can’t find X anywhere else.”
And that’s the hi-definition television at work.  Yes.  You can find that good aspect elsewhere, and almost certainly housed in a better boy/girlfriend.  Just like there are thousands of televisions that have hi-def cables, there are tons of people who can provide you with great sex or financial stability or depressive support.
Now, it’s scary that you’ll have to go looking, which is a distinct pain in the ass, because I’m not going to tell you that these folks are common.  No, you’ll have to do your due diligence here, comparison shopping at a lot of stores, doing online research, checking Craigslist for surprise bargains.  It’s a lot of work, and some days, yes, you may despair.
But your current television comes with a free honey badger to wreck your life… and there’s no separating the two.  Take the good sex, the honey badger is tagging along.  And that honey badger is ripping apart your other relationships, destroying parts of your happiness, forcing you to be always on guard for the next crazy honey badger assault.  And that’s not a good relationship.  That’s actually a terrible relationship with one good upside that you can mistakenly cling to.
But there are other honey badger-free televisions with the same features.  You can find a better TV somewhere – maybe not one with all the options you had before, and it’ll be a little scary learning to handle the new remote control, but you’ll find this new honey badger-free television has its own upsides you’ll grow to love.
And more importantly, you don’t have to spend your life managing some crazy-ass beast.
Seriously, though.  There are millions of human beings out there, each with their own benefits.  I’m not saying people are interchangeable – they’re not.  But when your lover is shredding your life from the inside, it doesn’t matter how clear this rerun of “Frasier” looks.  It’s time to go.

You Know What Still Weirds Me Out About OKCupid? And, You Know, People?

Three years ago, OKCupid had two separate controls for rating a potential match: Personality and Beauty.  You rated each profile along a five-star rating, one according to what you thought of the personality they expressed in their profile, and another according how strongly you were attracted to the person in the photos.
They collapsed that to a single rating, because as it turned out, most people just chose the same value for both.
Dude, that is fucked up.
There’s a running gag on FetLife (the Facebook for Kinksters) that no guy actually reads the profile, they just look at the pictures and then send messages.  Which is true.  Back when I posted a few shots of my then-girlfriend Jen on my Fet Profile, I got a couple of hi-LAR-ious requests from ignorant men wanting to have sex with me.  I almost took ’em up on it, just to watch the look on their face when they realized I was not the woman in the pictures.
Still, I think the fact that OKCupid’s helpful tool went unused is a sad sign of how society gets fucked around the axle when it comes to attraction.  One of the things that has saved me from a billion terrible relationships is that I can realize that I might want to boink the popcorn out of any given woman, but we’d irritate the hell out of each other during repeated, intimate contact.  When that happens, I’ll fantasize, but I won’t make any moves.
Unfortunately, this is not the way most people work.  When you have only one line of attraction, and the physical is high, then what folks start to do is find ways to bring this heavenly creature’s personality up to snuff.  Which means that you start making excuses for these Amazonian Gods and Goddesses – interpreting their disinterest as cool study of the world, their arrogant dismissal of the things you love as “high taste,” their erratic schedules as proof that they’re unique, fun-loving people.  And because you have no way of making that all-important distinction of, “Beauty: 5, Personality: 2,” you eventually create a situation where you have fabricated a whole personality for someone that doesn’t exist, just so you can try to boink them.
….which, like a dog chasing his tail, thankfully you don’t usually catch ’em.  But when you do, you’re in for months of ugly wearing as you slowly come to realize, Wait, I hate this person.
Look, I’m not saying never to boink a really pretty person who you don’t get along with. Do!  Safely!  Consensually!  Exorbitantly!  But the danger is in trying to transform that single-serving friendship into a relationship.  And you do that by fabricating bits of their personality that don’t actually exist, which is never a good idea.
What your body craves is not the same as what your mind craves, I promise.  Understanding that difference is a vital, healthy thing, one that leads to both more fulfilling relationships and more fulfilling sex, since having control over what you want is a wondrous, wondrous thing. Understand that you can spooge tons of bodily fluids to anyone’s images, and yet outside of the boudoir you might despise each other.
Let that be what it is.  Read their fucking profile.  Get an idea of who this person is that your body wants to bang like a screen door.  Then decide what kind of thing you would desire from them, and whether they might actually want to give that to you, and craft a relationship perfectly devised to this synergy of fleshly pursuit and emotional interplay.
But do not fool yourself.  Do not date people you’ve made up out of whole cloth just so you can gain access to a taut rump.  And even though OKCupid has bowed to the pressure, do not assume that a five-star rating is really a single rating.  It’s at least two.  Maybe five.  Think about all the axes before you make your move.