Men … are like blue jeans
By Patricia Scull Men … are like blue jeans. (Women, perhaps, in the case that you are a boy.
Or otherwise sexually oriented.) What I mean is that … dating can be
likened to the relationship you have with your pants. Think about it. Blue
jeans are universally appealing; most everyone wears them. Most everyone
dates. The only ready exception I can come up with at the moment is nuns:
Nuns don’t date. However, do nuns wear blue jeans? My point exactly.
Anyway. So you’re in a store. Maybe you’re looking for a new pair of
jeans, maybe you’re not. (Contrary to popular belief, women aren’t ALWAYS
looking for a pair of jeans). You spot THE cutest pair and rush over to get
a closer look. From here, a number of things might happen. You go over to
the rack and …??
a) Realize that the “cute” jeans from far away are actually not-so-cute up
close;?
b) Take a gander at the price tag and realize that this particular pair of
jeans is way out of your [price] range;?
c) You may be turned off by some other various aspect of the blue jeans (for
instance, they might have a wash on them that you couldn’t see from ten feet
away, but up close, it looks as if a nauseous platypus has swallowed and
then regurgitated them into a pit of mud); ?
d) OR you might get a look at them close up and realize that they seem
pretty darn perfect. Ack! And they're in your size too. You grab them and
head to the dressing room to try them on.
If you do indeed make it to step d, you are on your way to the second part
of this colorful metaphor. So you liked the jeans enough to “try them on.”
You’re past the initial “attraction” stage. What happens when you and the
jeans are finally alone in the dressing room? I know all that fluorescent
lighting can be a bit of a deterrent to the whole process. Just try to
imagine that your backside doesn’t look like it has the consistency of
canned dog food. Focus. On. The jeans. One of three things could happen
here. You might fall in love with the jeans right then and there. Or, you
might not really know just how you feel about them yet. Maybe you like the
dark wash but hate the small belt loops. In this case, you just have to
think carefully about what would benefit you better in the long run. Do you
have a lot of big belts that these jeans just obviously wouldn’t work with?
Or would you rather look past the belt issue and feel skinnier in a dark
color pant? Whatever. It’s your choice here. Merely a matter of
preference. Moving on. The third (and by far, worst) option here is that
you could have the kind of encounter that makes you want to take a vow of
celibacy. Just live in sweatpants. Well that’s pretty much the same thing.
Let’s hope this never happens to you. Provided that you leave the
dressing room encounter physically unscathed and emotionally unharmed, and
you like the jeans enough to actually plunk down the coin for them, we are
in completely new territory now. ??
Maybe you put your “favorite” pair of jeans in the closet for a little while
and kind of forget about them. Take some other pairs out for a test drive
with the coveted “favorite” designation. Sometimes you come back to the
original favorite. Sometimes you don’t. And sometimes, while you are out
rendezvous-ing with your formerly less-than-favorite pair, (you know, that
pair you’ve had forever with the fade that’s come naturally over time, the
pair that you can rely on to make any top look great, the pair that you just
never thought about because it’s always just been … there) … sometimes, over
time, that pair in the middle of the laundry stack can suddenly morph into
the jeans you’ve always dreamt about. You just never realized how great
they made your ass look before.
