Men Who Don't Love Me: The Alpha Male

Six feet five inches tall with eyes the color of -- the color of nothing I've ever seen before. Half Russian sailor, half Colorado point guard, he is lean and powerfully built. Nothing added, nothing wasted with the v-shaped torso other men covet and women want to embrace.

He has elaborate tattoos that scroll up his forearms. Curling patterns and finely detailed vines swirl over his pale flesh, monochromatic, suited to his minimalist habits. Until the day I saw him sleeveless, I had to live with a maddening ignorance of the extent of that ink. Finally I discovered that his work coils over his biceps and stops at his delts, leaving the rest of him as pale and blameless as the day he was born. His wrists are one of the few elusive parts of him that seem fragile, offering a wild sweetness that softens his intensity.

Like everyone who encounters him -- even gay women describe him as awesome -- I am fascinated by his physique. But after I met him, all of my adjectives changed. Describing him to a girlfriend, she interrupted my endless catalog of "sweet, fierce, gentle, funny" to ask, "Yeah -- but is he CUTE?" And then I knew: all of that fabulous packaging had become The Last Thing on My List.

That list is a real thing and in a crowded field what typically rises to the top is his aversion to causing pain. I myself have benefited hugely from this. He does not know but I met the Alpha Male at a desperate time in my life. Quite unwillingly, I was close to a karmic bingo of sorts, with four of the top-five-ranked life crises all occurring simultaneously. This condensed stress caused a significant uptick in what I will kindly describe as my tendency to blather, something the Alpha Male hates. He will never discover that I could easily spend an hour with him in total silence, basking in the solid warmth of his presence like a cat on a sunny windowsill.

I once casually asked if he enjoyed Thai food - and experienced a spike of humiliation as I realized that could have been interpreted as a dating inquiry. My cringing embarrassment melted into admiration for his decency though as I watched him search for an answer that would dismiss me without injuring me. His ultimate reply was delivered in a halting cadence like an open-mike poetry slam. "I mostly cook my own food." Revealing a skill women universally admire while diverting any hope of a hot time Saturday night? Now that is a man worth knowing better.

He dates only Pretty Girls, the ones that shine. They swarm all over him and he is sweetly unaware enough of his own worth to be grateful for their attention. They will always have his eye because in all the ways that matter, they are most emphatically Not Like Me. Their skin glows in the long summer sun and their hair sluices down their backs, tousled and touchable. Their manners are enticing, their smiles beguiling and their giggles like music. For crying out loud, even I think they're gorgeous. And if I ever jump the fence, they're exactly what I'll be looking for in a date -- yet will be sadly unable to obtain, I might add. Be gentle, girls, and know this: his real beauty does not show. His most impressive muscle is a heart that is surprisingly generous and loyal.

I must reluctantly admit that The Big Picture Me knows all the reasons why he and I don't fit -- jeepers there are lots and, uh, lots actually. But The Daily Me whines and rebels. In the harsh light of reality, all those reasons boil down to just one: he's never actually even seen me. Perhaps it is part of his pared-down efficiency that edges towards ruthlessness, but he has never wasted even the nanosecond it would require to catalogue the 837 obvious reasons why we would be a train wreck.

His disregard of me is epic and positively glacial -- an iceberg wrapped in barbed wire. And I, apparently, am the Titanic. I felt a bump to be sure. But at the time, it just didn't seem that bad. It was only later that I noticed how heavily I was listing to my starboard side. By then, my fate was inevitable. All my hysteria seems even more ridiculous if measured in proportion to the time we have spent together.

I know they say, "Whenever God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window." But sometimes I think He nails that door shut. And then you realize you're in the sub-basement. I guess I'm clinging to the idea that maybe, just maybe, there's a freight elevator around down here somewhere. And there will always be the next man, the next smile, the next wisp of possibility.

First published in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!, July 2007
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