Yeah... well, I'm sure I'm guilty of being a bit of "other"... but that's okay. I'm not looking for super high rates of return here, and certainly not wanting to date a bunch of women I'm not compatible with and waste both of our respective times. I want to date the kind of girls that date the kind of guys who are like me... the "other" type girls... and honestly, while I'm open to giving many a chance, and i do, I tend to focus on those types first to contact/like, and work my way out from there.

It's not so much about mass appeal. For instance, while looking for advice on a certain forum, I got relentlessly BEAT DOWN for having a beard, with a bunch of posters insisting it was the source of all my online dating woes. Trigger activated. I might as well have been Osama bin Laden. I was hideous, unlovable garbage. Just a page-after-page onslaught of criticism, despite my trying to make it clear that I didn't even have a beard a bit over a year ago and still had a struggle getting replies. The Internet is really bad at listening.

I thought about it again last week while enjoying a meal at Pita Jungle here in Scottsdale. I looked around and saw no less than three couples where the guy had a beard smiling and enjoying their respective evenings' together. Those "other" guys obviously weren't the worst people to ever exist because of their facial hair (or tattoos, etc.), they had pretty girlfriends, and seemingly happy days together. Those are the women that I want to connect to. I get that not everyone is going to like me. That's fine. That's not the point... but after about six years of this s**t in two different major metropolitan areas, it is getting me down for sure... whatever "it" is...