Excerpt 3:
A fast way to know if a guy is Mr. Wrong
[There are lots of things you need to know to see if your guy is Mr. Right. And there are lots of ways to tell if a guy is Mr. Wrong. But just for fun, here's a good and fast way, probably the fastest, to tell if the guy you're seeing is really wrong for you.]
The most annoying man in the world
Annoying, obnoxious, exasperating, pain-in-the-ass guys do to chemistry what slow leaks do to balloons. In all my years as a couples therapist I've seen couples survive betrayal, abuse, tragedy, incompatibility, insanity, termites, alien abductions, you name it. But I've never seen couples survive when the woman finds the guy annoying. Let me put it this way. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. Even if he were also the handsomest, sweetest, sexiest guy in the world, if you were in a relationship with him and you found him annoying, you'd still end up feeling "let me out of here!" even if you'd signed an iron-clad pre-nup that left you nothing.
You might think you can suck it up, but you can't. Being with an annoying guy is like living downwind from a pig farm. There's no way you can get used to it.
Here's how Ann, 36, described it. "Brad is a really good guy. A sweet guy, really. That's what makes this so hard. He's also the most annoying man in the world. [Every woman I talked to for whom this was an issue described her guy as 'the most annoying guy in the world' – it's what being with an annoying guy does to you.] It's not like Brad has just one or two little irritating traits. I could live just fine with a guy who, I don't know, gargled for twenty minutes every night before going to bed and cracked his knuckles all the time.
"But Brad is like a whole symphony of annoying things. He's still a young guy, but when he sits down he groans, and when he gets up he grunts. Groaning down, grunting up. Like a grandpa. I find myself saying to him, 'Are you going to be getting up and down?' Because I know there's going to be the grunting and the groaning.
"But that's nothing. He's got the worst timing in the world. When does Brad want to make love, you might be wondering. When I'm exhausted, is the answer. God forbid he should want us to have sex when I'm, like, awake. And he's always late for everything. He forgets everything. He hums the same stupid tunes over and over. When he eats, oh God, he puts the fork in his mouth and then scrapes it on his front teeth when he's pulling the fork out of his mouth. He puts his finger in his ear and then looks at his finger. He wears his pants too high... I could go on and on."
Now here's the rest of the story. Ann said Brad was a good guy. He was also good looking. He had a lot of great friends. He made a good living. He was even a pretty good little lover, except that when he reached orgasm he always said, "Oh, mama!"
So Ann stayed in a relationship with Brad from the time she was 31 to 36. That's five years, and in the last three years Ann felt that Brad was annoying enough to kill. But she stayed because of his good qualities. She stayed because she thought she loved him. She stayed because she thought maybe she could get used to his being the way he was. She stayed because she hoped she could get him to change.
Your trying to get him to change is the last stage in a relationship with an annoying guy. He "tries" but is unable to change. You fight. He makes you feel like an idiot for making a big deal about little things. "Okay, so you're saying I can stick my finger in my ear; I just can't look at my finger. And then you'll be happy?" You fight more. Soon your relationship is consumed by these kinds of fights.
You'd be a damned fool to commit to a guy you find annoying. Whatever you find annoying, if your guy does it, he's toast.
The guy speaks: "If there's something I do that's annoying, I'd rather you said something to me about it instead of just dumping me. Maybe I can cut it out. But you know, I probably can't. And I've got to say that one of the things I found most annoying is being in a relationship with a woman who's always trying to change me. So I guess, yeah, if you find me that annoying I'd rather you dumped me than we just fought all the time."
We rarely break up with annoying boyfriends just because they're annoying, not after we've gotten seriously involved. We should, but we don't. We break up with annoying guys because their obnoxious habits lead to horrible fights, incredible anger. It's sad – like watching love get cancer and die.
What a waste. Don't cheat yourself – you can do a lot better. You deserve to be with a guy who doesn't annoy the crap out of you. And they're out there, plenty of them.
If your guy's great but he has one or two little annoying habits... well you tell me, does that make him an annoying person? I doubt it. But if he's like Brad in the sense that annoying is his middle name, in the sense that annoying is what you think of when you think of him, in the sense that he's just too annoying too much of the time, it's over. Good-bye, sayonara, hasta luego, auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, see you, wouldn't want to be you.
And just think about this: if you really loved him, would you find him so annoying?
You have to be particularly careful with this if you're in an early stage of your relationship. Annoying guys can be really insidious. They fly in under your radar and get you to care about them before it fully hits you how annoying they are. I think it's a strategy nature devised to allow annoying people to reproduce.
Annoying traits are like a pebble in your shoe. For a while you're just slightly aware of them. That's how you can get trapped into doing nothing about it. But at some point they really get under your skin and cause you pain. That's why you've got to so something about it.
Let's say your guy's a complaining whiner. But when the two of you were just starting out he kept his whining hidden. And as he started revealing what a whine-o-rama he is, you found yourself saying, "Well, he really likes me. And when it's just the two of us he doesn't whine very much. And so he's a whiner – I can get used to it."
Oh really? That's like saying you can get used to a pebble in your shoe. So are you saying that you can get used to living with someone who whines all day, whines when he comes home at night, whines on Saturday morning, even whines during sex ("My arms hurt; my jaw hurts."), year after year? And you're telling me that you're going to get used to that? Uh uh. It just doesn't work that way. Getting used to a guy who's a big old whiner is like saying you can get used to living with the sound of a jackhammer next door 24/7.
The same thing holds true for all his really annoying traits. If you're honest with yourself, you'll see that you can't get used to them. They just grow more annoying with time. All I'm saying is, don't kid yourself – you can do a lot better.
