Having a Type is Killing Your Dating Life

I gravitate to smart-alecky, big-boned men. My resume is full of ’em. There’s just something that inherently attracts me to that adorable I-was-a-football-player-back-in-my-heyday look. Even my old celebrity crushes tell the story: I was in love with rapper Jadakiss once upon a time and I single-handedly headed up fellow rapper Cam’ron’s unofficial fan club until he got slim (and more obnoxious). I didn’t intentionally align myself with the prototypical thick, dark dude with attitude. That’s just my type, I guess. 

There’s no fighting the law of natural attraction. We like what we like. But sometimes we get so settled into being drawn to one type of person – the backpacker intellectual, the edgy thug, the quintessential pretty boy, the upwardly mobile business man – that we close ourselves off to other possibilities. And the way the dating pool is now, we need as many possibilities as we can get.

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Not out of desperation just to be attached to somebody, mind you. Being pressed out to have a man is so 1955. But most of us have life plans that do include marriage and family somewhere along the line, and limiting ourselves to one physical or one personality type, even without realizing it, is sentencing ourselves to round after round of the same ol’ same ol’.

I know ladies who refuse to date dudes who didn’t go to college because, in their little high-powered corners of the world, a man without a bachelor’s degree at minimum and a fancy-titled white collar position couldn’t be their equal and therefore isn’t worth adding to their contact list. Look, I’d holla at a bus driver or a construction worker so long as he knew how to make a living and had some ambition. You don’t need a degree to be intelligent and you don’t need to make six figures to be a good man. Anyway, most of the gals I know turning up their noses at blue collar dudes and dismissing them for being not their type don’t come from money in the first place. They’re debutantes only in their heads.

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Sometimes we just need to take one of those rare moments to pause and do some self-reflection. Why do you like who you like? Have you dated the same type of dude your whole life because that’s who you feel comfortable with and, give or take individual experiences, you pretty much know what to expect from them? There are all kinds of deep-rooted psychological reasons why we’re attracted to the same kind of men, and I’m certainly not the one to try to play armchair therapist and pick them apart.

I know they exist because I was caught up in the pattern myself – not just in my love of thickums, which is the most harmless part of my typecasting, but because, after two relationships that boiled down to 11 years, one baby, and no ring, I realized I was picking dudes who had maturity issues. Fear of marriage. Fear of success. Hell, fear of growing up. And because they couldn’t cheerlead themselves, they certainly had difficulty supporting me in my ever-growing accomplishment-chasing. My attraction to snarky big boys had turned into a long-term love affair with dead weight.

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A few summers ago, I met a guy who fit my physical type but lacked the swagger I was used to (yeah, I said I was going to give up that word but I haven’t found one to replace it yet). He was hella thoughtful and kind-hearted and all the things I said I wanted, but he didn’t present the challenge I thought I craved. I was used to trouble. He seemed like he’d be too easy, I had to check myself from rejecting the man because he wasn’t my type. We celebrated our two-year anniversary this week. Far as I’m concerned, even if we never stroll down the aisle, this is a success story because it forced me to try something new. The spell of wanting only one kind of dude has been broken.

Do you have a type or are you open to dating a variety of lovely guys?

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