Desperate and Dating Don't Mix

A desperate dater. I've seen her. I've been her. And it wasn't pretty.

Your typical desperate female dater fits the following profile:

1.) She's fresh out of a co-dependant relationship that ended long before she stopped calling him.

2.) She's over the age of 30.

3.) If you could see her biological clock, it would look like a ratty, blood red Swatch watch with a chewed up band.

4.) Whenever one of her friends gets engaged, she accuses them of changing herself for him.

5.) She hates spending more than 30 minutes alone without phoning a friend or logging on to Facebook.

It's SO easy to get caught up in the pursuit of love while single in the city. But what separates the healthy daters from the desperate ones? A healthy dater is open to finding love, but she's also happy and content with her life whether a man is in it or not.

I've had one too many conversations with girlfriends who are in search of love when they should really be learning how to love themselves. You know the type. The single girls who have scoured every dating website, singles bar, and their friends' list of contacts. They want a man and they want him YESTERDAY. But they haven't acknowledged the work they need to do on themselves. Not just the outside work (though a good hair cut and mani/pedi never hurt a girl's chances). But also the internal work. Cleaning out the emotional residue from the last guy. Wiping away the soiled spots on her heart. Dusting off the cobwebs of insecurity. A desperate dater figures finding a man will fix all of those issues. He'll swoop in on his white horse, take her off to his castle and she'll never be lonely again.

I'm sure Kim Kardashian would be the first to tell women to put down the bedtime story and forget the fairy tale. My married girlfriends are quick to remind me that their hard working husbands are just that-ALWAYS working...to pay the mortgage and the car notes and keep the family insured. They may be married, but these women still deal with their own bouts of loneliness, they just have extra housework to do while thinking about it.

And as cute as Kris Humphries may be, I'm sure Kim had the same complaints my other married friends do...he's messy, forgetful, he smells, and the romance went out the door after the honeymoon. The only difference is, my friends stuck it out past the 72 day mark, accepting the bad that comes along with the good of marriage.

So where does that leave us single ladies here in L.A.? I'm still figuring it out. Three years ago, I was that desperate girl. Fresh out of a relationship. Alone. Lonely. Craving a new relationship. A man to fill the empty void left by the last guy. What started out as a craving, quickly morphed into a longing, then a desperation, and eventaully an obsession. It takes an extraordinary amount of work to escape from the cave of companionlessness. But when you do, the other side is oh so yummy!