Our story begins a few weeks ago, in the kitchen of a friend. Said friends girlfriend, and another friend of the female persuasion were there as well.
For whatever reason, the topic came up of marrying me off.
(I do not lead these conversations, I merely participate.)
At any rate, they told me that I should take a boxing or martial arts class in order to meet women. Furthermore, they went on to say that a gym is a good place to meet girls in general.
I had a surprisingly vehement reaction against those well-meaning sentiments.
First of all, nobody wants to be the creeper checking people out at the gym. Okay, EVERYBODY is the creeper checking out other people at the gym; this is human nature at its finest. Or, if not its finest, certainly its most predictable.
But its quite a step to go from casually checking people out and actually hitting on them. And that’s just gross gym etiquette, if you ask me.
Anyway: it is several weeks later, and I am just finishing up my workout. And I’m in the locker room, and there’s a naked old dude, straight chillin’ on a bench.
(Don’t worry; he had put a towel down)
You’re probably assuming my reaction was something along the lines of, “Ew, gross! Retirement age balls!”
But no, I was thinking something different entirely.
I was thinking, ‘Ha! That old dude just don’t give a fuck! Good for him!’
Which in turn got me thinking to one of the pleasures of the gym, which is that I also don’t feel the need to give a fuck.
I usually show up in a tank top and training pants. Half the time, I don’t even bother to run a comb through my hair, because why bother? Good looking hair isn’t going to help me do more reps. And all I care about when I go to the gym is getting a good workout.
Which made me think back to that earlier conversation, and why I enjoy my gym time so much, and why I reject the idea of using as a singles’ bar: it’s the one place where I can go and not be worried about being judged on looks (or, more accurately, where I don’t feel the need to care)
Because whenever I go out, I have to look good and smell good and dress well, on the off chance that someone out there might be interested. It’s not a thing I think of as a burden, as such; it’s a personal choice. I could just as easily be some kind of awful slob if I wanted, and it probably wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
And so I was there in the locker room, and I started thinking, ‘Man, it would really suck if I had to look good here, too. Ugh, what kind of a shitty life would that be, if I felt like I was required to dress up and look my best every single place I went? Like, what if it was mandatory?’
Then I thought ‘…Wait. Isn’t that basically what we do to women, all day, every day?
Man, we are SUCH assholes…’
Pryorball. 