and she's STILL single?

April 14, 2001 11:09 AM

and she's STILL single? "Before You E-mail Me, This Page is Required Reading" "Underlying everything that I say about chivalry is the fact that I'm looking for a relationship in which it's understood by both the man and me that I'm ultimately in charge." more...
posted by centrs (39 comments total)

If you have a motorcycle, I'd ask you to never ride again. I know how fun a bike can be, but I wouldn't want to risk losing you that way.

Though I think animals are neat and I understand how important they can become to a person, if you have a pet, you'd have to give it up. I'd want all the attention (and when we're married, love and petting) that you'd give to your animal.

If you travel for a living, you'd have to find a new job. I don't want to spend a night apart from you.
If you're an airplane pilot, you'd have to give up flying. Even if we travel the world together (not that I need to), you'd have to be willing not to fly. I don't have a phobia about it. It's just a risk I'd want neither of us to take.

The man I seek would surrender his sexual psyche to me. Sir Lancelot was no hero to me. I need a man who wouldn't lust after or touch another man's wife or be unfaithful in the name of passion. I'd need you to, little by little, become a man who wouldn't dishonor a woman by kissing her before marriage. I'd ask you to unlearn a few habits if you had them, not to be titillating or arousing, but to help you learn to share a very special meaning of sex in our married life. That is — aside from your willingness to respect and appreciate our saving kissing, cuddling, and holding hands for marriage — you'd have to, if they were in your life, give up masturbation, pornography, sexual fantasy, and fetish.

i think a guy would be around a hundred years old by the time he finished the required reading alone!
posted by centrs at 11:11 AM on April 14, 2001

And you just know she'll wind up with an abusive alcoholic biker husband.
posted by frenetic at 11:26 AM on April 14, 2001

What goes around, comes around.

(She's on AOL and Geocities, which is how this one escaped the link filter. Dear me.)
posted by holgate at 11:29 AM on April 14, 2001

Previously on MetaFilter....

(actually, there was a lot of good discussion covered there, check it out)
posted by mathowie at 11:34 AM on April 14, 2001

Uh, why did you re-post a double-post notification?
Where's MetaDoublePostGuy?
posted by sonofsamiam at 11:35 AM on April 14, 2001

I wonder if the older daughter is as messed up as Mary is? If she isn't, sign me up...
posted by SpecialK at 11:43 AM on April 14, 2001

sorry.
posted by centrs at 11:44 AM on April 14, 2001

no biggie centrs, I didn't see holgate's doublepost when i posted mine.
posted by mathowie at 12:11 PM on April 14, 2001

Wow. That is one woman who has no idea what it means to be as understanding as the "understanding" she demands of others.

She's either delusional or pathetic.
posted by Spanktacular at 12:19 PM on April 14, 2001

I know it's been posted before, but I'm glad it's been posted again. I love the META tags personally...amongst others they include:

' i, am, i am, i'm, a, i'm a, as a, as, the, my, for, to, be, of, an, and, on, about, being, with, essay, article, information, info'

The stereotypical AOL user? (snigger)
posted by ecvgi at 12:42 PM on April 14, 2001

He said "SNIGGER!"
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 1:27 PM on April 14, 2001

God, her writing makes me hot.
posted by Postroad at 1:54 PM on April 14, 2001

Love is fickle business.

I bet if we all wrote down our needs in that much explicit detail, we'd sound just as crazy. I find it reprehensible and sadly narrow-minded to post this link and snicker away. We should all be this self-informed and brave.

Now, putting it all down in text, let alone posting it publicly on the web, is a little too public for my taste. But as someone who makes a habit of telling personal stories on the web (and encouraging others to do it, too), I'm in no position to say what is too personal for the web.

But just because it's not your style doesn't make it wrong. Think about it - why is this so funny to you? Are you threatened by someone who knows what she wants and says so?

That sounds like your problem, not hers.
posted by fraying at 3:00 PM on April 14, 2001

I'm laffing becoz her requirements are things I would never ask of anyone, let alone put up with if they were asked of me.

If she finds someone who can dig it, though, more power to her. The system works.
posted by sonofsamiam at 3:18 PM on April 14, 2001

I think she's actually recruiting for the CIA.
posted by holgate at 3:22 PM on April 14, 2001

"That sounds like your problem, not hers."

Sorry fraying, but even if it is "self-informed and brave" it's still full-on loony. Speaking as a male of the species, I can assure you that this will be a *big* problem for her. Dating crazy women is fun for a while, but it gets old real fast.

This is not a sincere woman sharing her inner self with us. It's a nut job who's sharing her mental problems with us.

Yes, I'm being callus. I guess I have issues of my own. But as far as I'm concerned she doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. It's not my style *and* it's wrong.
posted by y6y6y6 at 4:55 PM on April 14, 2001

Then it's still good that she posted her mating requirements on the Web. Because it will warn all normal men that she's a nutcase. Imagine if you met this woman at work and were thinking of asking her out. Now, thanks to the Web, you'll never have to expend the energy to raise your head and gaze longingly at her shapely figure as she walks by, or waste mental horsepower trying to figure out the best come-on. You know you don't want her, and your resources are thereby conserved for more deserving women.
posted by kindall at 5:07 PM on April 14, 2001

You know, I think the argument that "If a normal person posted their desires, they would look as unbalanced as this maryromantic person" is unsound.

Firstly, I don't think they would. I don't think most people want to go two years without so much as holding hands with their intended. Most people would not create a prepared speech that they want read back to them over the phone. Most people would not expect their intended to give up air travel. Most importantly, most people would not expect to be deferred to in all things. And most people, I believe, don't want anything as extreme as these items.

Secondly, for maryromantic these aren't desires, these are requirements. That, more than anything, makes this a very odd set of pages. Say I put up a Web page that says my ideal is a (making things up here) blond woman with green eyes and freckles with breasts and hips only slightly larger than average who has an interest in RTS video games, a degree in one of the Humanities, a job in the computer industry, who prefers yellow curry to red curry, who thinks that the third season of Simpsons is the best one, who wears overalls and open-toed sandals, who has read the entire works of Orson Scott Card and Kafka, and who can recite "Diving Into The Wreck" by heart. I'd look kind of strangely detail-oriented. If I put up a Web page announcing my uncompromising search for the above, with
long philosophical justifications and a hunt for code words for those who might want to contact me, I'd look downright strange.

Maryromantic is, in the strict sense of the words, an extremely unusual person. Whether her oddness is funny is a personal matter, but I don't think she's a typical person who just decided to make her desires explicit.
posted by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 6:19 PM on April 14, 2001

has read the entire works of Orson Scott Card and Kafka

Man, that sticks such a twisted image in my mind of what a book written by the two of them would be like, if such a thing were possible. "The enemy's gate is... a giant bug!"
posted by kindall at 7:00 PM on April 14, 2001

You can't kid us, L., we know what you're after.
posted by rodii at 7:25 PM on April 14, 2001

Whenever I see a ridiculous sign, I usually do a mental slide that goes from "What kind of an idiot does..." to "Oh my god, some idiot did...". Since most people aren't horrifically proactive, warning signs and explanations are usually posted after a mishap or two. That's how I choose to interpret this woman's page.

Which gets me thinking, "The person that this woman (previously dated, was raised by, whatever) must have been pretty, um, hard to handle. I'm guessing she didn't pop out of the womb that weird. She probably got some help from someone even more, ah, *distinctive*.
posted by websavvy at 7:58 PM on April 14, 2001

I agree. I see a divorce or three in her past. It's amazing how girls go for 'dangerous' guys, only to come out of the relationship rather twisted and burnt.
posted by SpecialK at 8:38 PM on April 14, 2001

This woman is clearly incapable of falling in love, whatever the cause.
posted by ParisParamus at 9:30 PM on April 14, 2001

fraying wrote:
But just because it's not your style doesn't make it wrong.

but posting this link, because it's not your style *is* wrong?
posted by centrs at 9:47 PM on April 14, 2001

Is it just me or does the signal word idea remind me of L. Ron Hubbard's footnotes in his Scientology propaganda?
posted by ed at 12:00 AM on April 15, 2001

man, l. fitzgerald, i'm glad you included this caveat:

(making things up here)

because, well, i've read your site for the longest time, and i have the biggest crush... and i don't match any of the criterion.

never mind. hee.
posted by sugarfish at 1:00 AM on April 15, 2001

Fraying makes a good point in that it wouldn't kill people to give each other the benefit of the doubt. It makes life so much easier....

That being said, a strong case was made last time that the woman is a dominatrix. If this is true, then the site is not a portal into the oft-wounded heart of a brave, determined woman, nor a window into the demented mind of a seriously troubled neurotic, but is instead a niche-market e-commerce site.
posted by cardboard at 6:36 AM on April 15, 2001

Should this woman be e-mailed a link to this thread? A pasted copy of its contents?
posted by ParisParamus at 7:49 AM on April 15, 2001

she wouldn't open it unless you had the proper code words, paris, so don't even bother.
posted by pikachulolita at 11:28 AM on April 15, 2001

Think about it - why is this so funny to you? Are you threatened by someone who knows what she wants and says so?

Part of the reason it is funny to me is that she's putting the cart before the horse. The time to reveal all of your high-maintenance traits and off-putting personal quirks is *after* you get someone to fall in love with you, not before you've even met.

The rest of the reason it's funny is because she's a complete nutjob who has documented her doomed-to-fail approach to relationships in encyclopedic detail. I know that I must have deep-seated problems to regard her a source of amusement rather than admiring her self-informed bravery, but I don't see anything praiseworthy in being so afraid of honest communication with a date that you script out his conversations in advance.
posted by rcade at 12:46 PM on April 15, 2001

The time to reveal all of your high-maintenance traits and off-putting personal quirks is *after* you get someone to fall in love with you,

I hate people who do that. Makes me fall right back out of love, it does.
posted by kindall at 3:53 PM on April 15, 2001

What we have here is someone who doesn't get the difference between ordering a custom-made computer from Dell or Gateway based on certain specs; and falling in love. She's clueless as to how sentiments work. Clueless to the fourth power. It's perfectly normal and appropriate to cringe at what this woman has wrote.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:03 PM on April 15, 2001

By the way, if anyone wants to email her ([e-mail]) and tell her that she's mentioned on here, please remember to have the subject be "Letting you Know that your Site is Mentioned/Discussed on the Internet at...". Because, as we all have read to know, she'll bite your head off if you do anything wrong.
posted by GirlFriday at 5:27 PM on April 15, 2001

"I ask any man who wants to meet me to give me a small gift when we meet in person. I do this for two reasons — first, I don't work and I could use a little extra help right now, and second, then a man can demonstrate whether or not he has a problem with helping a lady in this way or whether he has a problem with a lady who would ask for such help."


Now.. dont you people who felt all sorry for this professional Dominatrix feel pretty silly...?
posted by resigned at 1:40 AM on April 16, 2001

[e-mail]

She's on my IM Buddy List.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:33 AM on April 16, 2001

I don't buy the dominatrix theory. At least not in the "give me fifty bucks and I'll whip you" sense. Why would someone looking to make a living from a variety of submissive clientele limit her customers only to atheists and agnostics who have no pets and don't drive motorcycles? I can see having rules like "you must wear a hat" or "you must meet me barefoot" as part of the roleplay, but asking someone to change their religion or sell their mode of transportation in order to have a session with you seems like poor business sense.

Now, if by dominatrix you mean "a woman who wants to have a man be submissive to her while he pays all the bills" then, yeah, she's a dominatrix. But at that point "princess" v. "dominatrix" is just a semantic issue. But I think she's looking for that one special knight-cum-submissive, not an ongoing stream of them.
posted by L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg at 7:07 AM on April 16, 2001

she is, without a doubt, the most disturbing human I have ever had the misfortune of reading about.
posted by Qambient at 7:41 AM on April 16, 2001

All that required reading must REALLY cut down on spam! I'm gonna have to try that.
posted by DiplomaticImmunity at 11:25 AM on April 16, 2001

Has anyone sent her the URL to this thread?
posted by ParisParamus at 8:29 PM on April 20, 2001