One of the recurring themes of the stuff I write here and elsewhere is the relationship between signified and signifier. The true nature of something and the outward appearances, the appurtenances, the accessories. If I could simply obtain the gift of always seeing the former and never the latter, I would be wealthy, successful, loved beyond my limits of my imagination. It’s unlikely to happen. I’ll continue to sit in Plato’s Cave, facing the wall, just like the rest of us.

At least I have company, as this following anecdote will demonstrate.

Two women, each alike in dignity. Except they aren’t. Woman A, we’ll call her “Jane”, is successful, career-oriented. She’s attractive in a quiet Midwestern way and wears a lot of vintage clothing that verges on costume. She attends church regularly, believes in God.

Woman B, we’ll call her “Ashley”, is a professional stage performer. Drop-dead gorgeous. This close to being an alcoholic. She’s out every night showing off her body and her big eyes. Swears a lot. Isn’t afraid of much.

These are appearances. And they are mostly correct. Jane won’t sleep with anyone. She’s about the most moral woman I know. She takes relationships extremely seriously and is extremely agitated by them once she’s in them. Ashley will sleep with about anyone who catches her eye, on the first night, totally DTF, makes no bones about it. She will openly discuss sex in mixed company and speak at length about her preferences in male genitalia.

So far, so good. I’ve known them both for a few years. Just what you’d expect.

So here’s the odd thing. One of them is continually sought-after by wealthy, love-sick men who want to marry her, take her to the suburbs, and have kids with her. These men will promise and pledge anything. The other one is continually solicited by “friends” for random sex and treated about like you’d treat a fuck-buddy by every man within tapping distance.

No prizes for guessing that Ashley, the woman who’s ridden a hundred ponies, is the one who is continually receiving marriage proposals, and that Jane is the one who has men in her church congregation say dirty things to her after the service. This wouldn’t be worth a blog post if that weren’t the case. The woman who would be delighted to settle down with a devoted millionaire finds herself getting emails that resolve down to “stop by my house next time you’re in town and I’ll rawdog you on the couch, on which you can then sleep because I need my beauty rest alone in my queen bed.” The one who likes sport-fucking the way I like listening to Led Zeppelin III has her one-nighters come back from the bathroom with an engagement ring in hand.

As a result, neither one is happy. Jane keeps getting her heart broken and Ashley finds herself struggling to keep her multiple sex partners from discovering each other, as if she were a man or something.

I want to believe that there is a way for both of them to solve their perception problems, but I wonder about that. Jane is never going to adopt the “bitch shield” that would prevent her from receiving those odd advances from dudes. If she’d banged a dozen guys in her teens, she’d have it by now. Like the SCCA rulebook, the bitch shield is written in blood. Ashley is never going to have a man just walk away from her because each one of them is convinced it will be different for him. Each one of them sees her smiling at him at a party and thinks, “Although I just heard her discuss how she recently had a Ukrainian bartender ejaculate on her belly button, I know that what she secretly wants is to be my scrubby-clean wife from now until we die together on Golden Pond.” Both of these women pay the price because men can’t bring themselves to see a truth that is plain to anyone who looks.

All of this just confirms what I’ve come to realize is my life mission: to understand reality as well as I can. To free myself from all my illusions, from the cheering white lie (“Hey, I’m pretty good at playing jazz chords”) to the massive misunderstanding of how life works (“I know that I can change the way the PR machine works in the auto-journo business by just speaking up about it”). To live in reality, at all times. It’s not fun and it’s sobering and there’s nowhere to turn when you feel sad, but it is firm, you can stand on it. Once you get used to living in reality, you can change what’s broken. Until then, you’ll suffer, just like my friends, and just like every man who stands in front of them.