I have this thing, where I can read people without knowing anything about them. I just get this sense, this kinda vibe where I just KNOW what they’re about. And sometimes, I don’t even know that I know. I just know, ya know?

After reading up on this, I discovered that this tends to be one of the notable traits of an INFJ personality. Other personality types form judgments based on logical and analytical data that they actively observe through their 5 senses.

INFJs though, we just feel stuff. We subconsciously identify markers that people either disregard or never pick up on, or perhaps may not even exist in a physical sense, and immediately we know things:

INFJs have uncanny insight into people and situations. They get “feelings” about things and intuitively understand them. As an extreme example, some INFJs report experiences of a psychic nature, such as getting strong feelings about there being a problem with a loved one, and discovering later that they were in a car accident. This is the sort of thing that other types may scorn and scoff at, and the INFJ themself does not really understand their intuition at a level which can be verbalized.

After reading that, suddenly conversations I’ve had in the past start to make more sense. Like me meeting the new boss and then turning to a coworker and saying:

“This guy is bad news.”

“How do you know? He seems really nice.”

“I just know.”

“Yeah but how?”

“I feel it.”

“Yeah but how do you know?”

“I feel it.”

“. . .”

By the way, boss I had bad vibes about? Credit stealing drunkard, who despite having a wife with cancer goes and has an affair with a coworker half his age. And no his name wasn’t Newt (although I can understand why you might have made that assumption.)

So yeah, in the way that I seem to know things about people birthed from the very bowels of hell, I’d also like to think that this same kind of intuition can help me detect when I’ve come across… THE ONE.

That’s why I believe in having chemistry more than most people normally might, because I need to FEEL that connection. I go through tons of dating profiles for example, and leaving out the obvious mannish looking gender unspecific types, I do see a lot of pretty looking girls that for all intents and purposes, I should be drooling over like a 5 year old in an M&M candy store.

But I don’t, because, well, I’m not FEELING it. And I doubt it’d make a difference if I met them in real life either, because the feeling is derived from more than just a photo and a profile. There’s just… something about this person that for whatever reason, I don’t feel the magic. No jibes with my vibes. No emotion in the ocean. No jamming with the slammin’. No prancing with the dancing.

Sometimes though the reason should be obvious to anyone: they’re just ugly. Stone-cold, breath-taking ghastly apparitions of ugliness capable of freezing all of time and tearing the very fabric of our reality, sparking a spacial quantum vortex that could swallow the earth up whole and implode the universe.

But then sometimes it’s equally as obvious that they are pretty, and yet… I try to feel, if only to prove I’m not being ridiculously picky here, but I can’t seem to force it. Even when they’re sexually attractive and I’d definitely spank it like it owed me money. (After the wedding of course, I got morals here, yo.)

That’s why I’m inclined to believe that when I feel no chemistry towards someone, THERE’S A REALLY GOOD REASON FOR IT. It’s not about physical attraction so much as it needs to have the VIBE. The FEELING. Through and through and balls to bones.

I guess that’s why I’ve idealized the concept of romance and love to such absurd heights. I want to believe, nay, I MUST believe that there is a girl out there whose soul could so deeply intertwine with my own that the very raw energy of our wubsie wubs could light up Chicago every day (and twice as much on Sundays.)

Eh, then again, maybe I can learn to be content with a girl as long as she knows how to bake whoopie pies.

There doesn’t seem to be a better time to brave the dating world than just before Valentine’s Day, in which case a horde of single women become so desperate not to be alone on Valentine’s that for an ever so brief moment, they will lower their usual criteria that a man be 7 feet tall and make 6 digit salaries before they’ll consider dating him. For a guy like me, this time of year is magic hour. ;-)

Despite the horrific experiences I’ve had with it before, I don’t think I ever went all in on internet dating. Maybe I took it somewhat seriously, but not to the point that I thought to just keep maintaining the 30 plus dollars a month I paid to stay on Match.com until I finally saw some success. Eventually I would be so disgusted as to simply give up and move on.

But there really is no other recourse, other than to troll the bar scene and hit on drunk women. Forget church, forget book clubs, forget anything else. the only women I meet there are married, have kids, or have such crazy baggage that to date them is akin to using a canister of the Ebola virus as a football. I know I’ve been told if I just live my life then magic, wonderful fairy tale things will eventually happen, but I’m 35 now. When is it supposed to happen again? When I’m 40? 45? 50? At that point I won’t care anymore, as I have no interest in dating shriveled up secondhand divorcees whose looks have long abandoned them.

Because of my personality type (INFJ), I’ve always been an idealist when it came to romance. I believed in the concept of soulmates, to connect with someone on such a profoundly intimate level that it could be perceived as a psychic link by some.

But then I read articles like this, and I wonder what would even be the point. Is it even possible dig through the compost heap of humanity and eventually find a diamond in the rough amongst all the opportunistic, neurotic and amoral women that exist out there?

I doubt it.

I mean I’d like to believe it’s possible, and not only possible but that I could pull off such a feat. The obstacles I’d have to overcome are enormous though, and probably insurmountable. Because it’s not merely enough to find such a girl, she’d also have to LIKE me in return. And let’s face it, I’m just not a likable guy. I might have been, once upon a time, before the cruelty of life reduced me to a bitter shell of my former self, but not anymore. Whatever hand I extend in friendship has always been slapped away. Whatever opportunity I’ve had to show affection had always been turned back.

I guess the truth is I don’t have anything to offer women, else it would be far easier for me to attract them. I guess that’s for the best though, as I could have just as easily wound up in a bad marriage that would have ruined my life. It’s one thing to be alone and single, it’s quite another to be alone and MARRIED. Then you’re really screwed.

I think a lot of people can manage to date and get married not because it’s so easy for them to meet people and finally meet the ONE, but because they settled and married out of convenience.

I’m lucky in that I never had an overwhelming desire to have kids, else I fear I would have done exactly the same thing, crippled by the fear that time was running out and that I needed to find someone, ANYONE soon or I would be deprived a rewarding and long life as a parent.

But as miserable as I am now, the life I currently lead is eminently preferable to enduring the consequences of a bad marriage borne out of the reality that neither of us married out of true love.

I wonder though, if this is how it’s always going to be. That the world has become so evil that there just aren’t enough decent people to go around, such that finding a soulmate has now literally become a mathematical impossibility.

Or do I make one more try, convince myself to burn a hole in my wallet every month, if only to leave the door open for the possibility that I might be proved wrong one day?

When I’m not writing fake profiles just for kicks (and revenge) that is.

There’s one thing I hate about writing a good dating profile that will attract responses from women: the lying. In an ideal world, women would value honesty and integrity in a man, and typically they do, but only when it’s too late. Because the guy who lies and lies and lies is going to get the girl. The one who says he’s 6’6 and built like a boxer and feeds starving children at the orphanages while pulling 6 figures a year and keeps his apartment immaculate will eventually find a naive but sweet girl who will get hooked on him, and before she finds out that virtually none of those things he wrote about himself are remotely true, they’ll be hitched with kids. She’ll be miserable and unhappy for being trapped in a bad marriage with a husband who is completely unlike what she expected him to be, but again it underscores the point: HE STILL GOT THE GIRL.

Thus in today’s world, women don’t really reward honesty, because they can’t seem to accept that nobody’s perfect, that no matter how good a guy is, he is going to have a habit or quirk or a history that will put her off. Men HAVE to lie, because the shallowness of women today REQUIRES it, otherwise they could never hope to meet any girl’s ridiculous standard.

When I write a profile, I write about my interests but I’m also honest about who I am. I say I have a hearing disability, that I’m only 5’9, that I make an average income, that I have strong Christian beliefs that might put some people off, that I need to have physical chemistry with a woman. I don’t give my whole life story of course, I just present the basics of who I am, because I don’t want the beginnings of any potential dating relationship or friendship to start out WITH A LIE.

So who responds to a profile like that? I’ll give you a hint, the number often rhymes with “hero.” When it’s not that number, then I get responses from divorcees with 5 kids who are so DESPERATE to find someone that they finally decided to give my profile a second look. Or maybe from women who have lost all traits of femininity that they actually think I wouldn’t mind being with a girl most people will mistake for being a man.

In other words, responses from women so at their wits’ end that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel, which apparently is where I reside. Nice.

Do I stop being honest then, at least long enough until I can get the girl myself? I don’t think I can. Which is odd because for much of my childhood, all I ever did was lie. Nowadays though, I can’t stomach the thought of telling a lie without feeling significant guilt.

In the end, I have to be who I am. If that means being alone, then so be it.