Darren Hayes: ‘Having a “type” is keeping you single’
By Nick Levine
As a happily married man, I’m often in a position where single friends ask for advice on love. If you knew me ten years ago you’d laugh. I was anything but settled down and a complete bumbling idiot in love. You would not have been asking love advice from me. I wrote love songs for the whole world but really they were fantasy. I was as lonely as the rest of them. When I came out in my mid 20s I was like an awkward teenager trying to navigate his way through high school. I flung myself in to the dating world with open arms and my thinly veiled insecurities were detected within nanoseconds. I was emotionally torn to pieces and constantly wounded.
Years later, I have a lot of compassion for that confused kid who gave his heart away to any stranger who seemed remotely kind. I often talk about my mishaps to friends who haven’t yet been lucky in love to reassure them there really is someone out there for everyone. I do still believe this.
We have a joke about my track history in our house. Whenever I start to discuss my old relationships, my husband Richard makes a ‘here we go again’ face and reaches up to pull down an imaginary blackboard from the sky to add yet another ‘ex’ to my list. I’m not a slut. Yes I did try on a few pairs of shoes before I decided on a pair for keeps; but make no mistake, I’ve always been monogamous. I was just terrible at dating.
When I examine the crash sites of my disastrous past relationships there’s a litany of mishaps to point to. Beneath the excuses, the blame, the apologies and the questions there is always one common nugget of truth: Having a ‘type’ was a huge part of the problem.
It’s a question we are often asked when we’re single.
“What’s your type?”
Mine was quite specific: rough around the edges, emotionally unavailable and kind of mean. (We’ll get in to that later).
It’s a valid question I guess. Most relationships begin with some kind of physical attraction. In a club, at the gym, walking down the street – the person who turns your head is quite obviously the ‘type’ you find attractive. Nothing wrong with that. It’s only a problem if it becomes a rule. The sad fact is if someone doesn’t get our attention from a casual glance we rarely make the moves to find out more about them. Often, it’s only the person who looks vaguely like our rigid definition of ‘type’ that ends up on our radar.
This level of filtering is at play in most settings where you could meet a potential mate. Yet this ‘quick glance’ discrimination ultimately results in the discounting of a myriad of possible matches.
It’s hardly an exact science anyway. How many times have you walked over to talk to someone in a bar only to discover they bore you to tears? They might have looked like a runway model but they don’t get your jokes or the spark just isn’t there and that’s it. Game over.
I can’t tell you how many times I was dismissed by someone for the way I spoke, or how many times I walked away from someone gorgeous after those first few disastrous minutes of conversation. The click wasn’t there. It’s almost as though I was projecting the personality of someone I’d like to fall in love with on to a complete stranger. It rarely worked.
Funny that. Instead of just finding someone who made me laugh first and then thinking “Gee I wonder if they’re a good kisser” I approached things from the complete wrong direction. No wonder I was single for so long.
Dustin Hoffman said some of the most insightful words I’ve ever heard about the way we judge people based upon looks. In his cross-dressing role for the movie Tootsie – he spent months in make-up and wardrobe trying to look authentically like a woman. One day, he sat exasperated in the makeup chair dissatisfied with the results and essentially begged the team “Can’t you make me prettier?” They couldn’t, they explained to him. They had to work with what he had.
He looked at himself in the mirror, and realised he felt limited by what he saw. He realised this was how many women felt in a world that judged them purely on looks. He bravely admitted if he were at a party he would not have approached the woman he saw in a mirror. In this epiphany he understood how many times he might have dismissed potentially interesting and worthwhile people in his life based purely on what he found attractive.
It’s a powerful thought really, and a recipe for disaster.
I’m not here to discount the validity and importance of sexual attraction in love but I can tell you from experience that it helps to examine your definitions and broaden your horizons. Sexy is more than just physical.
Especially in gay culture, whether through choice or segregation, we have defined many divisions of our culture. Twink, Bear, Top, Bottom. Do we ever stop to think how limiting these labels are? Why do we so easily subscribe to them?
Let me get this out of the way and entirely clear: I am INCREDIBLY attracted to my husband. He’s gorgeous. He’s also smart, extremely funny, loyal, compassionate and the person who understands me more than anyone on this earth.
But I almost didn’t meet him. He was not strictly my ‘type’.
My ‘type’ was not traditionally good-looking and not nice to me!
Ironically Richard is better looking, kinder and more comfortable with himself than all of my past boyfriends. For whatever reason, I just didn’t approach guys like him. I guess my type was more of a personality. I would seek out men who were gruff, emotionally unavailable or dare I say it, mean to me.
Sigmund Freud would have had a field day. I’m sure he would have deduced I was looking for my father. Maybe the love I felt I missed as a child. But on the most fundamental level, what I was really looking for was a man who would love me and not leave. I was looking for an actor to play the role I’d cast in my mind and it was incredibly unfair because it didn’t allow for anyone to show up in my life and surprise me. I was just constantly disappointed they weren’t reading the lines I’d written for them to speak!
As a result, I discounted entire rooms full of men who had a heart as big as mine.
When I met Richard, he was someone that I might not have spoken to in a bar. Or if I did, I might have thought he was ‘too nice’. He is ‘nice’. He’s also kind. He’s hilariously sarcastic, incredibly witty and has a cutting sense of irony.
At our wedding, my dear friend, the lighting designer Willie Williams stood up and gave a speech. He said, “When we heard that Darren had met yet another boyfriend, we were all a little sceptical. Everyone said ‘Finally Darren’s met someone normal!’ But I’ve met Richard and I’m afraid to say he’s not normal. He’s extraordinary.”
He really is. And I almost didn’t meet him.
What’s your type?
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