Trash Panda Men

 The dating pool is rougher than anyone that has been out of it for any length of time can possibly imagine.  Not only is it filled with men just lounging around the pool, not even sure if they want to get in or not, but there is a not often discussed predator, lurking beneath the murky waters.  I'm talking about the bottom feeding men that are actually already in a relationship, yet refuse to get out of the water. 

Today we aren't even going to discuss the men that are half in, half out of a relationship.  We won't go over the men that are essentially living with a woman and doing everything good men do in relationships, happy as they can be, but with a complete and abject refusal to define, categorize or give the situationship a name.  No, we'll save that for later.

I'm talking about the married, or in committed relationship men.  The ones that never post their wives and girlfriends, but if you go to the woman's page, you see a storybook relationship of trips, cute moments and memories being made.  I'll give you two examples from last night.

My three besties and I decided to have a nice dinner.  All we wanted to do was hang out together, have some good food and just bask in the glory that is the magical combination of good food with even better friends.  We show up and we even wait the hour and a half wait time just to be seated in the Rosa Parks section next to the kids and the bathroom.  You see, there were plenty of empty tables by that time, but they sat us there because the other tables were being saved for couples.  On dates.  We were in the, don't disturb the ambiance or romance, section.  If the restaurant would have been a Thanksgiving dinner, they sat us at the kiddie table.  But I digress.

So we're laughing, talking, saying outrageous things to the waitress (okay that was just me) and just genuinely having some healing friendship/bonding time.

In walks a man and his beautiful girlfriend or wife.  She sits facing us, he sits facing the door.  This is a pretty common arrangement, because all men secretly expect that they'll spot trouble walking in the door and act accordingly I suppose.

The one of us that was sitting on the outside notices first.  This man is LITERALLY about to dislocate his head from his shoulders turning around to look at us.  He can't help himself and it's painfully obvious.  He's completely distracted from the moment that they're supposed to be creating, he keeps turning around like someone yelled his name.  Once I notice, I discover just how much he's actually turning to look.  There's no way his wife/girlfriend didn't notice, because it was everything unlucky thirteen seconds or so.  We point it out to the girls that can't see, and then they notice how blatant it is as well.

One of us gets up to use the restroom and that's when a decision is clearly made.  We look up to notice some activity at their table.  Y'all.  I shit you not, HE HAS ASKED THIS WOMAN TO SWITCH PLACES WITH HIM. We're thinking that he clearly has lost his mind and she must be unaware, because surely not.

Now his neck is saved.  He's a trash panda.

Next day...

We post pictures on facebook of our quartet and I see a friend request pop up.  I don't get friend requests very often, because I'm already friends with everyone I've known since grade school and I don't meet new people often.  I did a cursory look of his page and saw we had no friends in common.  But I saw that one of the girls in my group had liked one of his pictures.  He's not a bad looking guy and most of the comments are women leaving "hey handsome" comments so I'm wondering why he's single in the first place.  Since my friends are natives to Charleston and I am not, I usually run new guys by them.  So I ask if anyone knows him and I'm told he likes of the girls in my friend group.  I fall asleep, and I wake up to an inbox message from this man.  I must have accidentally accepted him when I was looking at his page (What an amateur).  I decide to entertain this foolishness for the sake of the blog and I respond.  I ask him how he found me since we have no friends in common and he says I'm attractive and he's a cool dude.  I'm like, oh are you sure it wasn't from my friend's picture?  He's like, Huh?  Oh no I was just browsing and you came up.  Sure, because that's how the facebook algorithm works.  He asks if he can introduce himself and I'm like OH THIS WILL BE GOOD.  

At this point, I go back to the friend group and I just flat out ask my friend what's up with this guy?  And she's like HE'S CRAZY that's what.  Oh damn.  I should have asked sooner.  Then I discover that while I was asleep, he inboxed another one of us.  So now he's at 3 out of 4 women in ONE group of friends.  I'm so mad I missed her epic response to him.  She basically told him she's single but he isn't and she knows because she they're friends on IG.  He responds "I'm not single but I'd like to be friends" (this will be covered in a later blog when I discuss how there must surely be a fuckboi handbook because they all say the same things in the same situations). She tells him that his partner looks happy and he should work to keep it that way and that he doesn't want these problems."  He responds that he's not happy but he's trying (Chapter 6 line 4 of the handbook) and that he wants all the smoke. Gross. She lets him know he looked happy in the video yesterday.

He blocked her.

So now we're in the group chat, discussing how we keep respecting the relationships of these men that could clearly give not one single damn about protecting the women they've committed to and he calls me.  I reject it.  He calls again.  I reject it again (I was still catching up on the previous conversation my friends had with him).  So he sends a paragraph long biography where he says he's divorced and likes to keep a small circle.  He wants to build a friendship and let it flourish with communication and honesty.

By this point, I'm all caught up, so I send him a screenshot of the message he shared with my friend (with her permission) and told him that I agree with her and he should put all of this energy into figuring out how to improve or get out of his current situation.

He blocked me too.

Yeah buddy, I'm the problem.  Do these men realize that it is never flattering, but rather the actual definition of disheartening?  I think not.

In conclusion, there are some things you should know.  There are women out here rooting for other women. We are protecting the sanctity of your marriage or relationship because we don't want our happiness to come at the expense of another.  Those men are going to cheat, they're going to be emotionally unavailable.  They're going to do you dirty.  Not all men, but those men.  But just know, they are fervently seeking out women that are willing to put up with that shit.  It isn't every single woman.  It's the single women that are also trash pandas. Just know that so many of us want to be in a happy and healthy relationship and it is very disheartening to discover that all that glitters is rarely real gold, and simply just the fool's kind.

I've been a fool before.  Many times.  If you see any signs that things are not what they seem.  Honey, they aren't. Trust.  But verify.

ETA: This blog was written before I was aware that the King of All Trash Pandas, Derrick Jaxn, would be making headlines with his incredibly predictable cheating.  Leave your thoughts below...let's discuss!