For reasons unknown.

I've dated them all. And I'm famous for it. I've dated the emotionally unavailable guy with anger issues, the married man, the unemployed artistic type, the recovering alcoholic, and the guy fourteen years younger than me (as well as the guy twenty years older). I've dated the pothead, the shoplifter, the closet case, the guy obsessed with comic books, the Jesus freak, and the guy who stole my Xanax. I have spent the past fourteen years of my life playing Mad Libs with my relationships.

Pick a verb: kick.
Pick a noun: puppy.
Now, form the sentence "Tony has dated the guy who BLANKS BLANKS." And, as it turns out, I have dated a guy who kicks puppies.

No stone has been left unturned in my dating repertoire. I have seen, heard, and (let's be honest here) done it all. When you've been around the block as many times as I have, it takes a lot to rattle you up. And the more I keep going, the less and less shocked by people I am.

But occasionally I come across someone that manages to say or do something that is somewhat pioneering. Recently, that honor of actually stumping me was bestowed upon a guy that I met out a few weeks ago. We met in a bar, clearly hit it off, and had a few laughs. I gave him my number and never heard from him again. Well, I ran into him for a second time a few weeks later and again, we had a lot of fun. Except this time he actually called afterwards. The conversation was easy. We seemed to have an effortless connection. So as the phone call wrapped up after an hour, I naturally asked him to dinner.

"Oh," he said, "I'm not really in a dating place right now."

Somehow, coming from him, that kind of honesty was surprisingly refreshing. I knew enough about his most recent relationship to respect his pause on dating. But naturally, I had a question.

"Well, why did you call me then?"

I wasn't expecting the "three little words" from him right then and there, but I got them. He began to explain to me that although he wasn't ready to date immediately, he felt that it wouldn't be long before he turned that corner and he hoped that when he got there that I would still be interested. And that's when he said those three earth-stopping, life-altering words. "I think you're really cool and funny and I'm really attracted to you, FOR SOME REASON."

My immediate reaction was to throw a million questions his way in hopes of clarifying just what the hell that meant. But, rather uncharacteristically, I chose to play it cool. Instead, we left it with the good old "I'll see you around" and we hung up. I laid in bed that night with that conversation knocking around in my head. Just what was that supposed to mean? Was he claiming to see my inner beauty or some other type of bullsh*t? Well, I for one do not want to be known for my inner beauty. I am not the ugly girl who plays tuba in the marching band who somehow while tutoring the hot quarterback in Spanish makes him fall in love with her. I don't want to identify with the lead in a crappy Freddie Prinze Jr. movie from the 90's. I don't want my value as a person riding solely on my wit and intelligence. While people with inner beauty are best known for their understanding, their passion for things, and their goodness, they are mostly known for their being grotesque and unattractive.

I came into vanity very late in life. I hated the way I looked up until I was about 29 years old. So I spent the better part of three decades cringing when I looked in a mirror, despising having to take my shirt off in public, and having s*x in complete and absolute darkness. It wasn't until I took realistic stock of my body as I approached 30 that I began to slowly start appreciating it. Sure, I has losing hair where I needed it and growing hair where I shouldn't be, but the rest of me wasn't all that bad. I was tight in pretty much all the right places. I have decent skin. My genes have assured me that I'll absolutely never be overweight. Judging myself against most of the world, I could've been much worse off in the looks department. I am by no means Zac Efron or a 1950s era Liz Taylor, but I can still turn a head or two on occassion. People are fairly consistently attracted to me way before they catch a whiff of any inner beauty. Even recently I had to fake having a boyfriend to fend off the aggressive advances of a guy in a bar. That's not something someone with inner beauty would do!

Well, FOR SOME REASON, this guy has texted me fairly consistently since this conversation. And, as I sat last night having several martinis with my friends Hector and Elias, the texting continued. As my phone blew up in my pocket and the vodka lubricated my thoughts, I took a swig of my fourth cherry cola-tini and asked my friends for advice. Once the laughter subsided, we got down to business.

"It's the Je-ne-sais-quoi!" my friend Hector exclaimed. "There's just something about you that he can't put his finger on that is attracting him to you."

"Not good enough," I responded. "I'd rather him put his finger on my hot body and then figure out later that I'm smart and interesting."

"Well," Hector continued, "I've been talking to this guy online for awhile. I can kinda tell by his pictures that maybe he's not the cutest guy in the world, but I think I'm gonna meet him anway. Because he just seems so nice and smart!"

"We've all been attracted to someone for reasons that we can't explain," Elias added. "I once slept with this guy who was kinda fat. But I thought he had the je-ne-sais-quoi so I slept with him. But it turns out that I was just kinda drunk. And then he ended up losing all of that weight and looked really good!"

The waiter dropped off our fifth martinis. "You two are not helping," I said.

The je-ne-sais-quoi. That part of someone that you just can't describe, yet you can't walk away from. As the fog from last night's martini-thon clears, I've remembered that I too have been attracted to people that wouldn't necessarily fit my normal bill. In all of the chaos I'd forgotten that the only person I feel as if I've ever loved was a broke out-of-shape Republican. He had je-ne-sais-quoi for days! Or maybe it was the fact that he had really good weed that kept me around for three years...

But whatever. Instead of approaching this situation with the attitude that this guy basically thinks I'm hideous, I'm going to take the enlightened road. He thinks I'm generally a nice and interesting person. And there's nothing wrong with that! Beauty's only skin deep after all. And no matter how hot someone is that hotness gets old really fast if they're a jerk or a moron. I find a bit of solace in that. But mostly I find solace in knowing that he would've never started talking to me in the first place if he didn't think I was hot. Come on! We're gay guys! We're shallow as f*ck!