Am I the only one around here who seems to ask too much from the people who are “candidates” to be in a relationship with me? More precisely, I am talking about girls. You see, I spend a lot of time in my gym because I am a good friend with the owner. I am there sometimes when I don’t workout, I come to pick him up, we go for a cup of coffee somewhere and so on. Anyway, I meet there a lot of girls, really a lot. Some of them look great. Some of them don’t look so good. I am on “hi” basis with some of them, I don’t talk at all to some and I talk more with another group when I am done with my workout. I also know a lot of people from various other places, from my work to… you got the picture. However, I can’t seem to be able to get really interested in any of these girls. I mean, some time ago I saw a great looking girl. You guys from the States would say she was a “real hottie”. She was very cute, real pocket Venus if you want. When I heard her talking… bam! Total turnoff. The girls is so dumb she probably has to think about breathing or die. I see that many guys are prepared to go over “minor” problems like stupid girl, girl with serious emotional problems and things like that, just to be in a relationship. Hell, I have friends that got married to women and I know for fact that they don’t have almost anything in common. They don’t even get along so great, but you know the drill “we are together for X years, so it is expected from us to get married and procreate”. I can’t believe how many people go with the flow and do things they are supposed to do because the society expects them to. For one thing, I simply reject the notion of treating all women all the time like sexual objects. When you have single guy and single girl together in one place, it is almost like there is an obligation for the guy to “make a pass” on them. I don’t do that, but the girls still look at everything I say like I am trying to get in their panties. Basically, my question would be - is there anybody else who has very high standards and is not willing to compromise when it comes to significant others?
People of character have the “high standards” you referred to Axy. I have a different question for you though Axy. I know you are from, or at least live in, Croatia. You English is excellent. Not only the grammer but the idioms as well. I am wondering how you obtained to master one of the hardest languages in the world to become proficient at when learned as a second language, or at least I am assuming it was? Perhaps you were educated in an English language country or perhaps the school system you went to in Croatia is above the norm. Anyway, your command of the language is better than quite a few American posters on this board. Nice job!
I would say most people who are looking for a relationship have certain standards they don’t want compromise on. But those standards differ from person to person. The trick is to find someone with standards as close as possible to yours. I doubt you will ever be able to find someone with you whom you’ll never have to compromise. After all, there is only one axy.
Lots of girls look real good, but 95% of the good ones are “little girls” who do nothing but party, which is too bad for them because I’ll never be interested in that. I can’t stand little girls & they’re all about my age too (21). I’ve talked to ones who are about 25-28 & they’re not so dense.
It’s funny. I love tall blondes. I mean, just the sight of really blonde hair can start getting me aroused. All the better if it’s on a woman who’s over 5’8". However, I’ve never met even ONE tall blonde who had anything going for her besides her body. I find them dumb, immature, and superficial. The best relationships I’ve ever been in have been with overweight brunettes. My theory is that when you’re a chick who can’t skate by in life just with your good looks, you develop a personality. Not to say that all blondes are dumb, I’m sure there are a great deal that are smart and funny. I have just yet to meet any. Oh, and I also don’t try and meet girls in the gym. When I’m at the gym, it’s to workout. I don’t want to think I have to primp up to look good for the ladies when I go there.
Actually Axy,I think you’re very brave. People are usually afraid of being lonely so they’ll settle for just about anything.I am somewhat similar to you, and I would be more than willing to spend my whole life alone, rather than being with someone just because I am supposed to.Maybe you wouldn’t say that, knowing my love life situation(Axy and I each other; we’re both from Croatia),but I am still young bastard, and I still have, as Eminem would put it “Lot of drugs to do, parties to crash,girls to screw” (or something like that).
You don’t have such high standards, you just know exactly what you want. Nothing wrong with that.
Thanks for the compliments. Yes, I am 27 yo, Croatian, born in Holland, but my family moved back to Croatia when I was a toddler. I lived briefly in East Berlin at the end of 80s when the Wall was still up. Actually, English is my third language, the first two being
(of course) Croatian and German. I started learning German when I was 9 years old
and I did not start learning English until I was around 12. Surprisingly, I did not
use German too much, so my English is at the moment much better than my German. You
are right when you say that our educational system is above the norm: I have a diploma
with major in business informatics, comparable to BS degree in the US (4 years after high school), but even in the high school I had to take a variety of courses, including
typewriting, electronics, technical drawing, a lot of informatics-based courses like
data organization, hardware, a lot of physics, chemistry and biology, mathematics to
the level of integrals, derivations and differential equations and several computer programming languages - and it was between 1987 and 1991! Several of my friends were involved in the student exchange program in the States and they were among the best in the class and most of them agree that American education system, at least to the college level, is much less demanding. It is unheard of to finish high school and be basically illiterate, and I realize there are a lot of such cases in the States. I think there is only one American college in Croatia with courses taken in English, in Dubrovnik, I believe it has something to do with management in tourism or something like that. Trust me on this one, but English is not the hardest language. It certainly has the largest vocabulary of all languages, but the grammar is rather simple. There are several problematic issues, when pronouncing words, “th” is a problem for Mid- and Eastern Europeans (as in “three” or “teeth”). Grammar is rather simple too, all you have as an obstacle is several irregular plurals, plural of the Greek and Latin nouns and some differences in tenses, for example, in Croatian and other South Slavic languages (if you did not know, Serbian is almost the same language, there is sometimes less difference between Serbian and Croatian than between dialects within those two languages -) when you want to express something that happened in the past, you pretty much use only past tense. In English, you also have other tenses like perfect tense or pluperfect tense - they also exist in Croatian, but if you used them, you would sound sort of archaic. German is for example much more complicated and I think that you would be surprised if you started learning Croatian that has 7 more letters than English (for example soft and hard “ch”, soft and hard “g”), every vocal is one letter and we have
7 cases (for nouns), each of them having separate ending attached to the original word -
in English, the noun does not change, you only add words like “about”, “with” or “of”…
Anyway, the overall level of grammar on this board is pretty much compliant to the high standards, with errors being highly predictable - it is interesting that lose vs. loose dilemma is prevalent both among native English speakers and those whose native language is not English. 
Btw. I don’t think my English is something special, I just invest a lot in reading integral English versions of various texts, and I read a lot of literature in English and use it in everyday communication - I work for an international software company. Take a lok at my buddy’s language (Draz)… or even better example, Veljko P. who is from Yugoslavia… the guy is 7 years younger than me and his English is simply great in its
fluency! Btw. this is a great example, I managed to hijack my own thread.
You did not ask me for advice, but I will give it anyway: if you really feel like that, fuck them all (literally), crash the parties and do your drugs, because in just a few years, you will not be able to do all that. When you finish your education, it seems that reckless fun days are pretty much over. You will enter “who will die having the fattest bank account” contest and most of the adolescent fun is over. Trust me on this one.
Avoids R, when I first met Axy on this board, one of my first questions was whether he lived abroad. His english is outstanding.
Axy,you can always give me advice. To tell you the truth, I don’t actually feel I need to party like crazy, screw everything that moves (except for my patients),but I do feel that I will regret it later, if I don’t do the aformentioned things. You’re right, after the school, the fun usually ends, and no matter how much I’ll try to keep my “mazda zoom-zoom” feeling, it just won’t be the same. (sorry,I had an excellent delt&arms workout, I have to turn in now)
I am having second thoughts about you screwing your patients.
Not to crash in on your conversation, here, boys, but there’s another angle to consider. I know exactly what you mean when you say the “party is going to be over”, but you might consider the fact that another one will be beginning. And that’s the one that begins when you find that significant other that you do want to spend your life with. I would not go back to the dating, game playing of youth for anything. It honestly is so much more satisfying to be with my husband and do things together and know that nobody is screwing with our emotions or our minds. Raising our family and doing all those things young people think are “boring” is truly exciting. You’ll see when you get there.
As for standards. You should never compromise on those. Don’t settle for a bimbo unless that’s what you want. And don’t worry. Someone will come along–and probably when you least expect it.
Well… My standards seem to be much lower then the average posters on this thread. I like just about any girl who looks cute, or doesn’t make a big deal when it comes to mattress mambo. If she is smart, cool, but that is not a necessary trait I am looking for. Stupid girls (or the ones not bothering to think) are much easier to get along with, IMO. Also, looks matter, but not to the point of refusing anything other than a certain type. Ive been with fat ones, skinny ones, models and prom queens, plus a lot of those in between. I believe that I will start being more picky as I get older, but certainly not this week. I believe Eminem also said: Ill fuck anything that walks. I’m ALMOST like that, only sparing the family and (most :-)) domestic animals. I have yet to meet a girl too repulsive to boink. Axy, thanks for the kudos. Aside from Serbian, I speak French and English. My folks used to read me books and play cartoons with no titles in those 2 languages, and since I wanted to know what the hell Bagira told Baloo in the Jungle Book, I had to learn some fuckin foreign words. I agree, English is not at all the most difficult language, it is harder than Spanish or Italian, but a LOT easier than German or Greek. BTW, Croatian has 33 letters? Wow, I’m really behind on current events.
Being a teacher, I too marvel at the high standard of English used by certain posters–especially knowing they are not using their first language. It is a known fact, however, that the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. Also, anyone equipped with more than one language generally tends to be better educated (although I have no specific studies on this one). Axy, you write better than most of the students I have ever dealt with–and most of them were born right here in North America with English as their first language. Congrats! And I don’t really think English is all that easy to learn. I think it depends on the grammar structure you are most familiar with. If it is similar to English, then it’s easy. If not–well it can be a hellish language to explain to someone!
You nailed it down pretty good when you said you will become more picky as you get older.
Yours truly also had a phase when he fucked everything warm with a heartbeat and no
girl was ugly enough or stupid enough not to watch the roof of my car from the inside.
(double negation is a bitch) However, it got old pretty soon, within several months.
I also noticed that I am very successful in playing mind games and fucking with their
brains to get what I wanted - and that is one of the areas where women are the greatest
specialists, but it also is not especially rewarding activity in the long run
because that is not who I am. Of course, you are in the worst situation if you are “being yourself”, so I am pretty much stuck here because I am not into head games and that is what most of them is all about. As for the current events, you are definitely behind because you forgot to exclude letters x,y,q and w that do not exist in the respective alphabets of our languages. 
Tnx. I did not tell you about my rather strange hobby. In my office I have a large piece of paper attached to the wall where I write down seldom used words and phrases that I come across. Some of them are real gems and almost never used in everyday communication. When I gather enough of them, I write a business letter using a lot of these words in order to confuse the adversary (part of my job is to prove that a specific piece of software has a bug and force the guys who write that crap to make a fix for the issue). Anyway, our languages are very different, Croatian is much more flexible when it comes to word order for example and the grammar is much more complex; however, it is a piece of cake compared to German where genders are not natural, so the horse is not masculine, every word has an article attached to it that has to be learned along with the word etc… it is a real mess to learn… and long words are major pain in the ass…
Nice to see that there are a few others on the board here who are language types. Of course, Europeans generally have a leg up on the rest of the world when it comes to languages, as most Europeans speak three or four. Still, all due credit to Axy, Draz and the rest, who consistently show up several of the native English speakers around here! Nice to see (if a bit horrifying) in a way…
Actually, from a purely objective linguistics point of view, no language is easier or harder to learn than another. As GM pointed out, it depends on what any individual person’s linguistic background is, i.e. how close the target language is to a language that s/he already knows. For example, Japanese is regarded as a “killer” language - and it is, for westerners. But Koreans come over here and get quite proficient in less than a year. The reason? The grammars are virtually the same, there are a lot of cognates, and many of the same kanji (Chinese ideographs) are used. (I’m sure Hyok could shed some more light on this.) So while it’s taken me about a decade to get really proficient, Koreans come over and are talking within six months. (Bastards. ;-])
Axy, I can sympathise with you. I am around the same age as you, but have the mentality of somewhere around 30. I don’t like alchol, never have smoked, eat 6-8 times a day (healthy, while going to college full-time and working partime on the side), and have little interest in parties. All people do at parties is stay up late (which, besides being bad on the health, I don’t consider much fun-I have to stay up late to complete assignments for school, why would I want to do it for fun?), drink, smoke, and then sometimes have sex with someone they will probably regret, when they sober up. Wow, that’s a lot of fun! That’s why I really enjoyed Charles Stanley’s post (he basically said that he has never tried any drugs, alchol, cigarets and or otherwise and has no wish to. What I think you are facing Axy is that you are more mature than your actual age. I think once you get around thirty, things will even out a little more. In the meentime, just talk to people, I’ve tried all ways of meeting girls and guys (for friends) and that’s the best way I’ve found, you can usually tell within a few minutes whether things will progess. Best of luck, and don’t give up, for to give up is to be defeated.
Oh my god! You’re right about the Asian language! My mom is Cantonese, but can speak other Chinese dialects with ease and is self-taught in English. I know some Cantonese, but recently began learning Mandarin. Oh my! And as you know, Ko can speak and write (although a tad rusty) in Japanese (his background). I only know enough Japanese from Karate - but man, I wish my mom stuck with me when I was a kid with the Chinese. She stopped once I became school age, since I had to behave like a “American”. Yeah, whatever ;-p
And my sister has lived in Kuwait since 1988 and is fluent with Arabic now. But even though Mandarin is scewing up my Cantonese, I'm sticking with it. I'm so impressed with people who speak several different languages!
I am considering sending my (future) children to a language school in my city. They teach in English, French, Spanish, and German. I lived in France for a year and think learning other languages actually enhances creative thinking. I also find it amazing that many non-native speakers use better grammer than Americans. Sad actually…
I have to say, that from that above post of mine, you couldn’t tell that English was my first language. Eeeuw, I don’t like how it was worded. Slapping hand Bad, Bad…