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 ric Schaeffer, the forty-five-year-old bachelor behind such films as Fall and If Lucy Fell, says he's been unfairly painted as a misogynistic, overly picky chauvinist, when all he wants is love and "a bunch of babies." His new book, I Can't Believe I'm Still Single, recounts his various endeavors to find a wife — and sometimes just sex, occasionally with hookers — while trying to avoid STDs, women over forty and anyone who drinks more than one glass of wine with dinner. Yet despite all his efforts, he's weathered a shitstorm of hostility and scorn, spearheaded by the gossip blog Gawker, which solicited tales of real-life Schaeffer dates, then posted the horror stories online (which Gawker said spiked their traffic by "a bazillion percent.") The public lynching has certainly raised Schaeffer's profile — though not
The women who wrote into Gawker — do you remember your encounters with them? I remember the chick who said she met me in the gym and that I wanted to fuck her in the bathroom. Of course, she only wrote half the story. The rest of it was, we had a contract for me to go to her house, I was going to walk in, she was going to be naked on her bed and I was going to fuck her. But she said the cable guy was coming at four, and could we do it at five instead? This was one of my very rare afternoon trysts, and I couldn't really be bothered to do it at five. So I was like, you know what? If you can't do it in fifteen minutes, I'd rather go to the gym. She was like, what gym do you go to? Cut to: we go to the gym. I did say, "Meet me in the second-floor bathroom in five minutes," and she said okay, but then she went down there and was like, "It's too weird, I know people down there." Why would she portray it otherwise? God only knows. In my experience, most women who say they just want sex are lying, and they in fact want you to fall in love with them. And I think when [I didn't go to her house for sex], she got furious and wrote [to Gawker] and said, "Eric Schaeffer is five-foot-two and has hair plugs" or whatever the fuck she said. It's all such a blur. That's just my layman's theory. Are any of those women who wrote to Gawker lying and have actually never met you? The one I don't recognize was the one who said I was on the Master Cleanse but still had the strength to ask her to give me a blowjob even though I was too weak to get up and walk her to the door. I've done the Master Cleanse twice and I'm pretty sure I didn't have a date either time. It's hard to believe you wouldn't remember asking a woman for a blowjob and her refusing. People are getting the idea that this is a lifestyle for me, that I would say, "Hi, my name's Eric, would you blow me now?" And that's not true. People say, "You're desensitized, you live a life of debauchery because you can't get turned on by a normal girl." I'm like, what are you talking about? I've had ten prostitutes in thirty years. I think I'm probably on the low end of prostitution experiences of most men. You have fairly stringent criteria for what you're looking for in a woman, yet you seem hurt when a woman rejects you because they, for instance, want to date someone taller than you are. Why are your dealbreakers valid and theirs aren't? My dealbreakers are very broad. They're not about height or a woman's body. They're like, does she want to have kids? Is she an active alcoholic? One woman who wrote in [to Gawker] said I wanted her to get an HIV test on the first date and that I said she had three drinks and that was too much. Yeah! I don't want to go out with someone who drinks too much, and I would hope any girl who I asked to get an HIV test on the first date would think that was a good thing, for my health and hers. And I value a woman asking me the same things. I just dated a woman who wants to have kids in the next two years. I don't. Boom. I liked her a lot, but we couldn't keep dating. I ended a book deal from a major publisher in New York because the woman who runs the publishing company, when my dick was in her mouth, had her checkbook out and said, "I will buy your book now." We went on a second date, and she said, "I want to have a baby in a year and a half," and I said I don't want to have babies for five years.
This was a deal for this book you have out now? Yes. Most women I know wouldn't date a man who was so blatant about his dealbreakers from minute one. There's something to be said for subtlety. Well I don't say, "Hi, my name's Eric. Nice to meet you. Here's your test." It's not that antiseptic. There's a lot of charm and flirting and fun that goes into a date with me. Let's say I see a girl in yoga class and I think she's pretty. If she catches my eye and smiles at me, I say something that's hopefully cute and endearing and sweet. I don't launch into, "So listen, do you want to have kids and at what point?" At what point would you ask her if she's under thirty-seven? There at the yoga class, or on the date? I'd have to have a sense that she's under thirty-seven to have a date with her. And it's thirty-seven-ish. If she's forty and completely blows my skirt up, fine. I'm just saying she can't be forty-four. She can't be forty-six. You said the word subtlety. If you're on a job interview, you don't stand on subtlety. When I pitch a movie to Warner Brothers, I ask how much money he's going to give me to make the movie. I don't wait till the third meeting. But most people on a date don't want to feel like they're at a job interview. Job interviews are horrible. Well that's what it is. People don't need to have a negative connotation about what an interview process is supposed to be. Could it be that you don't actually want to get married and that's why you have all these criteria? That party line — "You want to be alone and that's why you have all these dealbreakers," — that's an anti-feminist point of view. I'm more feminist than most self-proclaimed feminists I know. It's treating a woman with respect and honor: telling her exactly what I expect and what I want, and asking her to tell me what she expects and wants in her life. People have also suggested that you're a misogynist and that's why you can't find a wife. That's just a joke. I love women. I love my mom. I see her three times a week. I have a great relationship with my mom. In the book, I do write about this woman April who I dated not wanting to go away to Vermont with me, and there's a very graphic passage where I talk about how I want to bash her head in with a rock and vomit onto her deadness. Clearly hyperbole and satire — satirizing my own obvious oversensitivity and insecurity. Do you have female friends? I've always had more female friends than male friends. I wish I could have more male friendships, but I find that women are way more accessible to their emotions, much more honest about their emotions and more willing to talk about emotionality and be really close and open. That's the problem you say you have with the women you date — that they're not open enough, not willing to whisk off to Vermont with you at the drop of a hat. That's true. It's interesting, I have run into more women in my dating life who have been shut down and unavailable to their true emotions. That's been an unfortunate slew of women who I've met lately. But why do you think that is? It can't just be coincidence. I've been in therapy for years. My spiritual path has been one of self-reflection, and I'm a firm believer that water seeks its own level — you attract people who are where you're at. So is that saying I'm less emotionally available than I say I am? I don't know. The best I can say is I demand a very high level of honesty in my relationships. Do you worry that instead of attracting women with this book and with your blog, you're actually repelling them? No, I think that I'm quintessentially who I am, and any woman that's repelled by what they read or see of me through my work, they're not going to be for me. Of course, I'm open to being wowed. I'm open to changing my mind about things. You're forty-five. Why do you think you've had so much trouble finding a woman who wows you when other men your age have been able to find such a thing? It's very disconcerting to me. I see people around me who genuinely love each other. I see how they giggle at the same jokes, laugh at the same things. They just think each other are the cat's meow. I crave that. It's hard to find really smart, funny women who are confident and have a job or an aspiration that's inspiring to me. I'm not going to go out with a Republican, I'm not going to go out with people don't understand that it's not cool to drive SUVs. You whittle it down and whittle it down. But eventually, most people make some sort of decision. They think, I really like almost everything about her, and yes she drives an SUV, but I'll be with her anyway. The settling thing. I've thought about that. It's a matter of what areas are you willing to concede. Usually it's pervasive in someone's personality — it's not just the SUV. That speaks to a lack of consideration for the environment and for people around them, which speaks to a lack of consideration for themselves. If you pull the thread, it starts to unravel. When your relationships end, do you tend to be the dumper or the dumpee? I've predominantly been the dumper, but in the last one, I was the dumpee, and that was not fun. It was my last girlfriend, from seven years ago. She'd sort of said she wanted to marry me for a couple years, and I was sort of getting prepared because I really wanted to. And then I was ready and I asked her to marry me and she said no. And then she married somebody else a year later. Conan O'Brien. Was she very tall? Because Conan O'Brien is quite tall. She was five-ten, and I've always loved tall women. My last girlfriends have all been five-ten, five-eleven. I mean, I also like women my height. I also like women who are five-three. Do you like online dating? I have a love/hate relationship with it. I thought it made a lot of sense: here are thousands of women I can access and find a great match. But I think it's different for men and women. I think the women are way more fucked up in online dating than the men are. Let's just face it: the bottom line is, if you're a woman, I don't care how you look or how smart you are or what your personality is, biology is set up so that you are deluged with suitors. You have men asking you out when you walk out of the house. Men don't have that. I've found there's a lot more game-playing with women online, that they're there for their ego, they want to see how many men are attracted to them, they want attention, they don't really want to meet up, they don't want to talk — just a lot of fucking lying. You were on a quest to get your profile to the very top of Nerve Personals. Did you succeed? Yeah, I was so annoyed at the top two guys that I felt it was my duty to unseat them. The top guy was this tragically good-looking guy with glasses and a cowboy hat, and the second guy was this humility-feigning guy who was like, "This list is dumb, I shouldn't even be on here," and you knew he was just fucking eating it up. I just felt like I must destroy them both. Now, depending on how many times your pages get viewed, that's how you move up that list. A lot of women don't view pages because they're busy just answering all the messages they get sent. But if you view them, they might look at who viewed them. And then you get a hit on your page. So for one week, between Christmas and New Year's last year, for fifteen hours a day, I clicked on every fucking woman on Nerve Personals. I went systematically state by state. On a normal day before I started doing this, I was getting about nine views a day. After I started doing this I was getting four hundred views a day. And I moved up and finally became number one. You've hired various types of sex workers. Which are your favorite, the prostitutes, the masseuses or the dominatrixes? The dominatrixes. I thought you were going to say the masseuses. The masseuses are a close second. Special-massage girls will give you love because it's just the nature of who they are and what they're doing. Have you ever had a really bad date? Sure, I've had the kind of date where I fly someone in from L.A. who I met on Nerve, and she comes over to my house at midnight, and I get a distinct feeling when she gets here that she could be a psychotic murderer, and even though she's kind of sexy and wants to fuck me on the couch within ten minutes, I say, you know what? I think it's best if you go to a hotel. And I call the doorman and ask him to escort her out of the house. That happened? That happened. I'm sure she wasn't a psychotic murderer. It's just my strange imagination. n° 
 ©2007 Nerve.com and Will Doig |
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