Face it: Only winners get trophy wives

     All guys early in puberty actually expect some day to date the head cheerleader, the homecoming queen or another campus beauty with huge boobs and a wonderful ass. Most guys let go of this dream rather quickly and learn to set their sites more realistically. For some guys, this transformation takes longer. For 49-year-old George Sodini the realization never came to him that not every guy hooks up with a Playboy playmate.
     Sodini, lamenting that the women looked like goddesses and apparently angry that none of these beauties would give him some, shot up a health club this week, killing three women and wounding 15 others before taking his own life.
     After 19 years of failure with women, Sodini still held onto his unrealistic dreams of latching onto a hottie. On his absolutely pathetic blog, he wrote about wanting to date women 10 to 20 years younger, and he devoutly followed the author of the book “How to Date Young Women.”
     Desperate as he was for some action, Sodini should have turned his attention the other direction – to women older than him. If he had kept up at all with the trends, he would have made himself cougar bait, or as they used to say, he could have been a boy toy for an older woman wanting a young stud.
     By the way, I have my own book about how to date younger women. Here’s an outline of the four best bets: A) become a multimillionaire B) be a governor, the president, or a congressman C) be a rock star, movie star or professional athlete D) start your own religion in which you claim to be the messiah and it’s every female’s duty to have sex with you – aka David Koresh and Warren Jeffs.
     Even old farts who can accomplish A, B or C have harems of girls as young as jail bait. Option D, while effective, requires some rather rare psychological traits and often leads toward legal troubles. Since all those options are out of reach for most men or are guaranteed to end in disaster, I have some more advice aimed toward Average Joe: take what you can get.
     In high school, Sodini was probably the dork who haplessly hit on the cheerleaders while ignoring the overtures of the debate team geek sitting behind him in advanced physics. I think he never figured out that he could have done ok chasing attainable girls and that every girl or woman (whatever her age) has the potential to be pretty.
     Even if Sodini had eventually found a pinup queen, you know what would have happened next. He would have been an insecure, over jealous creep who monitored all of her phone calls and never let her out of his sight. He would have been so afraid of losing her that he would be unbearably controlling and his smothering attention would eventually force her to leave.
     Then he would have shot her so no one else could have her. Then he would have shot himself, holding onto the insane illusion that that action would teach the world some kind of lesson about how badly everyone treated him.
     I suspect Sodini made a huge mistake throughout his life: he kept looking for girlfriends without first making sure that he had a few guy friends. Guy friends could have looked at him objectively, aimed him toward females suitable for him and pointed out some possibilities that he hadn’t noticed. Friends would have let it be known to him the absurdity of that 10-to20-years-younger goal. Friends would have let him know that his life had worth even without a supermodel (or even any woman) by his side.
     Sodini was no different from other murderous gunmen. He was a loner overwhelmed with an ongoing frustration with nobody there to help him deal with it. I don’t know why he never learned the social skills necessary to make it through life. I do know more than ever that we need to act upon the usually available warning signs before these loners who don’t have anything to live for kill more innocent people who do.