Girls, brace yourselves. You’re about to visit the center of the universe: the Turkish male.
For all you girls who have been fortunate enough to have basked in the radiating aura of a Turkish man, your whole time dating was probably not unlike being on a hot-air balloon ride. You flew high up there to where the sun shone bright and warm, lifted further and further by a massively inflated ego that could keep up the ride as long as it kept blowing itself up with gas. The universe looked big all around you, the people left below seemed small and insignificant, like ants, and you felt like you were given the heavens to hold in your hands for all that time that you were promised the world on a magical ride. But of course every journey must come to an end. Soon the gas runs out, the fire fades to a flicker, the hot air fizzles away, the horizons narrow, the sun and the stars and heavens regain their distance, and all those little ants below begin growing and growing back into people as big as you, and bigger than him. Eventually you find out you’ve been wasting your time with somebody who was basically just a big baby trapped under a cap of hair gel.
“That’s the deal with any guy,” you say. Maybe, but in the case of the Turkish man, there are some other issues involved. And issue number one is his Mother (always written with a capital M). In terms of over-protectiveness and over-bearingness, the Turkish Mother could go toe-to-toe with a Jewish Mother any day. These formative years involve the boy being pampered and puffed, and generally protected from doing anything that’s good for him, like playing outside and getting dirty (NO, MY SULTAN, YOU’LL GET SICK!), being given a moderate diet and not being overfed and stuffed (EAT, EAT, YOU’RE SKIN AND BONES!), being able to deal with the elements (PUT ON YOUR SWEATER AND COAT AND MITTENS AND HAT, THERE’S A SLIGHT BREEZE!), and not being given everything they want just so they take it and shut up (TAKE THIS AND SHUT UP). In other words, the child is treated like a child, so the child naturally perceives himself as the little Child King. What results is a spoilt, overconfident, puffy egomaniac who eventually thinks he’s God’s gift to women just because he’s God’s gift to his Mother.
So now you see these guys 20 years on who wear undershirts tucked into their underwear, collared shirts tucked into their pants, hair so caked in gel you can see your reflection in it, standing around in one of those places where you pay a thousand dollars for a J&B just because there’s a view, as they give their best self-important Bollywood-actor-meets-creepy-myopic-stalker look to bottle-blonde nişantaşettes while simultaneously talking about jet-skis with their identically dressed childhood friends, and you think, “Good lord, what went wrong?” Well, to find the answer you’ll have to go home with one of them.
The Turkish yuppie’s bachelor pad is a sterile, vacuous cross between a doctor’s waiting room and Toys-R-Us. There are cheap prints of great artworks on the walls, white-carpeted floors, furniture picked out of a catalogue, and lots of toys lying around – PlayStation, flatscreen TV, souvenir lighters, discarded iPods, last seasons' iPhones, some kind of discarded ab apparatus he saw on an infomercial, football paraphernalia (both from his NFL team and his Turkish soccer team, which is either Fenerbahce or Galatasaray), and actual real souvenirs from when he went on Spring Break to Cancun while his dad was putting him through college in the U.S. There are of course no books, just a big library of DVDs instead, among which you’ll find the whole Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series. His kitchen will be well-equipped but never used for cooking, just for keeping food brought over by his Mother. The bathroom will be full of all the latest Gillette products, because he really does think it’s the best a man can get. He shaves with a Mach 3. Turbo.
So now you’re dating him, he’s showered you with compliments and presents, then one day he tells you he loves you. That’s usually a good sign in other cases, but not in this case. It means he’s either started or is about to start cheating on you. The more women that adore him and the more women he has sex with, the more he fills the vacuum in his meaningless existence. He must keep conquering, and what time he has to himself when he’s not working in his import-export company or his dad’s textiles business is spent in tacky bars with dyslexic names and over-priced drinks chatting up equally vapid brasserie-bimbos with fake tans who go weak at the knees when they see shiny sports cars with customized number plates. And if he proposes to you, that definitely means he’s planning to hit on other girls as soon as he has you as his surrogate Mother to help him uphold his status in society by being his wife and pumping him out some children... whom he'll then ignore and only show his love by throwing money at them.
You’ll kick yourself for having been a fool, but cut him some slack, because the poor guy really does think the world revolves around him. I know of course for a fact that it doesn’t, because it actually revolves around ME. How do I know that? Mother told me so.
