Dating a diva

Ah, the diva. She's demanding, fussy, pooh-poohs responsibility and is impossible to deal with. And yet she's irresistible to men. Why? No one understands really (is it because she looks good as a handbag, is good in bed or makes good scrambled eggs?), yet it's difficult to argue against the fact that men are genetically predisposed towards "goddesses".
Blogger J agrees that most men want a woman who looks good on their arm, but reckons that the more in-demand she is, the more difficult she is to tolerate, and the more willing her boyfriend is to put up with it.
"I don't get why they put up with the crap these girls give them," he writes. "Maybe it's because men who date a diva believe they've won some sort of a prize."

And it seems Joseph is not alone ...
"The demise of the trophy wife!" tut-tutted the ABC News in response to research published in the British journal Labour Economics, which proved that more blokes are picking partners who earn similar salaries to them instead of someone who leeches and looks pretty.

"Woohoo!" yelled the down-to-earth, smart, intelligent and hard-working women who buy their own diamonds and pay their own bills. Yep, it seems the era of the diva might finally have come to an end.
When I posed the question on the appeal of the diva to a bunch of blokes on the weekend, they all agreed that, indeed, she's boring, self-obsessed and ridiculously demanding.

Yet the thing that surprised me was that they all admitted to having dated a diva in the past. And evident from the myriad of emails hitting my inbox, many blokes seem unable to escape her wrath, including blogger Dave, who writes this:

"When I fell in love with Kate, she wasn't a diva. She was kind and caring and funny. The minute things started to get serious, and we were thinking about the next step, the demands started pouring in. First she wanted me to pay for stuff, then she wanted to live in a certain suburb which at that time I couldn't afford and the final straw was that she wanted me to spend less time with my mates and more time with her. In the end, she became such a diva, she was sadly no longer the girl I fell in love with."
By the way, when I recounted his story to a diva friend of mine, she retorted back with, "But Kate’s requests are very reasonable!" (A truly diva-esque response.)

Comedian Chris Rock has other ideas. He reckons it's not only the diva who is demanding on her man, but it's actually a trait of all women, no matter what her status.

"In order for any relationship to work, both people have to be on the same page, both people have to have the same focus. And we all know what that page is, we all know what that focus is ... What's that focus? The focus is all about her!" he says.
One man responds to Rock's tirade on the Eternal Bachelor blogspot with this little gem:
"My wife gives over the whole of the weekend to pursuing what she calls 'me time'. She goes to retreats, yoga mini-breaks, a spa, a health farm, even art classes. All of which I pay for, of course. She got the Oprah memo."