The Gals and Guys Every OC Native Has Probably Dated

Last year, we published two listicles that immediately became some of the most-read stories in OC Weekly history: “10 OC Girls You've Probably Dated” and “10 OC Guys You've Probably Dated” are testaments to the fact that no matter how many dirty cops we expose, how many politicians we recall, how many pedophile priests we uncover or how many innocent people we free from jail—no matter what we do, y'all just want to read about getting laid.

So have at it, Orange County. We illustrated some of the guys and gals from each list, all archetypes of people almost every OC native have probably dated, whether gay or straight, Mexican or white, an old-timer or a newbie. Most of these are exclusive to OC; some of them are universal. Enjoy, and if you've never dated anyone on this list? You've got a lot of lovin' to do.

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The Gals

THE GIRL WHO WANTS TO GET THE HELL OUT OF ORANGE COUNTY
She's smart, funny, creative, wonderful, gorgeous, liberal—and she's trying her damndest to get the hell out of the hellhole in which she grew up, whether that means going to college out of state or moving to Long Beach/San Francisco/Austin/NYC/Anywhere Not Named Orange County, California. This brain drain has afflicted us for nearly 50 years, and you won't see her again until she's firmly settled somewhere better, doing amazing things, having the time of her life and wondering how pathetic you could be to decide to stay in OC.

THE CHRISTIAN
She could be Catholic or Mormon, but she's most likely an evangelical from one of the Calvary Chapels, or Saddleback, or Mariner's or Eastside Christian or even Newsong. Follows Rick Warren on Twitter, voted for Proposition 8, attended Fishfest with her office mates, serves as a counselor at Christian camp every summer—yet fell for your heathen ass. Regardless of her creed, she will not put out—until she does.

THE CLUBBER
Next to the beach babe and the Mexican, this is probably the oldest OC chica archetype. Whether she was wearing poodle skirts at the Rendezvous in Balboa during World War II, tripped on 'shrooms in Laguna with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in the 1960s, danced at the Crazy Horse, patronized Club Rubber or Metropolis during the 1990s, slinked the night away at Sutra right before the Great Recession, or is still gloving at the Yost as we speak (even though its latest EDM concert ended two nights ago), this girl lives to club. She doesn't care about the music being played or even about you; she just needs a guy to dance with for this one song, and she will drop you as soon as a hotter guy (or better dancer) steals her from you. Upshot? She doesn't want a serious relationship, so she's probably the most fun lady of the bunch here.

THE ROCKABILLY QUEEN
In the 1980s, she moshed with you during Social D and Vandals shows; in the 1990s, she moshed with you during a No Doubt or Reel Big Fish performance. Nowadays, she spends her days primping her locks—sometimes Bettie Page, sometimes Veronica Lake—while counting the days until the next Hootenanny. Tattoos are virtually a requisite for her, as is a love of cheap beer, a working knowledge of Chevy engines from 1948 to 1973, and the ability to punch people as you defend her honor from other rockabillies after one too many Buds in the oppressive Oak Canyon heat. These ladies seem to congregate in Orange, Fullerton and Long Beach, and watch out with the ones in HB—they just might be neo-Nazis.

THE WHITEWASHED DAUGHTER OF IMMIGRANTS
Whether her name is Teri Nguyen, Carol Rodriguez, Annie Cheng or Ria Alizadeh, this girl's first name isn't the one on her birth certificate—she was born Thuy, Carolina, An or Darya. But at some point, she tired of playground taunting by classmates or classroom butchering by professors and decided to go by an Americanized version of her name. She almost always dates outside of her ethnic group, usually gabachos, sometimes to the consternation of her family members but usually with their approval because that family is also whitewashed. Girls such as this mostly live in Irvine, multicultural capital of Orange County, unless she's Mexican—in which case, SanTanaheim is where she roams.

THE MEXICAN
Whitewashed or not, dating a Mexican is not only a likely possibility for every Orange County male considering Latinos (more than 75 percent of them Mexi, mind you) make up nearly 40 percent of Orange County's population, but it's also our birthright ever since gabachos married the daughters of Californios when OC was legally Mexico. Dating a Mexican girl has been immortalized in OC literature: Victor Villaseñor's epic family saga, Rain of Gold, recounts how his mother dated a gabacho in Santa Ana, back when gabachos actually lived in SanTana. And the Righteous Brothers' “Little Latin Lupe Lu” dramatizes the joys of dating a spicy señorita—Bill Medley (who wrote the song) says it was inspired by a Mexi named Lupe Laguna with whom he went steady while attending Santa Ana High.

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Dating a Mexican girl will gift you many things. You'll learn another language and inevitably get an invite to a family function, whether a wedding, a quinceañera or a carne asada Sunday. If you're not Mexican, expect everyone to talk shit about you in Spanish; if you are, expect everyone to talk shit about you in Spanish and English. But at least you'll get to take a plate of carnitas home.

THE GOLD DIGGER
She's the gorgeous gal who will only date you if your American Express is black, your Mercedes is S-Class or above, and you were in college when she was still in utero. If you're none of the above, you might've bought her a drink at Gulfstream or Charlie Palmer's, a drink she quickly drank after seeing an Irvine Co. exec sit at the table across the room from you. Don't worry: In 20 years, her daughters will be all yours.

THE POOR LITTLE RICH SOUTH COUNTY PRINCESS
She grew up never setting foot north of the El Toro Y unless she attended Orange County School of the Arts or one of the Catholic high schools. Her dream is to buy into one of Irvine's latest developments or—if that doesn't pan out—a condo in Rancho Mission Viejo. The only reason she's slumming it with your Garbage Grove or Anacrime self is to spite her family—but once she has shocked her family, she'll marry a Mission Viejo douchebag and live as a housewife who lunches at Fashion Island or South Coast Plaza, the farthest north she'll ever dare to go during daytime hours.

THE BEACH BABE
The first famous girl in Orange County culture (despite our pre-World War II agricultural dominance, our farm girls could never compete in the national consciousness with those of Wisconsin or Iowa), the beach babe has enraptured OC's male mind since the Gabrieleños were camping in Bolsa Chica. When not traveling the world doing ads for Quiksilver or Billabong, she's posing for BL!SSS and sunning across OC. Unless you're in the action-sports industry yourself, your relationship is doomed to end when she finds a skier or surfer who's better-looking than you—and you know she will.

THE MILF
The best part about Orange County dating? Even if you can't get any of the aforementioned honies at their prime, you'll sure as hell nail them when they graciously transition into MILF-hood. In fact, all of these archetypes, as with tributaries to the Mississippi, lead toward a river of MILFs that dominate the county dating scene: We have the randiest collection this side of a Brazzers reel. The Real Housewives of Orange County only scrapes the surface of how they roll. And because we ain't sexist, the MILF inevitably attracts gold-digging young guns looking to get their bill paid at Javier's, the Quiet Woman, Foxfire—or any bar in South County. Are those breasts real? Only one way to find out!

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The Guys

THE MUSICIAN
You get with this guy because the prospect of going out with the next Mike Ness or Tony Kanal is exciting—and besides, you'll be on the guest list at all the shows, plus be able to get into concerts that matter due to your beloved's connections. But reality sets in fast: the grind of serving as your guy's impromptu stagehand from backyard shows to shitty South County clubs to opening at the Coach House to maybe getting a slot at an all-day festival at the Observatory or Burger Records in eight years to gigging anywhere and everywhere possible during OC Music Awards season. The absolute lack of money—and when there is money, it gets dumped into the next bad YouTube video. And he lives for NAMM. Then he takes off on tour, and you're left to ponder whether all those Instagrams of him with fans are pre- or post-coital. The tipping point comes when you have to call your mom's AAA for the umpteenth time after his band's van fails to start off I-10 outside Quartzsite.

THE CONSERVATIVE
He always dresses sharp, always desires and spends money, always volunteers for the Orange County GOP, always is a smug douche. This guy thinks President Barack Obama is the devil, illegal immigrants are ruining this country and Reagan is god—though he has no feelings whatsoever. Usually, this type is in the closet. He'll take you to Newport or Laguna for a date, with the occasional SanTana stroll to show he's hip. Unless you're also conservative, you'll dump the guy after he becomes insufferable—which will take a couple of dates.

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THE SUGAR DADDY
While the gold digger is an OC girl archetype, I don't believe most women who go for older men necessarily do it for money. Sometimes, the men of OC are really boys; sometimes, you gotta swing a couple of years or decades above your generation to find true love—or at least a summer romance, or even a guy to buy you a drink for the night. As for the guys who fall under this category? Always white-collar, always wearing a watch, always old enough to remember when new televisions still came with a UHF nob. They are very full of themselves yet insecure—why else would they go out with women the age of their daughters if not to desperately try to prove how hip they remain, Rogaine be damned?

THE POCHO
OC girls might slum it with the occasional cholo or even go for a wab just for the hell of it, but they usually love the pocho the most. Otherwise known as an assimilated Mexican, his English is impeccable, he's only Mexican when you ask him to pillow talk en español or you're ordering tacos somewhere, and his name is easy on your tongue: Will instead of Guillermo, Joe instead of Joaquín, etc. But it doesn't matter: When you take him home to meet your family, he'll be thought of as an illegal-alien savage no matter what UCLA degree he earned.

Key exception: If you're a Mexican girl, you'll date every type of Mexican hombre in the vain hope of finding one who's not macho, a pussy or a mamí's boy, an ideal as preposterous as democracy taking hold in Mexico.

THE NERD
He's an office geek of some sort, whether working for a hip company in Irvine's technology hub, doing IT for a Fortune 500 company, or serving as the design guy for his boss or designing stuff on his own. He's always a nice guy, if a bit shy. His idea of a vacation is going to Comic-Con every year—he can't find you tickets, but you're more than welcome to join him at BlizzCon or WonderCon or D23 or whatever lesser-tier conventions he also attends 'cause he attends them all. The nerd's not very exciting, and you might dump him because of that, only to long for him after his IPO gets released and he moves away to Cupertino with a trophy wife, proving nerds always win in the end.

THE HIPSTER CHRISTIAN
He's always saying such things as “Praise Him” and citing the Gospel while sipping his latté from Portola after mass at ROCKHARBOR, Mars Hill, Saddleback or Newsong. Yet he also gets drunk and might smoke a cigarette. And he's waaay too happy all the time—probably because he has figured out that if he and his girlfriend do it in the butt, then she'll still be a virgin.

THE ALMOST EXECUTIVE
This guy has hustled forever doing the work of others, whether he's a real-estate agent, a rep for a company, an ad guy, a car salesman—you name it. But he's only doing that to pay the bills because he's working on a product that'll get him the home in Newport Coast he has coveted since senior year at Edison High. It could be a clothing line, a new game, a skateboard—just about anything—and he'll mention it as he takes you to the fanciest restaurants or most exclusive hotels, always telling you that one day, he'll turn in his leased Beemer and buy that Tesla he has been wanting for a couple of years. But his dreams never quite come true . . . so he has to re-up the lease.

THE STONER
Although OC has always been notoriously straight-laced, our gents have always loved getting rich off contraband, whether making bathtub whiskey during Prohibition, smuggling in hashish from Afghanistan in hollowed-out surfboards during the 1960s, smuggling in cocaine from Colombia during the 1970s and 1980s, smuggling in marijuana since forever, or running a legitimate co-op since the passage of Proposition 215. OC's typical stoner, however, is none of those. He spends his days lit thanks to his fraudulent medical-marijuana card, is now into e-cigs and treats his higher-end bongs as if they were Matisses. Maybe he has a job—and if he does, it has to somehow tolerate his lifestyle, which means he lives in a ratty apartment in Huntington or Newport Beach, or maybe Fullerton, but definitely not in South County. He deals small-time because he doesn't have the desire to do anything more ambitious than attending next year's Kush Expo. The stoner isn't a beach bum, although he's friends with them because how else are surfers supposed to get their local supply of Maui Wowie? He gets involved in politics only for weed and reads OC Weekly only for the “alternative medicine” ads.


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THE BRO
Ah, the bro: our working-class hero, our wearer of MMA-style T-shirts, who'll go to fancy events in flip-flops and dreams of pounding Patrón in Vegas next weekend, who snickers at the rest of the men on this list and has the aggro-ness and muscles to follow through on any threats. While some people want to stereotype them as exclusively white—in fact, the owners of bro-tastic label Sullen Clothing once accused us of anti-white racism because we dared to write the company appeals mostly to bros—we've known enough guys to know that OC bros come in all ethnicities and fashion preferences. Persian bros come from Mission Viejo and Irvine and prefer spiked hair and luxury cars; Mexican bros blast Pearl Jam while driving big trucks that aren't lifted and wearing Dodgers jerseys; Asian bros care for their import cars, singing karaoke in Little Seoul and Yelping like a madman. And our HB contingent is almost exclusively working-class white, hates his white-trash 909 cousins and drives lifted trucks as though Tito Ortiz's life depended on it.

So let us now celebrate bros: I've never met a bro who didn't have a steady job, or at least trained in the gym to make it big as a tattoo artist or MMA fighter or had an energy drink or clothing label to hawk. Most OC girls will give a bro at least one shot, if only because they seem like so much fun. But then they realize that other girls will call her a bro ho, and she'll become embarrassed and drop the guy. Poor bro. . . .

THE GUY WHO'S NOT FROM OC
It has happened with almost all of my gal pals—eventually, they get so desperate at the paucity of available quality men around here that they cast their conchas to better territory: up the 5 to LA, or down to San Diego. Maybe just to Long Beach. And there's always some guy they met at a festival. Cross-country, international. Better yet is the guy who didn't grow up in OC but just moved here, and thus he hasn't yet joined our men in loser-dom (and, yes, angry guys: I'm one of ustedes—hell, King Loser. Just read all of my pathetic date stories that I've worked into the paper over the years).

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