Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (16 page)

FLATTERY IS SOMETIMES THE GREATEST FORM OF CREEPING A WOMAN OUT

After having a late lunch and doing some writing in my favorite coffeehouse, I went out to the parking lot and found a book—probably off the coffeehouse’s “take-one” bookshelf—on my car windshield. It was
Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America.
I opened it.

I do put some effort into putting myself together in the morning, and I contain my impulse to spend my evenings with my snout in a trough of Häagen-Dazs, so I appreciate when people take notice of that. Just not in a way that says “Some stranger is watching me, knows which car is mine, and wants to bend me over the hood.”

A note about the wisdom of grandmas:

If you’re a woman in your twenties, some of what I advise in this chapter may make you flash on your grandma swinging a wooden spoon and telling you to lose ten pounds and stop chasing the boys and then lecturing you on cows and the high price of free milk. Guess what: There’s a mountain of research that finds that your grandma was right—about pretty much everything.

DATING IS WAR.

Writing a love advice column, I have probably heard a version of every dating rudeness story there is, including ones that led to vomiting, blackouts, global humiliation, and brushes with death. One woman had sex with a man on their third date, fell asleep in his bed, and awoke around 3 a.m. to him trying to strangle her in his sleep. She thrashed and screamed, and he woke up. He apologized profusely, only then revealing that he had “a minor sleep condition”—which is what you get to call it when you sometimes wake up to an empty Oreo bag on the kitchen floor.

Since I only have space for a chapter, I’ll stick to some of the most common forms of dating rudeness and perceived rudeness.
Perceived rudeness?
The truth is, in dating, a good bit of the hurt and anger people feel is caused not by rude behavior but by misconceptions about the opposite sex and the way things “should” work as opposed to the ways they actually do. Often, an offended person’s bottom-line complaint is something along the lines of “Hey, lady, why can’t you act more like a man?!”

It helps to understand that there really is a war between the sexes—one that goes back millions of years. Evolutionary psychologists David Buss and David Schmitt explain that men and women have some “conflicting strategies” in dating, sex, and relationships. These seem to have emerged from our differing physiologies and the ensuing differences in what sex can end up costing us. As I wrote in a column:

A cave man could do a cave lady behind a bush and just walk away, no child support, no nothing, and still pass on his genes. Consequently, men evolved to have this extremely unsentimental sexuality: getting aroused at the mere sight of a nubile woman. Since women can get pregnant from a single sex act, and since there were few suckier places to be a single mother than 1.8 million years ago on the African savannah, women evolved to care a lot less about a man’s looks than his ability and willingness to provide. Although we now have reliable birth control, our genes are extraordinarily slow learners, so these competing sexual strategies remain. As my friend Walter Moore put it, “A guy was complaining to me that women are only attracted to wealthy men. I said, ‘That’s so unfair, because we don’t expect them to be wealthy; all we ask is that they look like models.’”

Attraction: Yes, men want hotties. Women want hotties but will settle for a homely gazillionaire.

Many women think men are pretty rude to care so much about a woman’s looks. In a just world, men would have the hots for women simply for the beautiful people they are on the inside. Unfortunately, in the real world, this is just not how male sexuality works. (The penis is not a philanthropic organization and will not get hard because a woman bought a homeless guy a sandwich.)

Because male sexuality is all about the visuals, men’s magazines are filled with pictures of naked women with freakishly large breasts and women’s magazines are filled with pictures of beauty products and ass-cantilevering $2,000 stilettos. Men evolved to go for signs of reproductively hot prospects—an hourglass figure, youth, clear skin, symmetrical faces and bodies, and long shiny hair: all indicators that a woman is a healthy, fertile candidate to pass on a man’s genes. Women co-evolved to try to make themselves look reproductively hot, though that’s not how we think of it.
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Whether men want thinner or fatter women seems to correspond not to the availability of
Maxim, Hustler,
and the Victoria’s Secret catalog but to the availability of food in a society. Population ecologist Judith L. Anderson and others have done research on this, finding that where grub is scarce, like in parts of Africa, men go for the meatier ladies. In our culture, where there’s a 7-Eleven, a Starbucks, and a supermarket the size of Rhode Island every few miles, men tend to prefer slimmer women (arm candy, as opposed to the whole candy store). Obviously, character counts in a relationship, but women need to accept how much looks matter to the opposite sex and keep up their curb appeal or, if they decide to slack off or resign from general groundskeeping, accept that it’ll be harder to land or keep a man.

Because men are turned on by disembodied photos of boobs, butts, and coochies, they’re quick to pull down their pants, click their cameraphone, and text some woman they just met a close-up of their zipperwurst. Really bad idea. Men who’ve done this should pick up a Harlequin romance,
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which is basically porn for women (from the ravishing by some hot gazillionaire to the final commitment-gasm). See any photo spreads of male crotch shots tucked in there anywhere, boys? This is not an error of omission. Women aren’t fantasizing about seeing your willy; they’re fantasizing that somebody in the royal family will pluck them out of suburbia and marry them in Westminster Abbey.
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Although women will go for man babes if they can get them (and studies show that most do at least want men who are taller than they are—by about six inches), they prioritize seeking men with status and power. In one of the more hilarious studies reflecting this, anthropologist John Marshall Townsend and psychologist Gary Levy showed women photographs of attractive and homely men wearing business attire or a fast-food worker outfit. The women overwhelmingly went for the ugly man wearing a Rolex over the handsome guy in the Burger King uniform, whether they were pairing up for the long haul or the short roll. In other words, if you’re a man seeking a woman, your first step should be seeking extremely gainful employment, which tends to be far more productive than lying on the couch in your parents’ basement pounding a six-pack and whining about how “shallow” women are.

Pursuit: Life will not always give you a cookie—especially when you’re on the make.

• Getting dates

There are a number of tactics for meeting people you can date. One is waiting for them to come to you. If you are a heterosexual man, this tactic can be very effective—that is, if you are Robert Pattinson, Clive Owen, or George Clooney. Otherwise, you’ll need to approach women and ask them out—and without seething with resentment that women rarely (or never) pursue you. Being pissed off and bitter will not get you laid. It will only get you more pissed off and bitter.

Women will not always be nice to you when you ask them out. This sucks, but it will hurt less if you ask a lot of women out instead of, say, spending a year sneaking furtive glances at one from across a coffee shop before squeaking out a request for a date. To get comfortable asking women out, give yourself an assignment: Hit on and ask out two hot women a day for two weeks in a row (and by asking them out, I don’t mean giving them your business card and telling them to give you a call sometime). The idea is getting to the point where getting rejected is boring more than anything else. At that point, “Actually, I’m a lesbian” from the straightest-looking woman you’ve ever seen will merely be a sign to move on and hit on the next girl.

If you’re a woman, the direct approach—asking a man on a date—is a risky tactic. Men will insist that they love when women ask them out—and they do. They love the ego-rub, but they tend to devalue the woman who gives it to them, just as they’ll often lose interest in a woman who has sex with them right away. Once again, the evolutionary explanation applies. Women evolved to be the choosier sex because of the costs of pregnancy and feeding and raising any resulting child, and men co-evolved to expect female choosiness, and they value women they have to work to get.

This isn’t to say it’s always a bust when a woman straightforwardly pursues a man. But, if you’ll hate a guy when he becomes a booty call instead of your boyfriend or gets into a relationship with you but only half-heartedly wants you, you should do what tends to set up the best dynamics for long-term success: flirt with a man to let him know you’re interested. By flirting, you’re also being considerate to the guy—signaling to him that you want him to ask you out, and that if he does, you won’t mock him or scream, “Rapist! Rapist in Aisle 2!”

The fact that a guy seems shy is no excuse for a woman to do the asking. If he’s too wimpy to endure thirteen seconds of rejection, he’s too wimpy to date you. Dating behavior is a microcosm of what you can expect in a relationship. If you don’t want to find yourself screeching at a ball-less boyfriend you have no respect for, make a basic show of balls a requirement for going out with you.

Some guys can be a bit flirtation-blind—especially the nerdboys I’ve always gone for. Some get so used to women kicking them out of the way when they are in their early twenties—typically the dark ages for one of these guys—that they can’t imagine that a woman who doesn’t resemble the thing under the bridge being interested in them. You can feel sympathy for them, but your methodology with them should remain the same. Instead of making moves on them, make flirtatious moves on them. Touch them, tease them, look them in the eye a little too long, play with your hair, touch them some more, and maybe some more after that. Good news: It seems that you can flirt yourself practically radioactive with obviousness about your interest in a guy and still not be seen as the aggressor—providing you stop short of “Hey, how about taking me to a movie on Friday night?”

• When a wink becomes a wank

On dating sites, a woman can probably get away with a “wink”: sending a doofy winking cartoon face to a man she’s interested in. A wink from a woman comes off as a form of flirting. A wink from a man to a woman sends a slew of messages, all of them wrong. Since winks are free to nonmembers of fee-based sites, a guy who winks suggests he’s too cheap to join. Other possibilities: He’s too lazy, wimpy, socially primitive, or lacking in intelligence to express himself in the written word. Or, he’s contacting women in volume because for him, just about anything with a vagina will do. In other words, when a woman doesn’t reply to a wink, this should be considered not a sign that she’s rude but a sign that she isn’t missing many teeth.

• An unambiguous rejection is a good thing.

Men should ask women out in a way that gets them as firmly and unambiguously rejected as possible, if that’s what’s ultimately in the cards.

Technology has allowed men to resort to wussy hit-and-run ways of asking women out: leaving messages on their voicemail, emailing them, and texting them. If you’re a man using these methods and you don’t hear back, you don’t know whether you’ve been dissed or whether your message got deleted, your text went to the wrong number, or your e-mail went to her spam folder. You should instead get on the phone with a woman and ask her out.
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This lets you know where you stand—or don’t—which means you’ll know to move on to the next woman instead of mooning and wondering endlessly and ultimately seething with resentment.

Women, too, are guilty of wimping out. They use the ambiguous shutdown, telling a man asking them out that they can’t date him “right now” when they really mean that they won’t ever, or they say they “have a boyfriend” or they’re “really busy,” which suggests he just needs to cool his heels until they break up or their workload gets lighter. A woman typically soft-pedals her rejection like this to avoid hurting a man’s feelings and having an uncomfortable moment, but this approach can eventually make for many bad moments and much bad feeling when an obsessive or socially clueless guy keeps pursuing her.

Unless you know a guy well enough to be pretty sure he’ll take an ambiguous shutdown as a no, the best and most considerate turndown is one that leaves a man with no hope for an opening—ever. You do that, gently but firmly, by saying something like “Thanks so much. I’m really flattered, but I’m sorry to say that I’m just not interested.” Most guys will eventually get it if you reject them in an ambiguous way, but there are those who won’t, who will turn into annoyances or worse. As security expert Gavin de Becker points out in
The Gift of Fear
, “men who cannot let go choose women who cannot say no.”