Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (5 page)

I have found the most trying quality of some married men is their fetish about secrecy. They don’t want you to tell a daisy, your diary or anybody you know that you know them. If the public relations man thought Jennifer had talked about the chafing dish he would have taken cyanide (after first having Jennifer fired). There isn’t much you can do about this obsession except
pretend
not to tell anyone.

For example, an insurance executive, infatuated with an accountant in his office, casually takes the elevator from the twelfth to the main floor at the time of her coffee break. Watches synchronized, she uses the stairway from the twelfth floor to the eleventh,
then
takes the elevator to the main where they meet. (We hope he doesn’t make her climb all twelve flights on the return trip to further avoid suspicion.) Nobody has ever seen them arrive or depart
à deux
, so he thinks nobody knows they meet. Just
everybody
knows, that’s who. And they would respect him more if he weren’t such a sneak.

In addition to dining with visitors, these are some of the things I think you can do successfully with a married man and never hurt you, him or his loved ones.

A. Meet for coffee.

B. Meet for lunch.

C. Have dinner with him (with others along) on the nights you all work late.

D. Have a wonderful working relationship. Help him make his company or his job a smashing success.

E. Flirt with him anytime, anywhere (except in a board meeting) including under his wife’s nose. Flirting is as healthy as orange juice and just as sweet. His wife might pick up some good pointers.

F. Have
innocent
dates, such as a malt after the night school class you both attend. My friend, Laura Phillips, has been having a hamburger with the instructor of a writing class every Monday night for twelve weeks. Then he walks her to her car and she drives home. Alone. Harmless, but he’s happier, and she has another man on her list.

It’s a question of taking married men but not taking them seriously. And not taking them home—too often. Don’t try to marry one. Use them in a perfectly nice way just as they use you. There are lots of them around.

The Homosexual

How do you tell when a man isn’t a man? Anyone can spot the effeminate chap who floats instead of walks, but how do you identify someone who
looks
perfectly male? I’ve known girls who even married homosexuals and didn’t know they were until their wedding night. (Which comes from not having slept with the man you’re going to marry, which I consider complete lunacy.) However, many homosexual men like girls too, and in that case if you never know, you aren’t wounded.

If you’d like a spot check just to make sure, I think you use your instinct. And add up his two and two to see if you get four. Or seven.

Suppose he’s over thirty and lives with another man. The situation bears watching. If he has a male roommate and he’s over
forty
, there’s very little doubt about his sex. He’s a girl.

How else can you tell? Homosexual men are usually tied in with their mothers. While despising the old girls for their smothering, possessive ways, they do them obeisance. One boy I know goes on trips with mother to Nassau, Japan, Buenos Aires—like Violet and Sebastian in
Suddenly Last Summer.

If a man is more solicitous of another fellow than he is of you, it’s entirely possible the other fellow is his lover.

I remember dating an attractive boy who worked for a broadcasting company. We were at his apartment playing Monopoly and I felt at any moment he would stop putting up hotels on Boardwalk, pass “Go” and make a pass at me. It was high time. About this point the phone rang and it was his roommate. This was their conversation: “Hello, Ralphy? Where
are
you?
Where
?! Oh, Ralphy, I don’t
like
those people and you promised you wouldn’t
see
them! Do you have your topcoat with you? Good. It’s kind of chilly. I left some marinated herring in the icebox for you. Oh, nothing much. I’m playing Monopoly with a girl.”

So I concentrated harder on getting up some hotels on Park Place.

It’s not always easy to tell a homosexual even if you have a suspicious nature. One of my dearest friends had me fooled for years. Spencer, I shall call him, was a charmer, successful with a plastics business, more outgoing than Dinah Shore. When we met he lived with his “brother” who actually looked very much like him. One night the three of us were driving home from a party and “brother” tried to steer the car off a Laurel Canyon cliff. I attributed this whim to his drinking but discovered later they’d had a lovers’ quarrel. “Brother” resented
me
and felt suicidally inclined.

When “brother” departed and another brother moved
in
(this time no family resemblance) I became mildly disillusioned.

Prior to that, Spencer had me convinced that while he and I were only friends and had kissed only once, chastely on New Year s Eve, numerous girls all over town panted for him—airline stewardesses, a Sands Hotel dancer, some blonde from Fort Worth destined to inherit oil, and a rather permanent amorata in Hermosa Beach he only saw Friday nights. I later concluded that the stewardesses, the dancer, the Fort Worth dazzler and the beach girl were all boys.

A single girl who is slightly, although unconsciously afraid of marriage, will be attracted to homosexual men because she feels safe with them and they in turn with her. Nobody is clambering over anybody to get married. You’re someone female he can take to parties, introduce to parents and with whom he can present a heterosexual façade to the world. But never kid yourself that the man who doesn’t kiss you good night is restraining himself out of respect. He isn’t for girls, that’s all. Or if you date an enthusiastic kisser who never even
tries
to proceed south of the border, look to his maleness. If you check and find he isn’t trying to go further with any other girl either, chances are his hormonal balance is a little out of kilter.

Before you rule homosexual men out of your life, however, let’s consider. Are they really monsters? Some very famous and beautiful women are married to them.

Psychiatrists tell us homosexuals have a strong sex drive. They are little boys, or girls, in an arrested state of sexual development (except the ones who are so strongly developed that they like boys
and
girls). The former, like you and me, arrived at the age of puberty when girls like girls and boys like boys. Only they never left it. They have tremendous emotional problems, which presumably respond the least of any to psychoanalysis. (If you think
you
have trouble and are about to open your veins over a
man
, consider how much lonelier and sillier you’d feel if it were a
girl.
)

While you turn up your nose at homosexuals, a lot of other homosexuals (undeclared), whom you don’t criticize because they’re married and baseball-oriented, are running around loose. I suspect a bunch in one of my former offices. They ate together every noon, told bawdy stories to each other, drank en masse at five o’clock and whistled at waitresses. They
seemed
to be as masculine as the Neanderthal man in the forest primeval, but how come you never saw them with a girl? If you ask me, they were less masculine than the slender reedy fellow who does a fantastic mambo and prefers
my
company to a man’s. If you still ask me, they were making a tremendous show of their maleness because they had some creeping doubt about it themselves.

As for declared (overt, as they say) homosexuals, they make wonderful friends—loyal, sympathetic and entertaining. They will sit by your bed when you have a strep throat while your other beaux and girl friends are out watching the Santa Claus Lane parade or some damn nonsense. They are good confidants and will give you sound advice about men. They have the most exquisite taste, the most handsomely done apartments (often on green stamps) and give the best parties of anyone I know. They are frequently devastatingly attractive—and a girl can’t surround herself with too many attractive men.

The Divorcing Man

This person is usually overrated as marriage material. He has his interlocutory decree (or whatever is the comparable document in your state), true, but still has time to serve before his divorce is final. If he has children, chances are he’s still more married than single. Certainly during those first few months after leaving his troubled Shangri-La, he is in shock. You hold his hand, cook his food and reassure him that the kids won’t forget who is Daddy. And what does he do? He goes over to
their
house on the least excuse. He mows their yard, mends their roof and has endless talks with
her
(described by him as “arguments”) long after it’s supposed to be
over.
While you figure to get a license the minute he’s free, he figures it’s time to look at some other girls. After all, you remind him of the awful transition period! Count the divorcing man a friend but don’t consider all your problems solved just because you helped him solve
his.

The Younger Man

This chap
is
better marriage material than you may think. I know of four happy marriages in which the groom is from two to eight years younger than his wife. In three instances the girls are treated like princesses, pampered, petted and adored. In the fourth the wife is no more taken for granted than in most marriages.

If you don’t marry a junior he can still be a wonderful date, keep you on your toes and swinging.

W
E’VE DISCUSSED
WHO
THE
men are. Now let’s see
where
the men are!

Actually, in trying to make the statistics a little more palatable for single girls, the compilers include entries in their “available single men figures” you can’t touch (because they’re locked up somewhere) or wouldn’t want to (because they are drug addicts, perverts, or have I.Q.s under 40).

Here are the best places to find the men you
would
fall on with glad cries.

Your Job

Most of the men in the world leave home every morning and check into a job, give or take a few writers and painters who work at home and must be flushed out other ways, a few millionaires—too rare and exotic to bother about—and parasites who only check into tennis clubs. (Let’s tell ourselves they’d be a bore anyway.) Unemployed men, of course, may not be checking in currently but will later. If they don’t, add them to the untouchables.

The rest of the men are reporting daily to places we girls can report to too! (Garages, missile launchings and live-bait barges hire girl clerks.) Now … it seems obvious to me that if you aren’t meeting any men through your job, you are in the wrong job.

From nine to five is actually a marvelous time to sink into a man. After Eve, many single men are already involved with somebody else so you can’t get
to
them. (Never mind that this broad is holding your potential slave
her
slave with three-inch fillets and herb soufflés like his mother
never
made. Temporarily he’s not completely get-atable.) If you are a feast for the eyes during the daylight hours, however, he may just turn to you when
she
has run out of recipes.

Many of the men in your company will be married, of course, or else they are soft-skinned, pink-cheeked little lambs barely out of high school. Face it. What covey of men outside of Trappist monks
hasn’t
been decimated by matrimony? Even though hordes of your male co-workers are married, plenty of unattached or “detached” men from the outside should at least be
calling
on your firm, thus giving you access to them—salesmen, consultants, suppliers, clients, friends of executives, even naughty chaps from the Internal Revenue Service who are auditing the corporate books.

It really is important to surround yourself with men every day to keep up your morale. And what’s to stop you? You’re not a wife-at-home who is lucky if she sees two adult males all day long—the postman and a suspicious-looking “veteran” selling magazine subscriptions.

Sometimes a girl meets the wrong kind of man for
her
in her job. That calls for a job shift. For example, if you’re the cerebral type who enjoys lectures at the university, but your only playmates at work are the Neanderthal-type crew of your plumbing-contractor boss, consider a change. (Probably some plumbers attend lectures like mad. I just don’t happen to know them.) Conversely, a sweet, mousy girl might be wasting her time in a music-publishing house. The males there are as slippery and glittery as eels, a type of wildlife that has no rapport at all with mousy girls.

So, it’s not only a question of going where the men are but going where
your
men are. If you never even
see
somebody you could be happily ensconced in a bomb shelter with, it’s probably time for a move.

Many companies do not allow dating among co-workers and clearly they are not with it! Why else do they suppose you are working except to cover a few items like food, rent, car payments, bank loans and other trivia? (Bona fide career girls to the contrary notwithstanding.) Managements who think romances lower the work output are right out of their skulls. A girl in love with her boss will knock herself out seven days a week and wish there were more days. Tough on her but fabulous for business! A girl with a crush on any coworker jumps for joy at having to work overtime with him. There she is in the hushed, sexy atmosphere of after-five with dinner money
and
him on her hands.

If your company frowns on intramural dating but there is good material at hand, I would say date anyway. You will undoubtedly be fired, but imagine leaving under such a romantic cloud … a woman so attractive to and attracted by the opposite sex, she was willing to collect her unemployment insurance for them!

Veronica used to date one of the salesmen in this “hands off your co-workers” atmosphere. She finished work before he did and would wait in his car, lying down in the front seat to avoid the Gestapo gaze of management or its informants (like her girl friends!). Every time Ronnie opened his car door, he would suffer a momentary spasm of horror thinking he’d found a dead woman in the front seat! Veronica was subsequently asked to leave the firm, but by that time she had decided she could never be really happy with somebody who had a set of nerves like that!