NCEG follow-up.

I previously shared a reader’s dilemma with a nerdy engineer who asked her via email for hot chocolate “next week.”  Reader emailed back a “yes” qualified by many mentions of friends and doing things as a group.  Commenters duked it out with competing advice.

All of those with any investment in Reader’s boy problems will be happy to know that said email did not destroy NCEG and that he seems to have gotten the message.  Reader wrote me:

I saw the “NCEG” with a few people last night, and he did not appear hurt, but nor did he mention hot chocolate again or really speak to me one-on-one (as he has in the past)!  I feel like he may have still been looking at me admiringly though–I can’t be sure!  And he offered to drive me home, which is in the opposite direction of where he lives.  At first I said no, but then someone else decided to get a ride with him, so I went along. Hm.  I’m hoping the right message has been sent!

“Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no'”?  Is NCEG still smitten and plotting future email invitations for hot chocolate?  You decide.

Ask her out. Then leave.

One of my earliest blog posts was on how to ask a girl out.  In that post I emphasized the importance of being direct and having a plan already in place (to show that you are intentional and have leadership skills).  I still stand by that advice, but after a conversation with a friend over the weekend where we discussed the fine art of asking someone out, I thought that some other aspects needed to be emphasized.

The first point of emphasis is that you need to create rapport with the woman before asking.  I mentioned this in my earlier post, but this is a crucial step.  If the woman does not feel comfortable with you, you will fall flat on your face no matter how well-calculated the rest of your date request is.  Ideally, you’ll have been chatting her up for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour.  She should be giving IOIs such as laughing and smiling, asking you questions, grooming herself (touching face or playing with her hair), turning her body toward you, possibly lightly touching you on the upper arm.  If you’re not getting any of these, the buying temperature is too low and you’ll probably strike out if you ask her for a date, not to mention she’ll either be shocked if you ask or annoyed that you couldn’t tell she wasn’t interested.

The second point of emphasis that I did not mention in my previous post was that after you ask her out, you need to leave.  Don’t keep talking to her.  Once you get her answer, excuse yourself and jet.  Don’t linger for another 10-15 minutes exchanging banal banter or pleasantries.  You will lose most, if not all, of the impact of successfully securing a date.  (And if you keep hanging around after getting rejected, what kind of glutton for punishment are you?)  By leaving after getting  her answer, you give her a chance to let the experience hit her (as well as squeal and run off to tell her friends).  Also, it DHVs you by showing that you’ve got other things on your plate, you don’t need to stick around for her approving assurance, and you don’t bask in self-satisfaction.

The advantages to asking this way are that (1) you get the benefit of immediacy and any advantages that your physical presence confers, and (2) if the girl doesn’t want to go out with you, it allows her to decline in the most graceful way possible.  If you ask her what her weekend plans are, she answers honestly that she’s not doing anything, and THEN you spring “wanna go out?” on her, she’s in a real bind if she doesn’t want to go out with you, and you will probably be forced to endure a poor lie.  Sure, she might be a weasel, but better a weasel who gracefully tells you she’s busy than a weasel who’s been cornered.  (On the topic of busy-ness:  I would say that if a girl says she’s busy and does not counter-offer, that’s as good as a no.  Also, the word “sometime” is not your friend, especially if used in conjunction with the word “maybe.”)

A final note:  A good way to eliminate ambiguity, at least on your end, is to touch the girl gently on the elbow when you ask her out.  No woman will misinterpret the intention behind that kind of touch.

Reader mail: help a sista out!

From a 20something female reader:

I am trying to figure out what to do about a male friend who emailed me today asking me if I’d like to go for hot chocolate with him next week!  (To be clear, I am not interested in him!)

My roommate and I have just had a discussion on whether this is a date, and what I should say in response.  This is especially tricky, because this particular guy is not actually a Christian and set foot in a church for the first time a couple of months ago–where I met him and invited him to our Bible study.  So now I am wondering if I was too friendly…but also don’t want to be rude…

My brother’s advice: This is a date, and since I am not interested, I must clearly reject him.
My roommate’s advice: There’s no way of telling whether it’s a date or if he just wants to be friends, so I should either 1) go for hot chocolate briefly and say I have to go somewhere else soon afterwards
or 2) go, but bring a couple of other people from Bible study along (even though she admitted that another man we both know says girls should never do this!)

I wrote her back, saying that I agreed with her brother and referring to her to some previous posts on the topic.  She responded with more details about the situation:

I actually agree with you and think my brother is right (my roommate–yes, female–would debate both of you, though!)  1) I had a little suspicion he was interested in me and 2) He and I are sort of friends, but more just because I was the first person to get to know him at church. He’s a nerdy engineering type who apparently graduated at the top of his class, but socially he acts younger than he is/doesn’t have very good verbal communication skills.  I do like him as a person, but I don’t think we even communicate well enough to be actual friends!  And he’s not asking me to “hang out” as a friend or do any specific activity–he’s asking me to go for hot chocolate?!  It just sounds too date-like.

So yeah, my problem is not really that a friend is asking me to hang out and then acting like it’s a date.  It’s more that someone I’m friendly with/spend a lot of time with in group settings is asking me to do something that sounds like a date (but especially over email, I can’t be 100% sure.  Or so says my roommate. I’m personally about 95% sure!).  And while I want to keep being his “friend” and definitely want him to keep coming out to group social things, I don’t want to encourage any romantic interest if it’s there.

Anyway, I replied to his email with something to the effect of, sure, maybe he and I and some other people from small group could go for hot chocolate sometime.  And I had references to “friends” and “group” in there about three times.  I’m embarrassed now because I feel like I was almost too obvious.  Gahh, I’m not good at this stuff! :(

Maybe your male commenters will have some sage advice.

Hear that, readers?  Someone thinks you have sage advice!

Anyhow, to recap:  Reader is a 20something Christian female who was nice to a socially unattractive non-Christian engineering nerd.  As fate typically has it, said nerd now has a crush on her and asked her out for “next week” via email.  Reader consulted her brother, who gave good advice, and her female roommate, who gave FREAKINGLY AWFUL advice.  Reader did not want to crush NCEG’s ego, so she tried to give hints that she is not interested by agreeing to see him…WITH A GROUP.  SOMETIME.  (Who wants to take bets that NCEG will not get the message?)

As obvious as the situation is, in practice it’s very difficult to hurt someone’s feelings when you don’t want to (i.e., when the person has put you in a difficult position where the only truthful option is to cause pain).  I probably would have reacted similarly to Reader despite knowing that I needed to shoot down NCEG.  Alas, we are trained by society to kill any impulse of bluntness, and it is a hard habit to shake, especially in a church setting, and even more so when dealing with a non-believer.

So, I’m opening the floor to the readership.  (Men, your egos may now swell.)  One, what should Reader have done, if you think she responded wrongly?  Two, what should Reader do from here on out?  Three, I’m not above taking predictions for NCEG’s next move.  Pride points to the winners.

*******

On a side note:  As hopeless as NCEG’s case is, I must give him props for at least taking a step, as beta-ish (OVER EMAIL?**  NEBULOUS TIME FRAME?) as it was.  Your typical Christian guy would probably have waited another six months, hoping that he could friend his way into her heart.

**+1 for not using Facebook.  Email is a bad way to try to get dates, but Facebook is even worse.

Oh, and P.S. to Reader:  YES, IT’S A DATE.  He wants to spend one-on-one time with you drinking a beverage.  Would you prefer a singing telegram deliver the news?  Or are such outings not typically recognized as dates in your neck of the woods?

Boundless still doesn’t get it.

A trip to Boundless is always good for getting me all het up with semi-righteous fury.  Though their advice reeks of sincerity, it tends to coddle women, castigate men, and completely ignore the biological imperatives of both sexes.  I feel like in Boundlessworld, if you just pray and believe enough, people will stop acting like…people.  Christian belief does not rewrite the biological code; it merely submits it to self-restraint.  If Christian beliefs truly overrode biology, then hot Christian men would be marrying fat and merry Christian women by the truckload, and average-looking Christian women would be dying to marry sincere but impoverished and shy Christian men.  I’m pretty sure a planet of such persons does not exist in the Milky Way.

And because Boundless does not address the harsh realities of biology, we end up with sad single Christians such as this young woman, who wrote to Candice Watters:

I am a 25-year-old Christian. I would like to have a family, and I always thought I would have met my future husband by now. Not surprisingly (as our timing is not always God’s), I haven’t. The possibility of meeting a man at all is very scarce. My church, which I love and am invested in, is very small. The young-adult scene is dominated by women, and only two of the six or so men are beyond age 20.

At first, I was praying pretty intensely for a husband, keeping a journal for him (at my friend’s suggestion), and (separately) writing to God about the characteristics I wanted my future husband to have. I did enjoy keeping the journal; I thought of it as a way to share the parts of my life I’d live before meeting him. I was doing this for several months when it hit me that my future husband may not come for another 10 years, and there are a lot of other things I could be doing and praying for in the meantime.

What I would like to know is:  WHO IS THE FRIEND WHO THOUGHT KEEPING A JOURNAL FOR HER HUSBAND WAS A BRILLIANT IDEA?  Has any man ever expressed sadness and regret that he was not privy to his wife’s most intimate thoughts prior to their meeting?  How many men have any desire to read a journalful of their wife’s every thought about, well, anything?  (Cue NAMALT chorus.)  Here is a classic case of female projection.  Like, to the nth power.  Not that Mrs. Watters addresses this aspect.  Instead, she very gently suggests to the reader that keeping a journal to her husband will send her off into a fantasy world that will prevent her from meeting actual men.  (But, wait…isn’t that what Twilight is for?)

Then there was this poor Christian beta who wrote to John Thomas:

I’ve done my best to play by the rules in terms of intentionality and avoiding passivity. My question is what to do when the woman doesn’t do likewise.

I was pursuing a young woman from my fellowship group earlier this year. I was very up-front and intentional with her from the start, making sure she never had to “guess” or “assume” what my feelings were. It was crystal clear that I was asking her on a date and not merely to hang out as friends. She agreed to the date, and it went well. Conversation was never lacking, and we got along great.

As time went on, things continued in — what I thought — was a positive direction. Our conversations were meaningful; her body language was affirming, and she even left encouraging messages on my Facebook wall (for what that’s worth).

After all this, I’ve recently discovered through a friend that this woman is not romantically interested in me and, in fact, does not even enjoy my company. This came as a surprise to me, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But after talking to her about it, it turns out that this is true.

I am certainly not angry that the girl isn’t interested in me, because I understand that not everybody is God’s match for me. But I do find myself a little frustrated that it went on so long without any negative indications of her interest. I was very straightforward, honest and intentional with her. I don’t know why she couldn’t have done the same.

What should I do in the future to make sure we’re both on the same page and avoid this from happening again? Or is it just one of the unavoidable risks of being a man?

Now, on the one hand, I do feel for this guy, because finding out that the girl you are dating doesn’t even like being around you is cold.  But on the other hand, what does “her body language was affirming” even mean?!?!  That doesn’t sound like flirty touching or kissing.  This dude sounds like he was completely de facto LJBFed by a girl who wanted the ego massage of his attention.  And this guy isn’t even angry at her over her behavior?  MESSAGE TO DUDE:  THAT IS WHY SHE DIDN’T LIKE YOU AND WILL NEVER LIKE YOU.

Not surprisingly, Boundless can’t come up with a good answer for why this girl strung this guy along while not actually liking him.  John Thomas responds:

I can’t explain why she acted the way she acted. I am just as surprised as you are at the outcome. There isn’t anything you could have done to change the decisions she made. For all we know, in His sovereignty, God could have protected you from something He saw, but you didn’t. Maybe time will shed more light on it, but whatever the case, you can absolutely trust His good for you and for her.

So women just remain an ephemeral mystery to all of Christendom.  It might have been God.  You just can’t know.

But not men.  No, men and their wicked motives are transparent in Boundlessworld.  Carolyn McCulley recently got yet more cyberspace to remind men that they need to work harder to live up to women’s standards.  In “Gentlemen in a Digital Age,” she invokes Jane Austen as the height of a more civilized time and casts contemporary men in the role of sneaky Petes who are out to scam women on the internet.  She advises:

Be willing to become known. Yeah, it’s risky. Yeah, it can come off weird. But it doesn’t have to. You can be charming, low-key and reassuring in offering this information. Tell her why you are making the connection (“I have heard a lot about you from our mutual friends, and then I saw your profile on Facebook”). Tell her why you want to be in contact (“You sound like a lot of fun, so I’d like to get to know you a little better”). Offer information that will make you legitimate in a cesspool of spambots and viruses (“I’m sure you’d like to check me out, and that’s cool. Here’s the contact info of some people we know in common/my pastor/my family, etc. Or if you prefer I first talk to someone you know, I’d be glad to do that. Whatever makes you comfortable”).

My knee-jerk reaction to this advice was CREEPY CHRISTIAN ROBOT BEHAVIOR THAT WILL SCARE OFF WOMEN.  It’s all too much, too soon, tries way too hard, and takes ANY mystery out of the equation.  It also completely ignores the reality that women judge strangers by their looks.  If you’re not reasonably attractive, and you send a message like McCulley’s to a single Christian woman, she will not want to get to know you better, or think YOU sound like a lot of fun, or have much belief that any action you take will make her feel comfortable.

McCulley’s final paragraph is a passive-aggressive kick in the teeth to men, too:

The fine folks of Jane Austen’s world might strike us today as being a bit rigid in their manners. But they demanded character and accountability even among the limited relationships of a small town. How much wiser would we be to honor the same practices in a world without boundaries.

Translation:  You should emulate Mr. Darcy, you spineless, greedy perv.

 

Take the 12/12 Challenge!

After feeling that last weekend was devoid of any excitement whatsoever**, an idea came upon me:  Starting February 15, I should commit to going on 12 dates in the following 12 weeks.

Now, I do not know twelve unmarried, not-dating-anyone men (between the ages of, say, 26-44), so I am going to have to do some combination of (a) asking people I know to find someone to go out with me for at least 15 minutes, (b) approaching stranger-men myself and either outright asking them for dates or finagling a way to get them to ask me, and/or (c) joining an internet man menu man catalog dating site.  This is a daunting task, but I am up to the challenge.

The question is…are YOU?

I figure I must not be the only single person on this blog who is looking to break out of the rut.  If you want to join me in the 12/12 Challenge, let me know in the comments.  At the very least, the Challenge will give you an opener to use.

THE RULES:

1. Twelve dates must take place between February 15, 2011 and May 9, 2011.
2. Each date must last at least 15 minutes, i.e., NO LEMON LAWING PERMITTED.
3. You are not limited to one date per week, e.g., if you complete twelve dates in one day, that still counts.  However, you may not go on two (or more) dates with the same person in one day.
4. You can go on more than one date with the same person, i.e., going on two dates with Person A equals two dates for the purposes of the 12/12 Challenge.
5. If you go on more than one date with the same person, the dates must be different activities, e.g., no buying the same person coffee on five different occasions.
6. Double-dating is permitted; group dating (large group with no distinct pairings) is not.
7. No going on a date with a “bro” of the opposite sex, unless the explicit goal is to break out of bro-dom.
8. You must make it clear to the other person that you are going on a date and not just “hanging out.”
9. If someone flakes on you, it doesn’t count as a date.  You must schedule and complete another date.

If you complete the 12/12 Challenge, I will award you a personalized prize probably a drawing by me.  Just leave a comment on May 10 listing each date you went on (calendar date, first name/initial of person you went with, and what the activity was).

MAZEL TOV!

**Minus watching the U.S. Figure Skating National Championships.***

***Okay, it wasn’t the most exciting Nationals of all time.  But high-level athletic competition is inherently compelling.

You can only have two.

The Christian dating version of this:

is this:

A truth universally acknowledged.

After a certain age, when you break up with a man, he will be married to someone else within a year.

The latest example of this phenomenon?  Nathan Zacharias of Boundless, who writes that a year ago on January 8, he was depressed and distraught after a difficult break-up.  One year later, he is on his honeymoon with his “beautiful” (read “SHE’S AN 8!“) bride.

Ten bucks says his ex-girlfriend is breathing fire and drowning her sorrows in Haagen-Dazs and “You go girl!” sessions with girlfriends.  Note also that the first three comments on the post are from admiring female readers saying how “inspiring” and “encouraging” they find Zacharias’s story.  (Read:  the power of preselection!)

The lesson?  Girls, if you want to get married, find an emotionally wrecked Christian man coming off a bad break-up, smile at him, and you, too, can be married within a year!

She likes someone else’s boyfriend.

Today in my internet surfings I came across a thread at one of my regular haunts that I knew I had to share with my dearest of readers.  It is a capsule of Roissy validation, i.e., it is a real-life, real-time dramatic incarnation of most of the principles of female nature he discusses.  Social message boards for women are some of the most instructive reads for insight into female nature; the nature of the medium does not alter the substance of interaction.

So, here’s what happened:  OP, in a thread titled “I like someone else’s boyfriend.“, goes attention-whoring by posting the following:

Lol, it sucks. But yes, I am smart enough not to ever do anything about it. He’s so awesome and we are so alike. I like him as in yes, I wish I could have him, but I just honestly like him as a person. Oh wellllll.

Right off the bat, we know we are dealing with a young woman, probably early to mid-20s, who craves attention and drama and is set on getting it by denying the very thing everyone with half a brain can tell she wants, even as she herself wants to believe that she really doesn’t want to steal this guy away from his girlfriend.  When the first reply suggests to simply enjoy the friendship since the guy does like his girlfriend, OP says:

Yes, he does. Should I add the story that I am 100% sure he would cheat on her with me. But, I just can’t. I would feel so bad no matter how much I like him. It’s not like a I’m liking him from afar thing. We talk all the time.

The East German judge gives OP’s hamster a 10.0 AND strikes a deal under the table with the Soviet judge to give OP a 10.0 also.  Anyone who believes this girl would “feel so bad” if she had sex with this guy needs to go pick up his White Knight suit with the Honors Beta badge from the dry cleaners.

With this additional piece of information, the dogpile begins.  Admonitions – rightfully so – that the guy is “shady” and that OP should “be careful” start up.  This attention prompts OP to reveal even MORE salacious details so her inner narcissism monster can be fed:

Because he’s mentioned it. We live in a SMALL town, and everyone knows everything, so that sucks. He apparently saw me leaving yesterday night and asked where I was going. So I told him out to the bar in another town. So he text me all night telling me to come over after I was done. And text me some dirty messages that I won’t even type here. I was like “aren’t you with your girlfriend?” He said yeah, but she will be gone later.

Now, that being said, I DO like him. So much. But I’m smart enough not to do anything. Because it is shady, and yeah, not cool. I know that I need to stop having contact with him, and it just sucks because I like him. I don’t know why I like him so much. He is willing to cheat on his girl. I think it’s because like I said, we have SO much in common, and I never meet people like me.

This is CLASSIC attention-whoring in the tried-and-true junior high girl tradition.  “I’ve got a SECRET!!!!!!…but I can’t tell,” “I’m in so much emotional suffering,” and “I don’t deserve this” techniques are all deployed here.  The only other biggie she left out was “I’m SUCH a ditz, tee-hee!”.

In a bid for even more attention, OP also starts denying that anything will happen between herself and Shade:

Whatever makes me feel better? I’ve already mentioned I won’t do anything about it. And I am serious about that.

In my experience, if you have to assure someone that you won’t do something, then you’ve already thought about doing it and are looking for someone to tell you that it’s okay to do it.  (Exceptions:  when your mom makes you promise that you WON’T DO SOMETHING despite the fact that you never discussed the topic with her EVER and never even thought about it seriously until she brought it up.)

Now that Shade’s douchebaggery is out in the open for everyone to see, the shaming tough love begins:

Wow, he sounds like a real prize and I can’t believe you’d like a guy like that. He obviously just wants you for a booty call and otherwise has no respect for you or his girlfriend.

//

Yeah, I think you should try to see his infidelity for the turn-off that it is. Maybe it will make it easier not to mess with him.

//

Ew he sounds like trash.

This is where things get interesting.  Are these other girls correct that Shade is a super d-bag?  Of course.  Any guy with a girlfriend who is sending dirty texts to another girl and talking to her all the time is prime d-bag material.  But are these girls correct that his douchebaggery is a turn-off?  No, they’re not.

The only reason that these girls can be objective about the situation is that they themselves are not attracted to Shade.  It’s pretty clear from the discussion that no matter how low-rent Shade is (and if he works at any place more prestigious than, say, Best Buy as one of the incompetent louts who can’t tell you anything about any of their products, I will be shocked), he has enough game to get OP to throw ethics to the wind and soak up his attention AND go seeking even more attention by telling strangers on the internet about the situation.

So, no matter how much these girls tell OP to stay away from Shade, to delete him from her phone, to tell him to…go jump in a lake (they use some more, um, forceful language), OP won’t.  OP already likes Shade, so nothing will be able to trip up her hamster.  OP will tell herself until she’s blue in the face – as she has done and continues to do in this thread, and until, I imagine, she is in the very act of having sex with Shade – that nothing will ever happen between her and Shade and that she has no desire to steal him away from his girlfriend.  And she will honestly believe herself.  And when it DOES happen, she will not be able to understand how it happened, and she’s not that kind of girl, and she feels SO bad (except she doesn’t).

And the thing is, all women are like this.  I’ve felt these seeds in myself at times and wondered why I was doing things that I would hate myself for if I weren’t the one doing them.  Even feminists are like this – maybe even more so, because I think that the more feminist a woman is, the more deeply and idealistically romantic she is.  A friend of mine who is a self-described “pinko commie” feminist fell for a roadie for her favorite band.  Roadie had a girlfriend, and would ignore my friend whenever the girlfriend came to a show, but it did not matter to my friend:  she and Roadie shared something special that was beyond the ken of the average person.  I tried to explain to her that Roadie was a loser, that she had no future with him, and that I did not understand why she was accepting second-best treatment and outright disrespect, especially when she was supposedly such a feminist and trying to be a role model for young women who have no better sense than to read Twilight.  Nothing I said made any impact.  Even when I pointed out that as a woman, why would she try to undermine another woman, all my friend did was shrug and pawn it off as not her problem.  She was in heaven when near Roadie, in angst when the girlfriend, known as Bitch, was around.  I finally told her not to talk to me about him ever again.

So what is the Christian spin on all of this?  The first is that you need to develop discipline NOW when you don’t have this kind of temptation in your life.  You also need to develop discernment so you will be able to pick good friends, and humility so you will listen to your friends and trust that their judgments are good.  If you find yourself saying about a guy, “Well, they don’t know him the way I know him, so they must be wrong!”, you most likely should stop and chiggity check yourself before you wreck yourself.  (I mean, think about it:  the way you described him to your friends was enough to raise red flags in their minds.  That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement for his character.)  And you need to develop character so you won’t become a common attention whore, chronicling your narcissism on the internet for everybody in the entire world with an internet connection both now and in the future to read.

As a companion piece, I recommend Ricky’s latest blog post, “Raw Concepts: Double Messages.”  It addresses the narcissism angle that OP so robustly demonstrates.

ETA:  OP is also constructing a scenario for plausible deniability in her actions with Shade.  She is giving him signals that she’s DTF but won’t jump him herself.  Being a man, eventually he is going to feel like experiencing someone else’s vagina, and being an alpha, he is going to be able to get it from an easy target, a.k.a. OP.  Then OP can say that it wasn’t her fault, “Shade just came after me when I was vulnerable and one thing led to another.  He’s the bad one.”

Steve Harvey says that men and women can’t be just friends.

While promoting his new book, comedian/author Steve Harvey tells CNN’s Frederica Whitfield that men and women can’t be just friends because, a la When Harry Met Sally, men want to have sex with their female friends and are only “friends” because the woman has LJBFed them yet they are still hopeful that there will be a chink in her LJBF armor at some point.

For the most part, I think this is true, but then how do you explain men with chubby female friends?  Is this implicit confirmation that men like chubby girls, despite all the manosphere screeching to the contrary, or do men just like to keep a “safety” handy in case of sexless emergency?  Maybe what we really need is definitions of “chubby” and “friend” that everybody agrees on.  There’s just too much wiggle room for those terms.  Also, is a woman who doesn’t really have any male friends yet is not getting asked on dates de facto unattractive to men (the logic being that if she is attractive, men will try to be her friend if they’re too scared to ask her out)?

Other questions that women might have about this topic that the men here can answer:

• You have a male friend who considers himself progressive, straightforward, and Unlike Other Men.  He insists that you and he are, and will only be, Just Friends.  Is he lying?
• You have a male friend who insists that you are a wonderful woman with many amazing qualities, but he needs to Pursue Jesus right now.  Is he lying?
• You have a male friend who likes to have long, deep, one-on-one conversations with you, but he never asks you for a date.  Is he attracted to you?

HT to ONTD.  For good times and, um, ~insight~ into the mindset of single, college-age, non-religious, liberal millennials on this topic, read the comments.

Do you have a type?

In the last post’s comments, the subject of “having a ‘type'” came up, with the dual assertions that (a) men don’t stick to “types” because they find many types of women attractive, and (b) women DO stick to “types” and refuse to date anyone outside of the parameters of the favored type.  Of course, these assertions were from men.

Based on my observation, I think men are more likely to marry their type, but women are more likely to date their type.  This is because men can grow a woman’s interest, whereas women are pretty much stuck with the yay-or-nay of a man’s first impression.  So, while a woman will hold out during her dating years for her ideal, a non-ideal man could slip in and start flirting with her until she decides he’s cute enough to marry.  Men, on the other hand, will only target the women who interest them, and for many men – NOT ALL; do you hear me, INLTs? – this means a type.  (See:  Bruce Willis – his current wife is a total Demi clone.  Or Rod Stewart’s wives:  all interchangeable blonde models.  Or the Sister Wives guy:  his wives are all, um, plump Caucasians.  Okay, I’m sure there’s a better example out there….)

Before the comments get rolling, I think it’s worth defining what a “type” is.  I have always thought of it as more of a suite of physical characteristics along with some personality traits, e.g., “tall, smart, athletic.”  I’ve gotten the impression, though, that men in the manosphere define “type” as the woman’s 463-bullet point checklist, which includes job, salary, car make and model, hairstylist, and feelings about soy.  Most women are not that picky.  If you’re running into this kind of woman, who will advertise this list to all those around her, you’re probably in a bar or on a college campus, and the woman is either quite young or divorced and bitter against her ex-husband.

It’s also worth repeating that “type” is an ideal and often is just what knee-jerks attraction, not what sustains it.  I prefer men with full heads of hair, for example, but a full head of hair is not what’s going to love me when I’m old and shriveled.