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.

OT: Seeking HDTV/Blu-Ray opinions

I don’t like to go off-topic on the blog, but I figured that this would be a good place to get some advice due to the male-oriented readership (or at least male-skewed commentariat).

Here’s the sitch:

My DVD player of almost 10 years died this past week.  (Sony, you done good.)  My television is a 28″ tube TV going on 12 years old.  Because the TV is so old, and because TVs have really advanced beyond where they were even a few years ago, I decided that it might be time to upgrade everything instead of just buying another DVD player to replace the old one.  I’ve been researching options for both HDTVs and Blu-Rays and would love to get further opinions.

My needs/desires:

• I am looking to stay in the 40″-42″ range and not break the bank.  (Breaking the bank is what husbands are for.  …KIDDING!)
• Picture quality matters – I will notice if something looks flat, pixelated, etc.
• Sound doesn’t have to be top drawer, but I would like it to be robust.  Will not be hooking it up to a stereo system.
• I do not have cable and just use OTA signals with an antenna.

If you have any advice/personal experience you would like to share, please do.

Reasons women don’t approach.

Whenever I bring up the topic of meeting members of the opposite sex, the male commenters here inevitably strike up the “OMG WOMEN MAKE IT SO HARD I WON’T APPROACH ANY WOMAN WHO DOESN’T HAVE A GREEN LIGHT WITH MY NAME ON IT PASTED TO HER FOREHEAD” song and dance.  Their position is understandable, but women are instinctively programmed to put the man through the paces in order to get to her.  This is because (a) women know that men want the most bang for the least buck, and (b) women want to be worth more than a buck.  Women who make themselves extremely available to men have very little way of telling if the man liked them specifically, or if the man was merely taking advantage of convenience.  Making a man work for it is a way of differentiating the warm body seekers from the specifically me seekers.

This is the general reason that women don’t approach men.  Most of the other reasons are situational and personality-centric, as I discuss below:

• She’s shy. Some women are terrified of talking to anyone they don’t know.  Clearly this leads to glowing results when women who are petrified of strangers and men who are petrified of women mix.
• She’s intimidated. This is a little different from shyness.  Shyness is more of an inner timidity, whereas intimidation is externally based.  A woman who is not usually shy may become intimidated depending on the situation, such as:
  • She feels he’s out of her league. Contrary to what the majority of the manosphere thinks – that all women are entitled landbeasts who wear XXL “head bitch in charge” T-shirts over their industrial strength bras and blast men for not being able to “handle them” – many women will balk at initiating interaction with a man they feel is markedly superior to them in looks, popularity, intelligence, socioeconomic status, etc.  A woman will think to herself, “A man like that could have any woman he wants, so why me?” and as a result, either outright ignore the man or only give furtive little glances when she hopes he’s not looking.  (Exception:  women who attend fan conventions and pay for pictures with their objects of affection.  The exchange of money and experience of waiting in a line make it okay to approach, giggle, praise, and sometimes sneak a grope.)
  • He’s surrounded by bros. Much like men grouse that women can never be found alone, women also find men surrounded by a posse intimidating.  Little Susie Sweetheart, pounding heart in her dry throat, will be much less likely to approach Hal Hotness if Hal is surrounded by five bros who are all slapping each other on the back while grunting about the manliness of Tom Brady’s hair football.  Same goes for Susie approaching Tom Tron and his five engineering buddies who are discussing their latest Halo 3 strategies.  Too many bros, especially if one of the bros is a class clown type who is loud and attracts a lot of high-energy attraction, says to a woman that the man doesn’t want to be bothered.
  • He’s surrounded by attractive women. While some women will be motivated by preselection competition, most women are not self-confident enough to cold approach a man who is constantly surrounded by other women, especially if the other women are good-looking, or at least popular (the good-looking vs. popular Venn diagram doesn’t always have the greatest overlap), or THINNER.  Susie won’t want to deal with the competitive shunning by the women, and she will also ask herself why Cory Cubicle would talk to her when he’s already got his hands full with some nice stuff.
  • He has never shown any previous signs of acknowledging her existence. A hurried “thanks for holding the door” at the elevator at work, followed by pushing the button and zero conversation, doesn’t count.  Non-communicative inertia just begets more non-communicative inertia.  There’s little more humiliating than attempting conversation with someone six months after seeing the person every day, and having that person look at you like they’ve never seen you before.
• She’s a creature of habit. Some women (and men, too, for that matter) settle into a rut of existence and find it immensely difficult to break out of the daily grind.  I don’t know if it’s that they find it too energetically taxing to vary their routines, or what, but there are just some people who habitually refuse to stray from the path every once in a while, even if it’s at the cost of meeting new people.  This means that if you’re not currently on the schedule, you might never be.
• She’s not interested. Yes, sometimes this is the reason women don’t initiate contact.  It usually means that the man hasn’t done anything to make himself stand out as someone to consider.  He hasn’t demonstrated any personality, any leadership or expertise, any sense of humor, any smidgen of fashion sense, any physical fitness, any special talents.  If you are the definition of drab, you’re stacking the deck against yourself.

I’d say that intimidation and interest are the most easily solvable issues.  So if you’re a man and you’re frustrated that women aren’t cold approaching you, understand that just as, if not more, difficult for women to do than men, and then check and see if you’re doing things that make it even harder.

If I like him, he can do better.

I met today with a couple of female friends, and, as is usually the case when two or more female friends gather, conversation turned to dating and male/female relationships.  At the moment, none of us is dating anyone nor has any prospectives in the pipeline, so whoever out there thinks that “good girls” get snapped up like cake at a Weight Watchers meeting, think again.

One friend mentioned how she had gone to a recovering addicts celebration/gathering at another local church and had become annoyed by the fact that as she was walking to the venue from parking, a very good-looking young man was walking not far behind her yet did not attempt to strike up a conversation even though it was evident that they were going to the same place.  Eventually they were forced to stop at a light, whereupon my friend took it upon herself to start talking to this guy, and they chatted all the way to the church.  Tonight she was planning on returning to the same church with some hopes of seeing him again.

After hearing this story, I said that I almost never talk to men who I think are good-looking because I assume that I will not meet their minimum standard of attractiveness and they will act like they would rather have their teeth drilled without Novacaine than talk to me.  I’ve had this happen before.  The man will give half-hearted, simple-sentence responses, never look you in the eye, act agitated, and generally give the impression of someone who is silently cursing his upbringing as he tries to tolerate your substandard presence for the minimum time required to feign politeness.  It is a simultaneously depressing and infuriating experience and is a huge waste of time.

My friend expressed great surprise at this revelation and quickly assured me that I could have anyone that I wanted.  I immediately shut down that possibility, citing, well, my life to date.  My friend told me that I needed to stop thinking this way.  I pointed out that life experience made it pretty difficult to.  My friend then said something that surprised me:  that she talks to men assuming that they will be interested and that men’s standards of attractiveness are not actually very high so long as you act smiley and bubbly.

I suppose, on the one hand, that to have success, you first have to have a successful attitude.  Surly warts do not win hearts.  On the other hand, the laws of the sexual marketplace are pretty immutable, and the likelihood that you will be the one to defy them successfully is pretty low to nonexistent.  I just know, both through reading and from experience, that if I find a man attractive – especially if he is objectively good-looking – then lots of other women will think the same.  And given the statistics of it all, the likelihood that I will be better-looking than all of the other women who are interested is probably going to be more or less zero; in other words, he will always have more appealing options than myself.  There is always going to be someone who laughs more at his jokes, who thinks he is smarter than I think he is, who wears a smaller clothing size than I do, who has a prettier face, who has a better body, who is more charming than I am, who is less opinionated than I am, who is willing to get in psychological turf wars with other women in order to get the guy, who is willing to make herself more sexually available, and – the older I get – who is younger than I am.

So whose approach is better – the optimist’s or the rationalist’s?  I don’t know.  Probably the best thing is to find someone you think is good-looking that no one else thinks is good-looking* and who honestly thinks you’re the best he can do even if it’s not true (if he’s good enough for you, he can probably do better than you).  I think it’s pretty rare, though not quite as rare as finding a unicorn or a chupacabra.

*The guy I had a massive crush on during my freshman year of college is someone I thought was fairly textbook tall, dark, mysterious, and handsome (AND A GOOD DANCER. AND SMELLED DIVINE), but my friends all made eww faces when I said I thought he looked great.  Of course, he ended up marrying the annoying girl from our dorm.  Oh, well.

Holding out for an alpha like dad.

It is often said that girls marry men like their fathers.  I think this is due partly to familiarity; dads are the primary source of a girl’s understanding of what a man is, so it makes sense that in seeking a man for herself, she will seek one like her father.  (Likewise, men often marry women like their mothers.  One of my brother’s friends is living proof of this.  His mother is a domineering battle axe.  Guess what kind of woman the friend married and is apparently quite happy with?)

So what happens when a girl’s dad is an alpha male?  Doesn’t that make it ten times as hard for her to settle down with a beta?  If she’s used to a man who makes decisions and doesn’t back down, who lovingly teases her and her mom, and is clearly in charge of the family, why would she ever want to settle down with a man who is too petrified to ask her on a date, who dithers over decision-making, who defers to her every whim and strives to make her happy at all times, and who apologizes for himself all the time?  Even if she did fall for a soft, sweet beta, the bloom would probably not be on the rose for too long, and she would soon be gritting her teeth as she clung to the remains of her attraction.

I think that another reason the daughters of alphas want alphas themselves is that she wants her husband to be able to hold his own with her dad.  What kind of woman can admire and love a man who shrinks in the presence of another?  Especially when the man is the girl’s father – if he can’t command her dad’s respect, how can he have her respect?  If the point of marriage is that a man and woman marry and form their own family unit, then having a dad who is still the top alpha in the woman’s life doesn’t bode well for the success of the marriage because the new husband and wife aren’t really their own independent family unit.  The woman will end up deferring to her father, not her husband, because her dad is the one with the true authority.  (See:  Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey’s ill-fated marriage.  Nick couldn’t overcome father-in-law Joe’s overwhelming presence and influence over Jessica.)  The issue just gets compounded when alpha brothers factor into the scenario.  If a girl grows up surrounded by an alpha dad and alpha brothers, who know how to handle her, her mother, and other women, she’s going to even more expect her future husband to be at or at least near their level.

Personal alpha dad anecdote from this weekend:  my dad was going to bed and gave my mom a peck goodnight on the lips.

MOM:  Excuse me?  That’s it?

DAD:  That’s all you deserve!

And he didn’t give her a better kiss and sauntered off to bed with an SEG on his face.  (Note:  some nights when she says this, he does give her a better kiss.  Gotta keep the wife on her toes. :))

P.S.  I saw both Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Camping Trip Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Tangled over the weekend.  If any readers are interested in a discussion post (or posts), let me know.  Tangled in particular has some interesting gender dynamics discussionables.

EverydayDHV: keep a clean and organized home.

I know the subject line sounds a little like Adult Life Skills 101, but nothing can kill (or at least severely maim) interest like a messy, dirty house.  Whether you rent a bedroom in a house, live in an apartment or condo, or inhabit a mansion, the physical state of your abode is an irrefutable outward reflection of your inner character.  Despite our living in a world where we are constantly told not to judge people by, well, anything about them that seems obvious to the naked eye, nobody actually does this.  Everyone judges everyone else by their appearance and the appearance of anything they’re associated with.  And if someone walks into your disaster of a house, it’s likely that they will take a moment to recoil, at least on the inside if they’re polite.

The home is a reflection of the mind.  It is the physical manifestation of your inner being.  Dirty, messy houses belong to people who don’t care.  They belong to people who don’t know how to allocate their time, or aren’t capable of allocating their time, or are too lazy to allocate their time to basic upkeep, none of which are positive traits.  While there are always some exceptions to the rule (cue this blog’s chorus of INLTs), it’s unusual to find a person who is organized and in control in their daily life who also lives in a sty.

Because people enjoy being in clean, organized spaces, one of the easiest ways to DHV is to keep a clean, organized home.  I’m sure everyone has had the pleasure of walking in to a clean, organized home.  It is a refreshment to the senses and immediately calming (unless it’s one of those places that has so much expensive, untouchable stuff that it’s nerve-wracking to be around it for fear of ruining something).  If you’re looking for someone to spend the rest of your life with, having a clean, organized house is a very fast way of assuring someone that you’re in control, organized, not lazy, and you pay attention to details.

Just a note:  neat is not synonymous with clean.  You can have a very neat bookshelf that has never been dusted.  You can have a very organized bathroom with a toilet that only gets scrubbed once every six months.  You can have a nicely decorated bedroom whose carpet never is vacuumed.  Just because you don’t leave a trail of your belongings everywhere doesn’t mean you’re clean.  A lot of people can be neat, but it’s rarer to find cleanliness with neatness.  If you can do both, your stock will skyrocket.

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As a side note, I am going out of town for Thanksgiving.  This will most likely be my last blog post until next week.  May everyone have a thanks-filled weekend.

 

Harry Potter got it wrong.

In honor of the release of the second-to-last cash cow film in the Harry Potter franchise, I figured now would be a good time to get soapbox-y about J.K. Rowling’s inability to write believable romance.  Please be aware that spoilers for the series follow.  If you really don’t want to know, now is the time to turn back.

For those who need a refresher/primer, the Harry Potter books revolve around the titular character who discovers at age 11 that he is not just a normal, everyday human (or Muggle, as the books call them) but a wizard.  And not just any wizard – he is the sole miraculous survivor of an attack from the greatest dark wizard ever, Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry’s parents (themselves a witch and wizard).  The books then chronicle Harry’s adventures at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy, a British boarding school for those with magical abilities.  During his time at Hogwarts, Harry becomes best friends with Ron Weasley, a good-natured boy of modest magical ability from a very large, very poor wizarding family, and Hermione Granger, the class brain whose parents are Muggles.  Each book increases in scope and complexity, as details about Harry’s past are revealed and Voldemort’s return becomes an ever-increasing threat.  The seventh and last book of the series climaxes with Harry’s final confrontation with Voldemort.  (Harry wins in the most anti-climactic ending ever for a supposed epic villain, and I still think that Rowling was using some pretty shaky logic to get to that ending.)

Anyhow, as the characters age – the series starts when they are 11 and ends when they are 17 – romance naturally enters the picture.  Harry ends up with Ron’s younger sister, Ginny, and Ron himself ends up with Hermione.  (The epilogue of the final book has both couples at the train station, sending off their children to Hogwarts.)  It’s all very tidy and sickly-sweet.  Orphan Harry gets to be a part of a big, jolly, loving family, and the Weasley family gets to be progressive and open-minded by embracing Muggle-born Hermione as one of their own.  (Muggle-born vs. “pure-breds” is one of the ongoing themes in the books and is one of Voldemort’s motivating factors.)

Which characters would pair off was a subject of hot debate among fans.  Some fans felt that Harry would end up with Hermione, who was always Harry’s biggest supporter and Girl Friday.  Others noticed Ron and Hermione’s constant bickering and guessed that it would be Ron and Hermione in the end.   Since the books were written from Harry’s limited third person point of view, there was no way of accessing the other characters’ thoughts, nor actions apart from Harry.  It wasn’t until the sixth book was released that the debate was settled once and for all:  Harry suddenly notices that Ginny is popular, gorgeous, athletic, magically gifted (unlike her brother Ron), sassy, and bold, and he spends the majority of the book lusting after her.  Meanwhile, Hermione sulks because Ron hooks up with the class bimbo.  If that didn’t make it clear enough, in the final book Rowling actually had Harry say that he had only ever thought of Hermione as a sister.  Your objections are denied!

As someone who favored Harry and Hermione, I resented Rowling’s psychosocial gymnastics to put the two couples together.  I never understood what Hermione, a highly accomplished and perfectionist witch, saw in Ron, who was completely average in every way and tended to be subordinate to Harry in their friendship.  In fact, I’m not sure Rowling ever knew, either, considering that she gave Ron a very hasty injection of athletic ability in book 6 and heroism and magical ability in the book 7 so that Hermione could finally admire him for something.  Okay, so Ron was a late bloomer.  It happens in real life, why not in books?  Well, not only was Ron up against his own mediocrity, but I still have no idea how he could have believably overcome Harry’s pure status game.  Because Harry was the only person who had ever survived an attack by Voldemort, he was already famous in the wizarding world and entered Hogwarts a celebrity.  Additionally, Harry had exceptional athletic ability – he was invited during his first year to be the seeker for his house’s Quidditch team, an almost unheard-of honor.  He was also rich – his parents had left him mountains of wizard money at the bank.  And he was humble about it, too, never flaunting his status, athleticism, or wealth.  Oh, and he was adventurous – always taking risks, always embroiling his friends in a new adventure…and always relying on Hermione for help.  How could any of this not be intoxicating to a young girl?

I suppose that’s part of why Rowling worked overtime in the sixth book to present Ginny as an alpha female uber alles.  She had to make it inconceivable that Harry could possibly end up with anyone else, not when such a choice babe was in the building.  The glamming up of Ginny – who up until then had been a tertiary character with a girlish crush on Harry that left her speechless whenever he was around – essentially forced Hermione into the role of Harry’s beta orbiter – and we all know that loyalty and devotion are never rewarded with romance.

To be fair, Rowling never wrote Harry as acknowledging any possible attraction to Hermione, other than being surprised at how pretty she looked at a school dance, and in hindsight you can see her dropping hints for Ron and Hermione in the earlier books.  Still, Hermione was extremely loyal to Harry, even more loyal than Ron, and deeply admired Harry, and the two shared some intense emotional experiences over the years.  Sometimes just proximity is enough to trigger an attraction, and who was more proximate than Hermione?

The more I think about it, though, maybe Rowling followed reality after all.  Harry and Ginny were the Hot Ones, and Ron and Hermione were the Not Ones.  Occam’s Razor, ho!

Men and smart women.

A reader emailed me a blog post suggestion with the following comments:

You sometimes complain (not exactly the right word) that men avoid smarter women.  You should expect this, shouldn’t you?  Don’t you believe that, all else equal, a) a woman a man can’t credibly “lead” can’t be happy with him, and b) a man can’t credibly lead a woman who is markedly smarter than he is, due to “the truth-extracting powers of time and familiarity”?   Maybe guys  know enough to avoid things they can’t (by definition) appreciate anyway.

Hmm.  Yes and no.

I think the key here is that a woman can’t respect – and therefore can’t feel romantic passion for, and therefore has no interest in being led by – a man of small intelligence relative to her own.  If she feels that he is a dunderhead, there’s no way she’s going to put her life and well-being (and those of her future children) in his hands.

However, a man does not need to possess book smarts in order to be impressive in intelligence to a woman.  Here is why:  book smarts aren’t as important to women as street smarts/people smarts.  A woman will be more attracted to the guy who got all Cs in high school but is resourceful, witty, and well-liked than to the guy who was valedictorian but can’t leverage his intelligence into social currency.  It follows, then, that very bright women can be attracted to (and naturally soften themselves for) men who aren’t Einstein but are socially savvy and quick-witted.  The key typically with smart girls is that the guy must have some aspect of intelligence that the girl admires.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be book smarts.  As long as the man can parlay his brainpower (in whatever form that may take) into increased social dominance, many a smart woman will be happy to follow such a man.

Obviously, there are some limits to how big an intelligence gap can exist in a couple.  Educational level and socioeconomic status are reasonable proxies for determining this gap, though not absolute.  For example, I’ve found that a lot of people with bachelor’s and graduate degrees, both men and women, may have “smarts” but not really much intelligence.  Really, though, the “dunderhead test” is probably the most reliable.  Dunderhead-ism kills admiration and respect, the two crucial ingredients for a woman’s attraction and voluntarily submission to a man’s leadership.

Finally, yes, I think that men tend to avoid women they perceive as smarter.  Most men assume that they will have a hard time being impressive to such women and therefore bail without even trying.

Is virginity even relevant past age 30?

As I’ve discussed before, the church sends out different messages about sexual purity depending on what age group you fall into.  If you’re still in high school, Sex Is Bad.  (It’s Good if you’re married, but since you as a high schooler have no hope of being married any time soon and since most of you are going to college for four or more years during which you will not get married, Sex Is Bad.)  If you’re out of college, then abstinence is rarely mentioned, with the sort of implicit understanding that everyone understands that Single People Don’t Do It.  Not that I’ve ever seen anyone hauled in front of the church to be disciplined for fornication, other than mostly regretful single male worship leaders who were saying goodbye because they got caught.  I would bet good money that in churches with lots of people returning to the fold (you know, the loving, nonjudgmental churches), there are regular attendees aplenty who are fornicating with delight, with many even openly cohabitating.  But let’s not be harsh, because we don’t want to give anyone the impression that legalism still mars the church.  God will convict their hearts in His own good time.  Besides, if I point a finger, someone might point a finger back at me, and that would be unpleasant and rather unedifying.

In the manosphere, there is a constant to-do about a woman’s “number” and a woman’s history of riding the “carousel.”  As far as I can tell, there isn’t a specific “number” beyond which a woman becomes a carousel rider, but it seems generally agreed upon that a woman’s “number” must be three or lower to qualify as “good.”  I’m not sure if this means the husband is number three or number four, but it does seem that most men who are shopping for a wife definitely get uncomfortable beyond five.  Even if a woman has always only ever had sex with men with whom she is “in a committed relationship” and has never strayed, six is just too many.  Even if it was a decade ago and she’s been living like a nun since, she’s still likely to be branded damaged goods.

Committed Christian men are even more hyperobsessive about the almighty “number” because (if they’ve been 100% pure themselves) marriage is their one and only shot at finding a sex partner, and no one wants to marry the town bike.  It’s understandable that the idea of treading where a score of other men have tread before is not a particularly appealing one, especially when one has tread nowhere oneself.  Still, with the age of first marriage being so high, and living in a sexually permissive culture where many Christians do not adhere to traditional sexual morality, it becomes increasingly unlikely that a Christian will be able to or even be able to expect to marry a virgin, especially after, say, age 25.  It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just that in many cases, it won’t be.  By the time someone is 30, hoping for virginity in a future spouse is like hoping to see a unicorn.

So is virginity, in a practical sense, really even that relevant after the “prime marrying years” are past?  I think most Christian men beyond college age would agree with the “three is a magic number” approximation.  So if you’re an attractive 32-year-old Christian woman who’s had sex with two guys and haven’t had sex with anyone in the past five years because you’ve rededicated your life to the Lord, are most single Christian men going to say, “Um, sorry, not a virgin, bye.”?  I doubt it.  A lot of those men won’t even be virgins themselves, and since the woman is still under the magic number, she’s still marriage material.

I’m not condoning fornication.  God’s rules are God’s rules.  As the creator of sex, God knows what He’s doing in setting boundaries.  Paul says, “‘Everything is permissible’ – but not everything is beneficial.”  This is one of those “rubber meets the road” areas, where “faith is being certain of what we do not see.”  As I get older, I’m not sure that I see that there’s much personal benefit in getting married a virgin vs. getting married somewhere under the magic number, but as I also see the societal havoc (and personal devastation) that fornication has wrought, I am reassured that God is, as always, infinite in his wisdom.

Hot and cold.

Can some of the men here please explain this phenomenon?  Typical scenario:

Man and woman meet at a social gathering (church, house party, bar/club, online).

Man and woman hit it off.

Man starts to call woman every day and sends dozens of flirtatious texts.  This goes on for weeks.  Woman raves to friends about “chemistry.”

Man and woman finally go on a real date (or just have an official one-on-one “hanging out.”)

It goes well.  There may be kissing.

Woman does not hear from man for days or even weeks afterward.

When woman finally screws up the courage to ask the man what’s going on, he says that he’s been “busy” or “has a lot of personal stuff going on.”  (Or HAS CANCER.  This actually happened to a friend of mine, who had dated a guy for a few months.  She thought things were going well.  Then he went completely AWOL.  When he finally resurfaced, he told her that he had been dealing with CANCER.  That was the end of their relationship.)

Woman wonders what went wrong/puts man on lifelong hate list.

How can a man go from hot to cold so fast?  Women interpret pursuit, especially consistent pursuit, as a sign of romantic interest.  For most women, feelings don’t turn off and on light a light switch, so when men flip-flop instantaneously, it throws women for a very confusing, and sometimes heartbreaking, loop.  Note that the younger and more inexperienced the woman, the harder this kind of flip-flop is to take.  It’s still hard for older women to take, but they usually have enough life experience to know that they have to harden their hearts and move on.