When Women Leave You Wondering…

[Note: this is a guest post, written by a guy friend of mine in response to How Do I Reject Thee?]

The problem, for both men and women, is they never really think about what the other sex goes through on a daily basis. This ties in exactly with what a lot of your posts have been about, men not getting it and women struggling to communicate back to men.

As men, we spend a great deal of our single life approaching women with varying degrees of success. We’re taught by experience that we have to chase if we’re interested, and by the nature of the situation, where the bulk of the time we are rejected, most of us end up treating it like hunting with a machine gun: highly inaccurate and probably hitting everything around it, rocks, trees, perhaps just air – while hoping that one of those deer you’re after happens to get hit.

Oh, deer me...

Related to this, it’s so rare for a girl to approach you, let alone hit on you or ask you out (so rare we don’t often know that is what’s happening), it never occurs to most of us how often it happens to you. Intellectually we know men hit on women, but usually we treat our approach like it’s the one time today or this week or this month that it’s happened to the girl we’re after. It’s usually not. 🙂

The fact is, I don’t think the average single guy (excluding a crazy Saturday night at a bar with his buddies) approaches more than one or two girls a week at most. Probably less, some weeks. And when we’re not single, even less (hopefully never). So it can seem like a rare, difficult, confusing and unique event at times.

Go out with YOU? What planet are you from?

On the other hand, most women, single or not, will get approached a lot. Every day? Maybe multiple times a day? With their boyfriend? With their girlfriends? At work? At the gym? On the subway? And you have to deal with it whether you want to or not. Now we’re at the crux of it:

We don’t seem very original to you because unless we go out of our way to practice approaching women, we don’t do nearly as much of it as you hear on a daily basis. And the fact that we don’t succeed most of the time makes many guys afraid. Then we end up hiding behind a dumb line or something we think is original in the four seconds we have to think beforehand. The first thing that comes to our minds is usually a cliché.

I have no idea what it’s like to be the woman on the receiving end of the shenanigans we put out there. But having thought about it, I imagine that most of the time, it doesn’t make us very attractive or manly. As in a past posts of yours, we mostly have no sense of who you are and what’s going on in your life. We could be interrupting an important conversation or a much needed girl’s night out. You could be married or in love. But we do it anyway because how else will we find out? In doing this, though, hiding in some clever gimmick, we give you all our power.

Now you’re standing there with some guy you, at most, barely know, asking you for your number. Our heart/ego is in your hands, and you know it. If you’re not into it, will you crush us?

Usually we get one of two responses:

1) A total blow off, which sucks but we’ll get over
2) The soft, confusing let down, which says yes but is supposed to be full of subtle hints to the contrary

The problem for us in getting women’s hints, in my opinion, is consistency. Almost no matter what you say or do, we’ve heard it before, only sometimes it was a woman blowing us off and sometimes it wasn’t. It’s confusing!

You may think you’re being “clear enough,” but some other girl last week said or did the same thing but then did go out with us (or didn’t, as the case might be). It’s probably a case of subtlety too. Our brains don’t simultaneously process thought and emotion very well. Yours do. So to most of us, unless you are snarling at us, if you say “yes, we should,” you mean “yes, we should.” Experience has taught me and most of my guy friends, that we plain just don’t know, and all we can do is take women at their word until they show us differently (which happens about 50% of the time). Honestly, we don’t trust women to be honest with is about it anyway.

In How Do I Reject Thee? you say, “I was trying to communicate that I wasn’t interested without having to come out and say it.” As a man I just think, “Why?” It would make my day not to feel like I’m guessing.

My number: maybe I'll give it to you, maybe I won't. And even if I do... what does that mean??

Again: “Hence I did what I usually do: when he asked for my number I gave it to him, so as not to be rude.” What?! I think it’s rude to give me your number unless you actually want me to have it. This is just a big, drawn out, “Fuck you.”

On our side, men are just as inconsistent. I’m a nice guy who has many women friends and does fine with women. I’m still confused much of the time as to whether a woman is into me or not, so we keep pushing until either it works out or doesn’t. But there are guys who are total donkeys and they’ve actually believe that if they keep asking and hitting on you that they can convince you to change your mind. They don’t take rejection well but then again, they’ll hit on every girl in sight and probably do better than the rest of us.

A few personal stories to make my point: I met a girl last time I was in California, the friend of a friend. We spent most of the party together talking about music, film, hiking, surfing, the ocean, etc. She was laughing, kept touching my arm, and we exchanged numbers at the end of the night. A couple days later we went hiking together. Afterward we ended up at her house, swimming at the beach and cooking lunch together.

Sounds romantic, right?

Wrong! Apparently she was only interested in being friends. And we are. I’m fine with that but … what?! So confusing.

Story two: in DC, at a bar with a bunch of buddies after work. I notice a beautiful girl sitting next to us, talking to a friend. I strike up a conversation. Cut to 2 hours later…

All my friends are gone. All her friends are gone. We’re still sitting at the bar, sharing french fries and talking about everything under the sun. We leave said bar and she convinces me to go dancing, even after a 14 hour workday and 3-4 hours at the bar. We go to some club she knew of playing reggae and dance together all night. I walk her to a train station at 5am and we end up kissing. She takes my card, gives me her number and goes home. I go straight to work in the same clothes, exhausted but happy.

Except I never heard from her and the number she gave me wasn’t hers. What?!

 

Story three: I go out for a female friend’s birthday with a big bunch of friends. A girlfriend of hers that I’ve always been attracted to is there. We’d never really talked before. I tried… Wow, was she not having it. Totally ignored me at the first bar. Okay. No problem. We go bar hopping. Pub, dancing, pit-stop for food, bar, crazy nightclub, got kicked out, ended up at a hole in the wall underground rave with industrial music and goth transvestites. Super fun! Everyone is dancing. Yay! I notice the girl from earlier is just sitting with the coats. She looks grumpy and tired. I sit down nearby for like five min and just hang out. It’s too loud to talk but I feel bad she isn’t having a good time.

Shortly after, we all went home, my friend and the girl in a cab to the other side of town. Sounds like nothing, right? Wrong!

A day later, she texts me after getting my number from our mutual friend. She invites me out for a beer and we end up together for six months! The whole time she kept insisting it must have been obvious she was into me. Even more confusing!

I could keep going, but the point is that as a man, I see no rhyme or reason or pattern with women. Each is different and gives totally different signals. That is the beauty, allure and challenge of it. It is what makes us want to step up, go out on a limb and start that conversation with a woman we know nothing about.

And it sucks a lot of the time, but it also makes me stop in awe at how complex women can be. It also strikes me how simple and unprepared a mere mortal man is in the face of that inexplicable fickle cruel power that has made many a culture worship and fear the goddess. It’s in all of you, and we have nothing on that. So be nice to us, but for heaven’s sake, be clear!