ON THE TREATMENT OF GIRLS (AND WOMEN)
Let’s face it, guys. Your social skills suck.
Yes, I said that.
Natural charm and the dashing good looks you all possess will only get you so far. At some point, you have to engage in a relationship.
It’s easy to fall in love. It’s one of the tragedies of life. For girls especially, love is about the easiest emotion to muster. Here’s an example…
Take a three legged one-eyed dog and toss it into a room full of girls and they will fight over who gets to take it home and take care of it. On the other hand, don’t….
But I trust the point is well taken.
Girls, be they beautiful or ugly or fat or slovenly or whether they come from wealth or abject poverty, or have huge breasts or barely any at all, whether they were raised in dysfunctional homes or ones that were perfect, all have one hormonally-driven need…
To love…
Not only to love, but to possess, body and soul, the beloved…
Most of the time this takes the form, in early adolescence, of abject worship of some one else…
Sometimes it’s a cultural icon (movie star, musician, what-have-you), or a girlfriend (we’ll discuss hetero vs. homosexual adolescent relationships and how you can tell the difference, or, for better or worse…you…
Sometimes this attention is good, and you’re happy. She loves you, you love her and it’s wonderful…except very quickly other feelings creep in, like jealousy, fear of abandonment, etc. Sexuality is a big thing, fervently sought, but in the end, somehow less than what either of you imagined it would be…embarrassment, frustration…ooops…suddenly that person whom you thought was the best thing in your life becomes the one you want to avoid the most.
From early adolescence then, we begin a pattern of cycling through relationships, some brief, some not-so-brief. But the entire history of dating becomes one of ecstatically forming relations, enjoying them, watching them crumble, rebuilding (or maybe not) and moving on to the next one.
Even marriage is not an adequate hedge against this sort of misery. The statistics on marriages are abysmal, and most of you know the pain that results from the failure of them.
But the pattern of meeting, dating and separating becomes a fixed one. It becomes familiar. You understand it. If you start dating at fifteen and have six month relationship until you’re twenty, you’ve already had ten breakups. By thirty, you’ve had up to thirty. Thirty? Thirty failed relationships?
I’ve heard girls who aren’t even twenty claim to have had thirty sexual partners. I know 19 year old girls with three children without husbands. I worked with young girls with children who were abandoned not only by their lovers (who had all sworn un-dying love—vows that the poor girls still believed) but were thrown out of their houses and estranged from the parents and siblings. I counsel people living in abject poverty because they fell in love, had children, lost the love of their mate and ended up on the streets, or as close to it as you can get.
But, you wail, that doesn’t always happen.
Of course not…but in the end of all relationships there’s misery.
Even if you have the best relationship in the world with your mate, and love each other devoutly and faithfully, in the end, one of you is going to die and leave the other one alone and bereft.
Is this a diatribe against relationships?
Not at all…
It is a diatribe against a certain kind of relationship, and a friendly word of advice about how to be ready for a positive relationship.
We can start with some basic assumptions….
- You’re a mess… How do I know this? Well, the strongest likelihood is that you come from a dysfuctional home…probably at some point living with either a single parent, or a step-parent, a substance abuser of some sort or an abusive caregiver.
- Because of your background, you’re a little confused about love and trust…Hmmmm…does that make sense? If you have been abused or neglected by someone close to you, like a parent, you have a clash of truths. You have been told since birth by everyone in the society that your parents love you. Yet they abuse or neglect you. This leads to the erroneous thought that abuse and love can co-exist. When I started working with abuse, I was taught that the abuser, especially if it’s a relative, really does love the child it’s abusing. Years of using that little germ of misinformation led me to believe otherwise. Abusive parents don’t love their children, at least not in the sense of a love that’s pure. Let’s back up…Remember how you loved your parents from the beginning? It didn’t matter what they looked like or what they did, you loved them and you wanted nothing more than to be close to them. That’s pure love. The love that says, "I love you," but knocks you to the back wall when the person is drunk is not love. A person that assumes their position as a loving parent is assured simply because "everybody knows parents, even abusive ones, love their kids" is wrong.
Let me tell you something…if you live with a substance abuse, that person is incapable of loving another human being. They love one thing, and that’s the substance they’re addicted to. Period. Sorry, kids. It’s a harsh thing to say. But I saw it for one reason and that is this: The sooner you get past the lies, the sooner you can start to live.
What was that?
I’ll repeat it…
The sooner you get past the lies, the sooner you can start to live.
Okay. So what does that have to do with social skills?
A lot
You’ve heard your parents lie to each other or their partners, or vice versa. You’ve been lied to over and over. You watch manipulation in multiple relationships and now here you are, determined to make a go of it. But you don’t have a road map. Basically, we don’t teach our kids how to have relationships….we don’t even teach them manners…
But I will teach you, because I like you…
- Treat everyone with the kind of respect you would like to enjoy from them. Irrespective of who they are…
- Get to know a girl before you let your emotions run away with you. She’s likely to be more emotional than you are, so you have to keep ahold of the relationship.
- Always behave responsibly. What do I mean by that…
A lot of misguided boys in the hopes of having their cake and eating it to pull all sorts of really stupid crap…
Here are some examples…
Calling after three weeks and saying, "Oh, sorry, I lost your number…want to go out or want to go out again?" She might say yes, and if she does, it’s because she’s one desperate little kitty…we don’t seriously believe the stupid crap you guys say, but we might go along with it…
Pretending not to be home…
Avoiding or evading…
For example, she calls and is talking to you.
Her: "I was at the mall with Shelly and Mary the other day and we saw this album cover with this guy from Screaming Pitbulls on Crack and he looked just like you…"
You: "Yeh…Whatever…"
Her: "So I thought when you, like, set fire to the trashcan in the lunchroom it was like, ummmm, way cool…"
You: "Yeh, sure…"
Her: Well, the dance is coming up next Saturday, you know, and I know it’s going to be really lame, but I was hoping maybe you might kinda think about, like going…"
"You: "Next Saturday? Uh…I dunno."
Her: Yeh, well…okay…
You get off the phone convinced that one more call like that should completely discourage her…however…what she heard was this…
Her: "I was at the mall with Shelly and Mary the other day and we saw this album cover with this guy from Screaming Pitbulls on Crack and he looked just like you…"
You: "Yeh, Whatever…" (Ahhhh…he’s soooo sweet and shy…he doesn’t express himself very well, does he? Well, he just needs someone who loves him to bring him out of his shell…he doesn’t like to be compared to famous people because he must think he looks like a dweeb, but I love the way he looks, dweebish or not. Oh, poor thing…)
"So I though when you, like, set fire to the trashcan in the lunchroom it was like, ummmm, way cool…"
You: "Yeh, sure…" (Ohhhhh…he’s so modest…what a rebel he is. He doesn’t care at all about convention and rules. I bet he’d drop out of school and get a job when he turns sixteen and if I was his girlfriend we could, like, start living together, because he’d be making money and then I wouldn’t have to listen to my bitchy mother…I wish he wasn’t so shy, though…it’s so sweet, he’s no nervous he can only say two words at a time…)
Her: "Well, the dance is coming up next Saturday, you know, and I know it’s going to be really lame, but I was hoping maybe you might kinda thing about, like going…" I can’t really completely ask him out, but I can drop enough hints and he’ll get it…and he can’t really say yes, I want to go with you because that just isn’t the way guys do things, and even though I’d rather have him ask me I’m soooooo desperate and so much in love with him that I’ll take any lousy little crumb I can get…"
And then she spends the rest of the night on the phone with all her girlfrieinds talking about how much she loves you and how cute you are…What goes on away from you is so much more important sometimes than what’s going on in front of you, or even, what you’re doing…
True story time?
My son went to a really sleazy bar a few weekends ago. This bar was so sleazy that girls were taking off their shirts and dancing without pay on the dancefloor. After getting an eyeful, and, I’m embarrassed to say, a handful or two, he slogged over to the bar, where he met a young woman.
After a few minutes of conversation, she slid down the bar and sat on the stool next to him…But it was very loud in the bar and so, before long, she was sitting in his lap…In the course of the conversation, he told her where he worked. Tossing her hair, she said, "Well, I’ll come by and say hi to you sometime."
End of conversation…end of evening…
He comes over (circa 1:30 a.m. to wake me up and tell me all about what happened, "Mommy, mommy, guess what? I went to a really sleazy bar tonight…" He tells me all sorts of things, but he doesn’t tell me about this last girl. Why? Because he was too busy telling me about the thirty-some year old woman who gave him tequila and told him he was too young to sleep with and what a damned shame it was…Did I mention he’s 18? He did mention to me that there was a girl who sat in his lap, but it wasn’t really like he was talking about a person, more like just a…what…commodity?
Meanwhile I give him my "what girls really want" speech. I said, "You know that girl that sat in your lap? She’s home now, moving the teddy bears off the second shelf in the living room so you can put your Green Day albums there…" He laughed and told me I was full of it…
The day after, he comes over to my house, and says, "You’ll never believe what happened at work…this chick I met at the bar the other night (and then he tells me about her) came to the store today. She brought two friends with her. They oohed and aaahed over him like he was a prime piece of livestock…and, as if he was her boyfriend already.
"So she says to me, ‘I said to them…ohhhh, you should see him, he looks just like somebody I’ve seen before…a musician….’" And they had gone through all their album covers and liner notes looking for one picture of some obscure jerk. And they found it. It took a couple of hours…three girls all intent on finding a picture of one guy because he looked like my son…They hung around for a half hour or so and then toddled off…He doesn’t even have her phone number or know her name, but she’s crazy about him. I know where this is going too….She’ll come in a few times, finally drop her number on him, hope like hell that he’ll call (which he won’t) and then she’ll have to go through all the misery of disengaging herself emotionally from someone she didn’t even know in the first place.
What Girls Want…
Girls want you. Well…the you is fungible. They want a guy. They want a husband or a live-in or whatever…but at the bottom of it they want a nest and they want you in it…
It doesn’t matter that you’re both only fourteen…
Or that she’s fourteen and you’re thirty…
Or that you don’t have a job or you’re an alcoholic or anything else…
People by fixer-upper houses all the time…at the worst, she thinks you’re a fixer-upper guy…
If you’re dirty, you can be cleaned up…if you’re stupid, you can be educated…if you’re an alcoholic or a doper, you can be rehabilitated….What flaw is there is a beloved that can’t be overlooked or repaired?
You’re ugly as sin? Well, girls know looks aren’t everything…
You’re abusive? You just haven’t been loved enough…
It goes on and on…Believe me, there is nobody in the world cleverer or more ingenius than a girl trying to rationalize why she loves you…
SO why does she love you?
I’m utterly and absolutely convinced it’s hormonal….For guys it’s hormonal too…
But we have diametrically opposed hormones…
Well, duh…
Ahhhh, but it’s more subtle than you think…
Female hormones encourage us to nest…to find a man and bring him home, make him comfortable in as many ways as possible and encourage him to stay and provide support for the children that you two are going to have….I think this need goes on whether or not we’re in a society that appreciates and reveres marriage or not…Children have to be created for the perpetuation of the species, women are the ones who produce them and guys are vital to continual progenation and the support of the offspring.
Boiled down: Women want and feel most comfortable in long-term relationships.
Male hormones also encourage mating and to some extent bonding…Most guys in their early, most fertile years, have the urge to get into a relationship in order to mate. But their desire to stay in that relationship may last only two to six weeks after the consummation of the relationship. They’re ready to move on. Instinctively, I think it’s because six weeks thoroughly ensures one full fertility cycle (plus a little), to insure impregnation….
Boiled down: Men want and feel most comfortable in short-term relationships.
The average homosexual relationship (just about the epitome of what males do naturally, a true distillation of maleness) is four to six weeks…many don’t last out the day on which they begin…
For men, there are sometimes practical matters that lead them to desire long-term relationships…the least attractive of these is the need for a constant supply of domestic labor. Oh…but it’s sooooo true.
The truth is, the best relationships with adolescent males come before their first completed sexual experience…although even then, the closer they come to it, sometimes the stupider they become…
For example:
A young man engaged to be married, goes to a prostitute several days before the wedding, just to make sure he "knows what to do". There are a thousand variations to that story…young guy in love with one girl has sex with another because he doesn’t want to "screw it up" with the one he really loves…which puts girl number two in a bad position. Having done it with the guy, she is convinced he loves her…
In a girl’s mind…sex equals love and love equals commitment…
Shall I repeat that?
Sex equals love and love equals commitment…
Part of this stupidity derives from not being completely settled in what you want.
If you don’t want the girl at all, it’s fairly easy…you try to run her off.
But what if you aren’t sure? What if you say, "Hmmm…what if I can’t get another date? Or what if I get really horny?" By trying to play both ends against the middle, you’re more likely to hurt her feelings.
