Ladies, please explain why it is that a decent gentleman still has to wait by the phone after making sure a woman has had the night of her life?
Too many times this has been the case with even the most self declared “liberated women”.
Please look for the advice that I give in this this thread.
Zen I noticed that those “liberated women” are not only not calling you back, but they are not responding to your thread(but the night’s still early).
So, to fill in the dead time, I offer these suggestion–
Did you get a second opinion yet? Maybe you were too much the gentleman and she wanted to get laid. Not too much of a stretch.
Or maybe she was after some guy who just wasn’t quite as nice as you. That’s what I tell myself. While she may be a liberated woman, she has insecurities and worries like all the rest of us. She actually may have less self-esteem than you give her credit for. And maybe she was after some guy who was a little more macho than you or I. Some guy with more show than substance.
Offered for your consideration.
humbly,
another nice guy looser.
Sheesh! What a loser I am. Can’t even spell loser.
Hi Zenster,
Maybe she just doesn’t feel you two have much in common, or she will call you back and hasn’t had time. How long have you been waiting?
You seem like a very nice guy from what I have gathered from reading your posts. Someone out there will realize that someday.
As for the liberated woman thing, some guys still seem to want to be the one to take the initiative (and some women may be playing by those silly The Rules books).
In my current relationship, I am the one who took the initiative and called him first, and I believe we are better suited than the relationships I had with men who did the choosing. But it could be just coincidence.
Good luck!
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I’d rather have a real man like you around (samclem) to assist on a double date, than a fistfull of macho meatheads.
I got an E-Mail with the following humorous story.
One day, God appears before a man and says He’ll grant him any one wish that he desires. The man says he wishes for a bridge to be built between California and Hawaii so he can drive there for vacations. God says He could do it, but that this would be terribly wasteful in time and materials. Surely there was something more holy the man could wish for.
So the man said, “God, I’d like to be able to understand women. I’d like to know what they really mean when they say, ‘I’m fine.’ I’d like to know what they mean when they say, ‘Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you!’”
God paused for a minute, and said: “You want two lanes or four on that bridge?”
Oh, and by the way, my mother was the one who sent this.
One date a year. That’s the average, OK Spidey?
I don’t think it has anything to do with Liberated or not Liberated (whatever Liberated means in this context).
I consider myself to be a strong feminist and if I felt like ringing a bloke when I was single I would do so. If after a date I didn’t feel like more contact, then I didn’t ring.
My suggestion would be to lose the label idea and ring the woman in question and ask her whether she wants to see you again. I wouldn’t ask her why she didn’t ring unless she originally said she would ring. In which case, if I liked the person I would cut them some slack…
Why don’t you just call her? Even us liberated chicks sometimes have crises of confidence.
& maybe you were too decent, or too much of a gentleman…
So far Primaflorra, you’re the exception to the rule. It would be so nice to be asked out once in a while. I have run into so many women who want to be treated like a “liberated” woman (i.e., included in guy things and not being coddled), but when the rubber hits the road, suddenly they want to be a demure little Miss Princess. I have given hundreds of bouquets of flowers in my life and received maybe two or three.
And that’s why my motto for this year is, “No more Mister Nice Guy.” I have found that when you treat a woman nicely, your reward is to be thought of like a brother or cousin instead of a lover. I cannot bring myself to mistreat women or ignore their needs, so I guess that I’m damned to being alone. I just no longer have any sympathy whatsoever for women who choose the “bad boys” and then get their hearts broken or the shit kicked out of them. I detest violence against women, and yet I have to believe that any woman who elects to be with a “bad boy”, basically wants to be abused. Please trust me that the previous sentence makes me want to scrape my skin off. It’s just getting harder and harder to escape that conclusion when I see the losers these women pick out.
Bitter? Nope, just disgusted.
Whoa! Jump back there buddy! What I meant was that I personally have been in situations where I found out later that a guy was interested in me, but I didn’t know it at the time because he was being too much of a gentleman (by which I mean not sexually aggressive enough.) Like, I’m not saying I want to be jumped on immediately, but if he doesn’t try to cop a feel on the first date, I’m going to assume that he’s not interested in copping one ever. shrugs Maybe it’s just me.
Of my “liberated” female friends, all stil want the guy to make the moves. Kind of a double standard, “I want to be your equal and share housework, but you pay for the date and hold open doors and make the sexual advances.”
But hey, you don’t like it, there are plenty of regular old fashioned girls out there. But they still want you to kake the moves.
Well, whichever adjective you want to use for it, these are probably feelings that you would do well to fight. Not that I don’t totally empathize…I’ve felt some of the same frustration that you have!! But, I will throw out a few random thoughts on the subject:
(1) In our society, men are trained to be assertive/aggressive and women are trained to be less so but also to be attracted to this trait in men. (Or, maybe it is partly in our genes…whatever.) And, even women who are quite liberated might be more used to men making the moves. Alas, this puts those of us men who are less aggressive/assertive at an unfortunate disadvantage.
(2) I have also been reminded by female friends that if one person is more interested than the other person in pursuing a relationship, then that more interested person will probably have to be the one to do the majority of the pursuing. Some of us non-assertive guys (of which I am one…don’t know if you are) sometimes let ourselves off too easy, trying to make someone else do a lot of the work when perhaps most of it will have to fall more on our shoulders.
(3) Although I have also asked the “why are women attracted to jerks?” question, I think one has to take a more realistic assessment on this. First of all, when I really think about it, most of the women I know are with guys who are not jerks, even if I sometimes resent the fact they are not with me. (I not-too-long ago described, to Kimstu, the new boyfriend of a woman I had my heart set on thusly: “I guess he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy considering he is the devil incarnate.”) Of course, obviously this does not apply to women who are with guys who abuse them or to women who ask why all men are jerks…by which they mean (IMHO) “all the men I go out with seem to be jerks.” In this case, clearly, there is some reason the woman in question is attracted to such guys or at least is insufficiently selective to weed them out. This could be partly explained as a more extreme result of my point (1). However, one thing which really enlightened me was the realization that I could be a little this way too…I.e., there are some perfectly nice women who I don’t seem to be interested in even though I think I ought to be, and then there are some women I have been ga-ga for who really haven’t treated me too well. Go figure.
Anyway, just a few random thoughts on this. Keep your chin up and keep being nice! I’m sure you will find a woman who appreciates it.
Ouch, way to paint everyone with the same broad (no pun intended) brush. I’ve paid for plenty of dates, bought plenty of presents, made plenty of moves, help open plenty of doors, etc., etc., ad nauseum. But you probably didn’t want to date me because I’m too fat and ugly and you, shallow man, were thinking with the wrong head. There, turnabout is fair play. How did that stereotype feel?
Stella:
!!? You serious??
or maybe the guy was trying to be a gentleman…and wait before he actually knows a bit about you before copping any feels…
jshore: (I not-too-long ago described, to Kimstu, the new boyfriend of a woman I had my heart set on thusly: “I guess he doesn’t seem like such a bad guy considering he is the devil incarnate.”)
Hee hee, I’d forgotten that one…
And Mr. Z., who the hell are these “liberated women” who are letting guys pay for them on dates?!? I completely agree that gender equality means that you don’t freeload. (And by the way, this was a solid etiquette principle way back before gender equality, too: a hundred years ago, no lady would have dreamed of letting a stranger pay her expenses for anything, because a lady “never permits an unknown gentleman to lay her under an obligation” (let it alone, guys, 'kay?).)
Once they were properly acquainted, of course, he’d do all the paying, but differences in gender status and income levels made that almost reasonable. These days, it is Absolutely Not Done for a lady to expect a gentleman to pay her way (unless they are established friends who take turns treating each other, or unless he has specifically asked her to be his guest at a function of his own choosing that she might not have chosen and/or couldn’t have afforded).
Any woman who automatically expects you to pick up the tab even when you’ve mutually agreed on whether you’ll go out someplace together and where you’ll go, simply because you’re male and she’s female, is either somewhat ignorant and thoughtless or else is No Lady. Or perhaps she is signifying her willingness to be treated as a lady of a hundred years ago. Either way, she does not qualify as a “liberated woman.”
(Etiquette, by the way, has nothing to say about who makes the sexual advances: it’s far too subtle an issue to rule on, anyway. You may think you made the first move, but you wouldn’t have tried it if she hadn’t smiled at you like that…)
I don’t know how old you are, but maybe you should try dating women who’ve been out in the dating world for a while. Girls are still taught, by word or deed, that you let the boy/man make all the first moves, make him jump through a few hoops, make him “earn” you, or he won’t appreciate you. Some women can shrug off this teaching early, others figure it out later (I’m in this second group), some never learn it.
After a few years of dating I got really irritated with the games and assumptions that went with the mating rituals. I figured out a system that ended up working quite well for me. There were just a few simple rules.
#1 - forget being mysterious - talk about questionable stuff (sex, who’s paying, who’s driving, etc) up front when the subject arises.
#2 - whoever does the asking pays for and plans the date.
#3 - sex is not assumed, but the option exists for discussion.
#3 - the “datee” (the one who did not pay for the date) is responsible for the next move - the ball is in their court and it is up to them to contact if they are interested in another date.
#4 - whoever gets to the door first opens it
#5 - whoever is driving opens the door for the passenger
Establishing these rules took a whole lot of stress out of dating, culled the herd a bit (although men who were not interested in a strong woman have rarely been attracted to me), and made for some very enjoyable evenings. It also strongly appealed to the gentleman who eventually became my husband, a man who was seriously interested in a partner in every sense of the word.
In my 20’s (the 1980’s), I was constantly appalled by my contemporaries, many of whom were horrified that I asked men out and paid for dates, but who envied the relationships I had while they kept ending up with men who wanted to dominate and victimize them. You think they’d figure it out after a while. What you catch depends on how you bait your hook.
Stella*Fantasia
::shaking off apoplectic speechlessness::
Guess it takes all types…look, hon, maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I tend to assume that your gender assumes that most heterosexually inclined members of my gender would always be interested in copping a feel with damn near any halfway palatable female between legal and double our age, so THAT’S already established (the occasional instances where the assumption isn’t accurate being outnumbered by the instances where it is dead on).
The question is whether or not the female (that’s you) harbors a corollary interest, and since many folks of your gender find it annoying and objectifying and rude and crude and occasionally even downright creepy and intimidating for us to ascertain this degree of interest by seeing what happens when we try to cop a feel, lots of us male types tend to wait.
Degree of wait depends on the fellow.
a) I’m sort of off at the extreme end, I suppose, I’ll wait until you (that’s the female) initiate by blatant verbal or overt physical behavior…that’s how I screen out inappropriate companions, in fact, the others get bored and leave…
b) Lots of pretty nice guys will take the initiative once they’ve gotten to know you over several dates and you’ve encouraged or initiated several innocuous closenesses and G-to-GP-rated brushings of skin; and
c) Even many of the more opportunistic of the nicer guys aren’t gonna try to cop anything beyond a good-bye kiss on the first date if you don’t send out something that has a welcome-mat tingle about it.
Please don’t call me “hon” again. That was patronizing.
I don’t automatically assume that every guy in the world wants to jump me. Not even close. (I was scarred for life in high school, when I was The Girl Who No One Would Ask To The Prom. So even though I finally grew out of my acne & got some breasts, I still on some level feel like a freak.) I’m always surprised when somebody finds me attractive.
The other thing that may not have been clear from my posts is that I personally am quite forward if I am interested & will often initiate physical stuff. I’m not the type who plays the blushing virgin all evening, then is surprised not to get a good-night grope. I’m very flirtatious & I figure if a guy doesn’t pick up on that, he isn’t interested. I mean, you have chemistry, or you don’t, and you know within thirty minutes.