About a month ago (as I write this) I read a comment, I believe by a man, who observed that he was astonished than men and women ever got together. That jogged my memory about a time in college. I lived in a studio apartment attached to a two-story house with 11 or 12 girls in it. I lived there for a year and a half, so I had plenty of time to observe these women, all of whom were about 20 years old, give or take a few years.
I noticed something interesting: the few girls who were popular always talked to guys and showed they were interested in them. The girls who were not popular sat there like bumps on logs.
One of the log-bumps had one date in that year-and-a-half, and when he called for a second date she turned him down.
Another log-bump had no dates, but one guy did spend the night, since I heard them through my wall. He left in the morning and never came back.
One of the popular girls, one Thursday night I was sitting in her room, just passing the time. For some reason, and to this day I do not know why, I asked her how many guys had asked her out for the weekend.
“Seven,” she told me. I was speechless for a few seconds, then I asked her which one she was going out with. She told me the one she liked the best.
I thought, here is a friendly woman who did like guys, talked to them and was interested in what they had to say. And she had seven guys ask her out.
The other two girls – one date in a year-and-a-half for one, no dates for the other, just some guy who spend the night and never came back. And they never showed any friendliness toward guys, just the attitude they were supposed to sit there saying nothing and guys were supposed to approach them.
I sat in my classes, always in the back row, watching students. I never saw anyone talk to anyone else in any way that showed any kind of romantic interest. Not once did I see a girl smile at a guy. I remember thinking, how do these people think they are going to meet someone and get married?
Occasionally a guy would talk briefly to a girl, but she never responded with more than a few words.
One woman I know, who was very popular with guys, told me she had been asked by the other girls why she was so popular. She told me she couldn’t believe the question.
“All you have to do is be friendly and talk to them,” she told them. Apparently this simple concept had never occurred to any of them.
Probably the strangest thing about this time in college is that there were many more women than men, so you’d think the women would be competing for the men. I never saw it. What I saw, over and over, were girls by themselves on Friday and Saturday nights.
How did I know they were alone? Because I delivered pizzas for a year-and-a-half, including to the girls’ dorms, and was just amazed that all of them were there by themselves. Not hundreds. Thousands.
I suppose if I was to have asked them why they were alone, they might have responded, “There are no guys here,” an odd response at a university with about 9,000 guys.
What they really meant was, “There are no guys here I’d be interested in,” again an odd response with 9,000 available guys. Maybe they thought they’d just look at a guy and know he was the one – love at first sight? Price Charming, which means they thought they were princesses?
Since men usually approach women, women have to show themselves to be approachable. That’s what “friendly and smiling and interested” means. Again, in college, in classes, I never saw it.
I never saw it at parties, either. Just the log-bumps. Mostly I saw the log-bumps at nightclubs, too.
Oddly, I have noticed this attitude only among American women. With non-American women I have never seen it.
It’s one of the reasons white guys go out with Asian women (who are a lot friendlier and act more interested than almost all white American women), and of course many white women get hysterical about this, even though they themselves would not go out with this particular guy. It’s as if they’re saying, “Maybe I don’t want him, but no one else should, either.” This is some kind of weird envy or jealousy that I do not understand.
I know women who are in their 40s and 50s who are unmarried and childless, and are hostile toward men because of it. I wonder if it has never occurred to them they are in some way responsible for their predicament? Because they forgot how to smile?