by Jeff Mac
PRAISE FOR
Manslations
“Jeff Mac has summed up exactly why my last boyfriend and I broke up. Now I have a guide that really sums up why men do what they do. You'll laugh, shake your head, and laugh some more.”
—Rachel Sarah, author of Single Mom Seeking:
Play Dates, Blind Dates, and Other Dispatches
from the Dating World (2007, Seal Press)
“Comedian Jeff Mac spills many male secrets, revealing just why guys aren't up for “The Talk” and other relationship conundrums that continue to puzzle women. He explains the basics of male thinking (and female overthinking) in a funny but honest way that breaks down classic dating misunderstandings into language that's actually helpful. Instead of the Tough Love of a He's Just Not That Into You, Mac's take is that if he is into you, you can do no (okay, little) wrong, whereas if he's not, he'll likely just try to get you in the sack. If you're looking for a laugh and some high-quality advice for the lovelorn, do yourself a favor and check out Manslations.”
—Rachel Kramer Bussell , contributing editor, Penthouse
Copyright © 2009 by Jeff Mac
Cover and internal design © 2009 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover Design by Jill Lynn Design
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mac, Jeff.
Manslations : decoding the secret language of men / Jeff Mac.
p. cm.
1. Man-woman relationships—Humor. 2. Men—Language. I. Title. II. Title: Decoding the secret language of men. III. Title: Secret language of men.
HQ801.M2338 2009
306.708102’07—dc22
2008018086
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to all the ladies (and the occasional gentleman) who have written in to manslations.com—for the sheer optimism it must have taken to spill their guts to a total stranger over the Internet.
contents
Introduction: Welcome to Manslations
1. Basic Manslations Theory, or The Stuff You Don't Know
2. Of Myths and Men, or Stuff You Don't Even Know You Don't Know
3. The Notorious S.E.X., or Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here
4. First Date Dos and Don'ts, or You're Not Wearing That, Are You?
5. Post-Date Debriefing and Aftermath, or Sitting at Home Freaking Out
6. Men and Their Things, or Sometimes a Remote Is Just a Remote
7. Having “The Talk,” or How to Communicate with a Man without Causing Him to Exit via the Fire Escape
8. Manslating Literature, TV, and the Movies, or Why Nobody in the Real World Ends Up with McDreamy
9. Twelve Months of Holiday Confusion, Solved
10. Manslations to the Top Thirteen Male Conundrums, or Real-Life Problems Crushed to Dust by the Power of Manslation
11. Final Thoughts, or Is That All There Is?
Glossary: The Phrase Book
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
welcome to manslations
WHAT IS A MANSLATION?
Boy, am I glad that you asked that. If you aren't interested in knowing at least that much, then I have to question why you've read even this far.
So a manslation is a translation (see what I did there?) of male behavior into something that a woman can understand. Here, I'll use it in a sentence:
“Wow, would you look at that manslation over there?”
And now I'll use it in a more helpful sentence: “Listen, when that guy told you—within thirty seconds of introducing himself at the bar—that he drives a hybrid because he cares about the environment, the manslation is that he was trying to work his way into your bikini areas.”
Why Should You Care?
Because you are holding the Rosetta stone of relationships, conveniently printed on “paper.” (I begged them to release my original stone draft, but there was something about shipping costs.)
Throughout this book, I will manslate some of the things men do and say—and then I'll teach you how to do it yourself. By the end, you will have the tools to manslate what any guy's doing or saying. Ultimately you won't even need me anymore, and I can go back to living my lifelong dream of sitting around at my place doing nothing.
But before we really get going, I'm sensing that you might have some questions for me, such as, who am I? Why should you listen to me? Why this book and not all the other books sitting on the shelf next to it? What do I weigh?
Well, have no fear. Not only am I going to answer these, but I am also going to make up the questions and pretend that I'm you. Convenient!
WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU
QUALIFIED TO WRITE THIS BOOK?
Firstly, I'm not sure I care for your tone. I wrote a book, is who I am. Then again, I guess that's a little bit like going on a job interview and, under references, putting your own phone number. Fair enough. It's a valid question.
I am the guy who can tell you how to understand all male behavior.
I know, I know. I don't expect you to just take my word for it. If you'll just bear with me, I'm going to dump virtual bucket loads of authority all over the place.
Why should you consider me “qualified”? Because of the almost legendary abilities of stand-up comics to maintain healthy relationships?* Because you've always wanted to get dating advice from someone who was once paid to be the voice of a package of toilet paper? How about because I write an online daily advice column answering any and all questions that women have about men? Okay, getting warmer…
Here are some of the real reasons why you should listen to me (besides common courtesy).
All Human Males Know How to
Read Other Human Males
And, I suspect, all other male animals, as we'll discuss later. All men instinctively know what's going on with other men. Yes, it's absolutely true. Every time you've found yourself confused, bewildered, baffled, stymied, perhaps even bamboozled or hoodwinked by a man, virtually every other man around knew precisely what was happening. And they didn't tell you.
On behalf of all the nice guys out there, we're sorry about that. We're sorry that we never told you why this guy insisted he would call you and then didn't, or why that guy got furious with you that time when you caught him cheating. We could have told you, but we didn't. We're sorry. We're really, really sorry.
In our own defense, our reasons for not telling you were
… okay, they were really cowardly. It's not much of a defense, I know.
What are you saying? Why wouldn't even my nice guy friends explain this stuff for me?
The reason that you can't get a decent manslation from the vast majority of the men in your life—even the really super nice ones—is this: the men who know you are all in one or both of the following two categories:
The guys who know that tattletaling on another guy doesn't look very manly
The guys who want to sleep with you
Lucky for you, I fall into neither of those categories. Not only have I long ago given up on being considered manly, but I don't want to sleep with you. A man can't offer you a true manslation unless he is completely willing to NOT sleep with you. Otherwise, he won't be able to be honest for fear that it might jeopardize his chances of gaining access to your boobs.
How come you're not trying to sleep with us?
Look, I'm sure you'd be great at it and all. It's just that, well, first of all I'm in a relationship with pretty much the perfect woman. And even if I were stupid enough to risk that by sleeping with you, she would—how do you say?—“murder us both and make it look like an accident.”
Okay, so you don't want to sleep with us. What else you got?
I'm glad you asked.
I've been in several long-term relationships (although some of them probably just seemed really long). Most of them didn't work out, of course. Well, obviously none of them did except for the current one, which, let's face it, we still don't know for sure, right?
But that's not the point.
The point is that I have information. I've seen the other side. I've been let into the inner sanctum. Once you are with a woman for long enough, the veil comes down. She realizes that you are no longer on the “other team.” The differences between your genitals become less important. You are awarded an honorary vagina. And you wear it on your sleeve.
That's my point. I wear a vagina on my sleeve.
During one particularly long relationship, I basically ceased to be a man altogether. Unless the toilet needed to be fixed or something, I was just one of the girls. No, that's not even right. I was like a pet man on the Planet of the Women. This might sound fun (it is!), or like some soft-core porn they show on Cinemax After Dark (it's not!).
During this time, some of my female friends started to ask me to interpret male behavior. They would trust me with their side of things, because, hey, who was I going to tell? I no longer had any male friends. (I know why the caged man sings).
The more and more shocking conversations that I had with female friends, the more I knew that I had to help. Even some of my smartest friends would show such a stunning inability to understand men that I just had to do something.
So I became a manslator. Of course it was wrong. I was betraying my brothers. I only hope that the men of the world can forgive me, if anyone ever tells them that this book exists. Either that or I hope that when they are on their way to my place to beat me up, they get lost and refuse to ask for directions.
But in all fairness, the “secret language of men” needs about as much translating as a coloring book once you know what you're looking at. But my lady friends didn't.
And I do.
And now you will, too.
My Main Qualifications
Ah yes, my professional qualifications as a manslator? None, really. I have no formal training. Or formal clothing, for that matter. I have no background in math or science. (The last “science” class I took was Nutrition for Actors, and the professor was morbidly obese. Seriously.)
I have what every man has: an uncomfortable awareness of how easy men are to read and interpret.
But I've also got something that most men don't have: zillions of women who have already asked all of your questions about men. At www.manslations.com, I get letters every day from women who need answers. I've heard it all. I know what confuses you people about us. And over time, I've learned how to explain our (painfully simple) male ways in words that make sense to women. And I'm willing to tell you all about it.
I am like those scientists at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project in that (a) I'm not at all concerned about the dangerous forces I'm fooling with, and (b) if you dropped this book from an airplane, it would almost certainly hurt any person it landed on. In my later years, I expect that I, like Oppenheimer, will deeply regret the role that I played in the opening of such a Pandora's box without a moment's thought for all the poor, unsuspecting people who will never know what hit them.*
YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST TIME
Here are a couple examples of some of the very first manslations I ever… uh… administered?… to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
I had a friend who I consider to be a very smart, contemplative person. One night while waiting tables in New York City, one of her male customers struck up a conversation with her that continued throughout his meal. At one point, he mentioned that he was flying to Bermuda with a few friends in his private plane and did she want to go? You know, no biggie.
Now… I'm having a hard time even typing this part. She didn't think that this man was necessarily trying to have sex with her.
Had that story been about an eleven-year-old girl who had grown up in a cave, raised by wolves or badgers or something, you'd hear that last part and think, “Oh, that poor thing. Shame on that bad, bad man for trying to take advantage of her lack of experience like that.”
But this was an intelligent woman, an artist—a New Yorker, no less.
I asked this young woman, “So, ah, what do you think he wanted when he asked you that?” I really tried not to sound like I was asking the equivalent of, “Now, when you slammed your hand in that door, er, how did you think that might feel? Good or… less good?”
“Maybe he was just being nice!” she said. “Some people do that, you know. Every man doesn't want to sleep with every woman he meets!” And she rolled her eyes.
You know—as if I was the one being naïve.
So when this “just being nice” man showed up at her restaurant again the following week and asked her if she wanted to go back to his hotel room, she was shocked— shocked, I say!—that his trip to Bermuda had been a cover to get him laid. Of course, any man could have spotted this guy's agenda from across the street. (Hint: when a guy says something wildly impressive and passes it off like it's no big deal… well, just hang onto your pants is all I'm saying.)
Another example: A good friend came to me crying, bewildered, because her boyfriend had left town saying he loved her, and then came back a week later saying, “I just don't know if I can be a good boyfriend right now.”
Now…that guy cheated on her. That's not a guess. It's a fact. But she made the classic mistake of listening to what he said rather than paying attention to what he did. And I knew that I could help her understand what was going on. So I did.
And, of course, a month later, after they had broken up, she learned that he had cheated on her during that week away. Again—bewildering to her, but obvious to any man. In this book, you'll learn to see this kind of stuff as we guys do.
So why should I buy this book instead of the fifty others on the shelf right beside it? What's so special about this one?
Look, there are already plenty of books like
Guides to help you tell when a guy you don't know very well doesn't like you very much. (Vital to be able to do, of course. However, it's pretty simple once you read the next chapter of this book.)
Guides to help you spot total womanizing jerks. (Again, very important to be able to do. But not only is this also pretty easy to do, it only helps you locate jerks. If you meet a guy who is not a jerk, it doesn't really help you deal with him.)
Self-help books written by psychologists who can tell you all about how a man's mommy issues are ultimately going to wind up becoming your issues. (The only problem with that seems to be that no matter how informative the books are…well…the guy still has mommy issues,
right?)
Books to help you trick a man into marrying you by following rules, such as pretending you don't like him very much. (Yeah, that one still confuses me. Oh, unless you're seven years old. Then it might work.)
