Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  So how must men feel when it’s a true encounter and everything in the game seems stacked against them? They make the move, or the women bluff them—without tipping their hands—into making the move. The guys step out (stupidly, it now seems to me) into the space between, saying something irreversible and frank—a compliment or an outright indication of interest—and most of the time the women step away, or laugh disdainfully, and the guys are left with their asses in the wind. That’s the sport, and men are the suckers. Women guard the gate and men storm it. Natural selection is brutal, and women do, in the immortal words of Jim Morrison, seem wicked when you’re unwanted.

  “How do you handle all this fucking rejection?” I asked Curtis when we sat back down for a postmortem.

  “Let me tell you a story,” he said. “When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn’t particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn’t figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. ‘How do you get so many girls to go out with you?’ He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: ‘I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it’s that ten percent.’”

  That made us both cackle and pound the table.

  “That’s the thing about being a guy,” Curtis finished. “Rejection is part of the game. It’s expected.”

  Not only was dating one of the hardest of Ned’s experiences, it was also the most fraught with deception. I was deceiving people on a lot of levels and the responsible part of me didn’t particularly feel good about it. But I also felt the glee of pulling off a performance in the real world, which meant that I was lying and I was enjoying the lie at someone else’s expense. I was deeply involved in a way that might get me and other people hurt.

  But how hurt were any of us going to get? What, I asked myself, are one or two dates in the grand scheme of things? I decided I would out myself to anyone with whom I had more than a passing, unsuccessful, date or two—which happened with three women. With everyone else, I would just be deceitful, but brief.

  To most of the women I dated, even a date or two meant a lot, especially women who had been out roaming the singles scene for years in their midthirties, trying to find a mate amid the serial daters. Almost inevitably, they were carrying the baggage of previous hurts at the hands of men, which in many cases had prejudiced them unfairly against the male sex. For them, as for so many of us, romantic hurt equaled romantic blame, and because they were exclusive heterosexuals, romantic blame was assigned more often to the sex, not the morals, of the person inflicting the pain.

  Bisexuals know that hurt gets inflicted by both sexes in equal measure if not always by the same means. But for these women—who had never dated other women, and thus never been romantically hurt by them—men as a subspecies, not the particular men with whom they had been involved, were to blame for the wreck of a relationship and the psychic damage it had done to them.

  It’s hardly surprising, then, that in this atmosphere, as a single man dating women, I often felt attacked, judged, on the defensive. Whereas with the men I met and befriended as Ned there was a presumption of innocence—that is, you’re a good guy until you prove otherwise—with women there was quite often a presumption of guilt: you’re a cad like every other guy until you prove otherwise.

  “Pass my test and then we’ll see if you’re worthy of me” was the implicit message coming across the table at me. And this from women who had demonstrably little to offer. “Be lighthearted,” they said, though buoyant as lead zeppelins themselves. “Be kind,” they insisted in the harshest of tones. “Don’t be like the others,” they implied, while having virtually condemned me as such beforehand.

  The bitterest women I met were usually in their midthirties or older. They’d been through the mill a bit and they’d probably had more than their share of hellish dates or hit-and-run relationships before I came along. To hear them tell it, the pool of eligible, mature, stable, reciprocating, emotionally evolved men out there was small and polluted, and having to wade through it when what you wanted most in life was to settle down and start a family would be enough to shorten anyone’s fuse.

  Then again, many of the women I met weren’t emotional giants either, nor were they particularly well adjusted or stable. They just considered themselves to be such. And even the ones who knew they were damaged seemed to feel entitled to expect stolidity from a man, as if, in the time-honored way of things, a man is supposed to be strong, to hold things together for his woman, to hold her up when she can’t do it herself.

  Ironically, one of the women who was the least well adjusted, and the least graceful at dating, turned out to be one of the most important of my relationships.

  I arrived on time at my local Starbucks. I had met Sasha, as I met most of my dates, through a personals Web site on the Internet. We’d exchanged photographs and a number of e-mails. After a week or so of back and forth we’d decided to get together for coffee, a brief encounter that would presumably allow either or both of us to bolt if we felt the need. Or so I thought.

  When I approached her table, Sasha was already a good way through a pile of photographs she’d obviously just picked up from the pharmacy across the street. I expected her to pocket them the minute I appeared, but instead she began showing them to me. They were of a coworker’s wedding—not a friend’s or a family member’s wedding, mind you—but a coworker’s wedding. She leafed through several rolls, pointing out her office acquaintances in their morning coats and off-the-shoulder dresses, all drunkenly propped against each other, hamming for the camera.

  This, I thought, was a hostile act. Everyone knows that photographic displays are one of the most boring parts of getting to know anyone, which is why people save them for later, when you actually know some of the people pictured, or care enough about the other person to endure the torture.

  I found out later that this particular woman’s train-wreck experiences with the opposite sex had taught her to believe that, to men, women were just, as she put it, “meat with a pulse.” In retrospect I wonder if this Photomat ritual wasn’t an elaborate test, maybe her twisted way of letting me know that if I was just there to get in her knickers, I’d have to do my term in her holding cell before I’d get anywhere. Perhaps she had found this to be an effective way of weeding out the louts, but it made me want to bolt.

  It was only the beginning. After we’d finished with the photos, she launched into a two-hour description of her pending divorce and the circumstances that had precipitated it, one of which was an as yet unconsummated affaire de coeur she was still having with a married man. She was torn up, an obsessive caught in her own pain loop. I felt sorry for her, but then her situation wasn’t any worse than a lot of people’s. Besides, I felt mighty resentful about having been dragooned into a therapy session on a first date.

  Toward the end I decided that this woman was either the most conversationally inconsiderate person I’d ever met or the most socially impervious. Whatever the case, she was taking advantage of my good manners.

  I was going to get a little of my own back before the poor slack-faced coffee minions—who were by now not so subtly hinting at last call by slamming cupboards and rustling trash bags—were forced to hustle us out the door for closing.

  I was mean.

  “Do you live entirely inside your head,” I said finally, “or are you aware that there are other people in the world?”

  She thought about this for a second without the slightest hint of having taken any offense, then answered, “Yes, I guess I do kind of live in my head.”

  “Why are you here?” I followed.

  To this she saw me and raised me one, which I had to admire. “Because it’s better than staring at the walls in my bedroom.”

  This I could understand and pity. I had been there.

&nb
sp; “Are you disappointed by your life?”

  Again she paused, computed this, then said, “No.”

  I don’t remember much of the rest of it. There wasn’t much. We got kicked out of the Starbucks and that was basically that. But her frank answers to my questions had made me realize that I could ask this person almost anything, and that alone was interesting. She was quite happy to converse on whatever level if it kept her engaged and kept her from stewing alone. I could learn what her impressions of Ned had been, how he’d compared with other men she’d dated, what else she was expecting from a man, and whether cheap therapy was all she was wanting from a second date with Ned, or whether Ned had scored points for being sensitive, a good listener.

  “I told you all of this because I wanted to be honest with you from the beginning about where I am,” she said.

  Clearly she wasn’t ready to start dating again. She wasn’t looking for a relationship. She was looking for distraction and an ear to tell her troubles to. She didn’t have enough emotional energy left to get seriously involved with Ned, which I saw as a buffer zone between us, making it possible to get to know her, as a man, without causing too much romantic hardship, if any.

  I was especially interested in her because she had been involved with a married man and been hurt by the experience. This is a wounded woman’s cliché if ever there was one, and she followed the pattern to the last detail. She had chosen to get involved with someone who was unavailable, yet she blamed him for refusing to leave his wife. He was the cad, the coward. She was the long-suffering party, the helpmeet waiting in the wings, the used one who deserved better. Her predicament was of her own making and entirely predictable, yet she used it to bolster her distrust of the opposite sex, and as with many of the other women I dated, Ned took that accumulated load on his shoulders from the start. He was just the next man who would hurt her.

  How could it be otherwise? When a woman approaches a man armed to the teeth with ulterior wounds for which men as a species are presumptively to blame, the man in question has little choice but to fight back, and when everything he says and does is measured against the front-loaded politics of sex, he can’t help but shrivel or putrefy under the scrutiny. Sadly, this alienation dynamic, while temporarily unpleasant for me (the man in these cases), worked in the long run far more to the detriment of such women, who were not only desperately unhappy, but doing everything to ensure that they would remain so. Their refusal to see men as individuals, and more importantly to see their initial encounters with them as tabulae rasae, doomed them from the start.

  I would see more of Sasha—wounds, armor, honesty and all.

  Meanwhile I went on a lot of dates. I heard a lot of clichés. But I also saw a lot of women who didn’t conform to patterns in the least. One middle-aged woman with whom Ned struck up a conversation in a bar summarized one cliché in three words: “Women are enraged.” The reason? According to her, a complete and utter emotional disconnect between the sexes—women wanting and desperately needing more emotional communication and attention, and men being utterly baffled by this need and unable to meet it. It sounded as if she’d been reading Deborah Tannen, who wrote in You Just Don’t Understand: “Many men honestly do not know what women want and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.”

  Yet the opposite is equally true, though less often discussed publicly. A lot of the women I met didn’t know, didn’t understand or didn’t appear to care what a lot of the men in their lives wanted, either.

  Perhaps women have been guilty of hubris in this regard. We think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don’t on all counts. But as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely untrue and absurd. Of course men have a whole range of emotions, just as women do—it’s just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women’s eyes and ears. Tannen was right enough on that point. Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn’t there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.

  Ditto for the stereotype about men monopolizing conversations. Like Sasha, many of my dates—even the more passive ones—did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and coworkers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember, yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy. I sat there stunned by the social ineptitude of people to whom it never seemed to occur that no one, much less a first date, would have any interest in enduring this ordeal. This was a human, not a male or female, failing.

  When I wasn’t listening to these long laments, I was asking these women questions about themselves, mostly to fill the silences, because they rarely asked me questions about myself or, for that matter, made much of an effort to engage in a genuine conversation quid pro quo. Perhaps the art is lost to both sexes.

  Weren’t people supposed to be on their best behavior on first dates? Weren’t they supposed to at least pretend an interest in the other person out of politeness if nothing else? Certainly, that’s what I was doing, making polite conversation. So much so that I never expected to hear from these people again. I was boring myself. That’s the worst part of a bad date. It makes you feel like a toad, and you keep telling yourself, “I know I’m more fun than this, and I know that when I came into this café I wasn’t in despair about the human condition.”

  Maybe they were just bumbling through as best they could, knowing that they’d never contact me again. But to my surprise, many of them did contact me again—enthusiastically.

  To my mind my first dates were often so bad that second dates were unthinkable, even in the name of research, except in rare cases where I thought I could learn something useful from posing a series of what, under normal circumstances, would have been considered rude questions, but when aimed at the liminally autistic proved just the ticket to a vaguely interesting conversation.

  If the most disgruntled women I met and dated as Ned had ever been attuned to men’s signals, by the time I met them, they were long past receiving outside information of any kind. Moreover, if the way they discussed their pasts and the way they approached me was anything to go by, they seemed incapable of seeing any new man as an individual. Worse still, they seemed to transform each new man, benign or otherwise, into the malignancy they were expecting him to be. They tended to see a wolf in every man they met, and so they made every man they met into a wolf—even when that man was a woman.

  Not surprising really. The women who were hostile to me made me mad, and that made me want to be hostile to them. I can’t imagine men in the same position not reacting the same way. And so the self-perpetuating cycle of unkindness and discontent would go on and on, feeding on itself. These women were mostly hostile in the first place because they felt that men’s bad behavior had made them so, and the men they met behaved badly because hostility breeds contempt.

  It wasn’t a good recipe for finding a lasting relationship, but I could remember feeling exactly the way it seemed these women did when I was a young woman in and just out of college. I found plenty of ammunition for hating men in Women’s Studies 101, much of it, like the subjugation and abuse of women historically (and even currently), undeniable. What’s more, I found plenty of reinforcement for my fledgling misandry in the crass undergraduates I encountered everywhere on campus. I’d read the textbooks of radical feminism, and following their lead, I thought all males were tainted by the patriarchy. For years thereafter, every guy I met was on probation.

  But there’s nothing like
a few years in the trenches of lesbian romance to give a girl a little perspective on the supposed inborn evils of the opposite sex. As time went on I learned that girls don’t behave any better than boys under relational duress, and that centuries of subjugation haven’t made women morally superior.

  Sasha and I struck up an e-mail relationship after our first lousy date. Indeed, e-mail is now central to dating. I made contact with almost all the women I dated via the Internet, and we usually exchanged a number of e-mails before we met. Often the process of measuring me against previous hurts began then, as did the expectation that I prove myself to be better than the rest.

  Correspondence was mandatory in most cases, even with the women I met at speed-dating events and followed up with later by e-mail. (Speed dating, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice, is a process by which singles can meet and have minidates with ten or more members of the opposite sex in the space of an hour. One group, usually the women, sits at tables. The men then rotate from one table to the next, spending a timed five minutes with each woman. Everyone is given a sheet of paper on which they mark a yes or a no next to the name of each person they meet, indicating whether or not they have any interest in seeing that person again. The organizers then match the yeses and provide e-mail addresses to the interested parties.)

  These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren’t going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren’t going to waste a meal or even a cup of coffee on a suitor who couldn’t be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. The seductive effect of a well-written letter or, better yet, a well-chosen poem, on a strange woman’s mind was often strong and sometimes hilariously so, even to the women involved, who were quite aware and ready to laugh about the effect distracting missives could have on them. One date told me, long after she’d dated Ned and learned his secret, that a coworker, reading one of Ned’s e-mails over her shoulder, had said: “Shit. He’s sending you poems? You’d better fuck this man.”