2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

Chapter 44

Of course, I'm not saying you can't find gentility and sweetness on a Western male. My cousin, and my friend Mei, are happily married to Western men, who are tender and considerate. They also happen to be 50+ years old. Maybe nowadays young men just don't find it cool to be a gentleman. But I didn't want to think I should categorize, or pre-judge based on culture. Surely, I can find Western men who are tender and considerate and fit snug against the heart. Even after I went to China, I still didn't want to believe it.

And then there was Jeremiah.

How many more men do I have try to love and continue to fail?

In the western culture, and I'm not strictly speaking about Caucasian men, I'm talking about men who grew up or have been heavily socialized in North America, (forgive me for the generalizations, it's impossible to talk about culture without generalizations), while I felt a lot of pressure for immediate physical intimacy, achieving emotional intimacy with Western men is about as easy as flying to Mars. A most formidable distance.  Even though there's a lot to enjoy in their company, with their towering physique, their sharp wit, their ambling confidence , their openness, their humor, and in some cases very tight six-packs, but as one Chinese woman put it, "Western men are easy to like, but hard to love."

To understand why you have to first understand the modern dating culture in the west. A pick-up artist called Kane wrote, "In the west, women value more masculine traits, which means not being needy in behavior or conversation. Which can be done by acting aloof and saying cocky things." As soon as I saw those two words: "cocky" and "aloof", it was as if a lightbulb went on in my head. This hard-to-put-your-finger-on kind of feeling I've had for so long, is so precisely captured in those two words: cocky and aloof. Hence the limited texts, the limited phone calls, and the general sense of distance I've felt with the various men. I thought about them a lot, and longed for something hearty and substantial, but being with them felt like running on caffeine on an empty stomach, I couldn't shake this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

A technique to demonstrate your cockiness could be achieved in the form of a "neg" – a negative hit. Anyone who's read The Game would be familiar with this term. Negs originated in the pubs and nightclubs of L.A., where the most glamorous and beautiful women gather for planet Hollywood. Because these women, models and actresses, are so used to being complimented all the time, a negative hit, a tease, a subtle rude remark, hooks their attention. A neg could be blowing your nose at dinner, and then handing your date the dirty tissue. Or telling a girl who's an 8 that she's a 6.

The girl who doesn't realize she's being negged, spends her afternoon chasing around the guy who called her a six, demanding in near hysteria, "Why am I a six?" And the nice guys watching from the sidelines are scratching their heads going, 'How come the douchebag always gets the girl? It's so friggin' unfair!' What they don't see is, the drama they're witnessing is pretty much as good as it gets. He may have gotten her attention like a cartoon circus performer, he's not going to win her heart.

If I may make a side commentary here, negs, when done well, can be a friendly tease. But when done poorly, as it often is, can be very insulting. Not to mention hurtful, especially to girls who've just come out of breakups and happen to be re-entering the dating scene with shattered self-confidence. (Dating tip: ladies, next time a guy subtly insults your intelligence, body shape, appearance, or even the your pinky finger, just know you've been negged. Go ahead and call him out on it, or better yet, walk away, and find someone more nourishing to chat with. Please don't go home and dwell on it for the rest of time. Treat negs like Mission Impossible messages, let them self-destruct in 5 seconds.)

It wasn't until now that I understood why I was called conceited one minute and then complimented the next. At the time I was so shocked. How am I conceited? Who, Me? What did I do? But now as I look back, all I can do is laugh – what a waste of brain space trying to figure that out. My time would be better spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary. For pleasure.