Girl Advice From a Girl

Chapter 3

Funny enough, the trauma of first crush rejection doesn't mean we stop having crushes - that would mean that we'd stop looking for our life partners. We just get more cautious about how we deal with our feelings. By now, a lot of us reach this misguided conclusion that the direct approach will get us nowhere. We start to develop new approaches that are mostly spin-offs of stuff we see in magazine articles, on television and in romantic comedies, and that only work every once in a purple polka-dotted moon. Both males and females try to figure out just the right things to do and say to reach their objectives, and to avoid rejection. Piece by piece, we each unconsciously create a 'manual' on what makes someone tick, and what their every response means.

Naturally most of it - if not all of it - tends to be guesswork and horrible generalisations. We make the mistake of thinking that every response is universal, that every reaction is the same across the board. We somehow lose the ability to consider one another's individuality - a concept which dictates that everybody has a different combination of characteristics, and everybody will invariably have a different reaction to any one thing. Yet, we compile these generalisations and allow them to influence how we approach one another. Males have their code, females have their code, and neither is quite familiar with the other. There is no logical way to explain why a female would think a male likes her based on how much he speaks to her when he is around his friends, or why a male would think a girl likes him solely because she goes to every one of his football games. That emotional, newly-developing part of us latches tightly to these gestures and exaggerates them. And the reason for it could not be any simpler - we want them to have the same inkling of a feeling for us, as we have for them. We see the potential in them, and so that part fabricates these signals in our heads to satisfy the need we have for our feelings to be reciprocated...and it does this for every possible candidate.

We tend to prefer subtlety and hint-dropping to the direct approach, too. This is done in an effort to get to see if someone likes you, as much as to steer clear of a brutal rejection. Thus flirting and pick-up lines and tell-tale facial expressions are born. Hilariously and ironically though, it's usually pretty difficult to tell if one person likes another unless he/she does any of the above in an extremely obvious way, or just states it outright. The sad part is that those two actions are things not many people are very comfortable with. It's like people expect you to have the same abstruse approach that they've somehow gotten accustomed to. They somehow prefer to attempt to decipher every word than to accept honesty, and so they say that those extreme flirters and those honest types "come on too strong." (Although, I won't tell you that this applies to all of them).

So a dear friend of mine asked me why it's so bloody difficult (verbatim) for some people to approach someone they're interested in, and so easy for the rest. Is it a question of confidence or self-esteem? Is it like a skill - you either have it or you don't? Does it depend on past successes or failures in the love and relationship department? Is it a question of good looks? Maybe it's a little bit of all of them. Maybe some people just have a higher threshold for rejection - kinda like how some people can handle more pain than others. Maybe looking a certain way can make it easier (...or more difficult). Maybe it requires a finesse that is either built into you, or isn't. Maybe some people are just hella good at faking it 'til they make it. There really is no one way to answer that question; except maybe "to each one's own."

But aren't there any exceptions? How can we attempt to explain the existence of guys who seem to know exactly what girls "want" to hear, or exactly what girls "want" them to do? How can we attempt to explain the existence of females who "understand" the innate simplicity that exists and often prevails within the male mind? Well for starters, we could blame every romantic comedy and novel ever made, or every fairy tale ever told that has given us these extravagant ideas of what love should be like, and what people in love do. They have subconsciously rooted in girls' minds that they must be swept off of their feet by a Prince Charming type with some ostentatious gesture. Delusions of grandeur. These concepts are easy for a guy to get a hold of, because pretty much all he has to do is read or watch the right stuff. Females unknowingly create a "How to Land a Girl for Dummies" guide and it becomes as simple as internalising and actualising for a guy. It definitely doesn't work the same way in the opposite direction though. Very often, for a girl to know even the most basic thing about guys - that most are straightforward and simple-minded - she probably has to be exposed to males from birth. The common conduits for this kind of exposure are healthy father-daughter relationships, a tendency to often be around a lot of male family members and things of the sort. Girls who have this sort of exposure are wired a little differently than girls who don't. Tomboys become the close equivalent of a gender-based double agent - they have insider information from both sides of the fence.

We believe these people have an unfair advantage, and I guess I can see why it would seem that way; but in their defence, they are simply taking advantage of the information channels made available to them by everyone else. It would be the equivalent of watching a documentary about shark attacks to avoid becoming fish food for example, which is completely warranted. Therefore, and quite coincidently I might add, it becomes yet another means of protection. In the same way as subtlety and indirectness means that you can always brush off a rejection by saying you were just being nice or friendly, using "insider" information provides a way in which to approach one another the "right" way, to avoid being shut down before you get a fair shot. I will not say that we always play fair. Let's be real - of course we don't. There will be those that use this information for good, as well as those who use it for evil. That's the way the world works. There will always be "John Tuckers" in this world, and there will always be girls who feign being tomboys just to get their guy - although it's worth noting that I don't see the latter as much as I see the former. Does it then mean that guys feel a stronger need to 'protect' themselves from females? (Right about now, there is a general chorus of 'hell yes' from the world's male populace).

I saw this quote somewhere that said we spend our entire childhoods learning how to suppress our feelings, then the entirety of our adulthood relearning how to express them. We are never ready to have our feelings hurt and so we keep them to ourselves, then find it exceedingly difficult to feel them fully and freely ever again. Guys especially are taught to "be a man," man up, grow a pair and all the other charming euphemisms for concealing what they truly feel; and women are probably to blame just as much as society. Society has perpetuated this view that a man must be able to bear immense pressure and not crack, to grin and bear it and fight through the pain. He must be the rock, the one that everyone can depend on and look to when the going gets tough. Women have come to ask for these macho man types, and then when they get exactly what they ask for, they want these same men who have spent their entire lives essentially forgetting sensitivity to emote and talk about how they feel. Truth be told, and though it may seem laughable, they probably feel confused as hell.

What the heck are we really asking from them? It's either hard and emotionless or soft and sensitive, because that's how we've paired them. Men are soft because they feel something, and yet it's inexcusable when they don't. Maybe we need to get it out of our minds that we need the macho men. Maybe we need to peel away the stupid gender barriers and cut the gender role bullshit for a second. At the foundation, we are all human beings, aren't we? I mean, is it really fair to ask one set of human beings to give up emotion of all things? Emotion? The intrinsically and irrefutably human trait? Come on.

Ladies, from the get-go we get to be the ones that "let it out" and scream and yell and cry - whatever we have to do. We almost never have to walk a mile in their shoes. Our emotions run riot, and theirs get bottled up somewhere between their chests and that fascinating new developing part. And because of the varying emotional approaches, yet another gender barrier arises, subtle though it may be. Now we come to have - in the simplest words - a "girl" part and a "boy" part; and if there was trouble before, now it's probably like pandemonium.