Manslations

by Jeff Mac

  I actually make it a policy early in relationships that I will never respond to that question. And it's not nice to ask us to respond. If you want us to tell you that you look nice, grow a pair of balls and tell us, “Hey, you there, tell me I look nice. Tell me I'm beautiful.”

  I don't know what you think would happen if you did that, but I will tell you right now that if my girlfriend said things like that (and she does), I'd break my neck complying (and I do). Finally, one I can win!

  My friend's boyfriend compliments her on what she's wearing all the time.

  I'm sure he does. And that means that he knows how to play the game better than your boyfriend. I'll admit that. But what I won't admit is that your friend's boyfriend gives a crap about her clothes. It's just not one of our things, ladies. We don't get it. And we know that you get it. So we know that our opinion is so “amateur hour” that we have virtually zero chance of saying anything that makes any sense.

  Don't hope that we will ever be able to tell the difference between two pairs of shoes that are both black. We can tell that you're not barefoot, but that's about it. We just can't see those little differences that you see. Or… we just can't imagine that they are what we are supposed to care about.

  Just teach him the game. Say, “Look, when I tell you I got these shoes for only this much, just tell me how great I am and how beautiful the shoes are and how they make me look hot and that I'm a shoe genius, okay?” And in return, notice the difference when he hooks up the new High-Def TV, even if you can't see the point. It doesn't have to make any sense for it to work.

  The reciprocal blanket appreciation for stuff neither of you fully understands will work great.

  What happens if I really do just want to know if I look fat?

  Come on. You never do. You only want to know that he still thinks you do not look fat. If that's what you want, tell him, “Hey. Tell me I'm not fat, okay? Thanks.” You just have no idea how quickly he'll respond to that. And if you want an honest opinion about an outfit choice, do everyone a favor and ask one of your girlfriends.

  I want my man to be more thoughtful (flowers, cards, little reminders that he loves me). What can I do?

  Well, as you of course know by now, men don't understand such gifts from birth; we must learn. We don't want to receive them, and as a result, many men don't think to give them.

  You have to educate him about the fact that giving you these types of “meaningful” gifts, while it wouldn't do a thing for him, makes you very happy. And he's going to have to get used to it.

  Your job is to make him understand that you and he are different in this arena. More different than he thinks.

  And how are you going to do it? By hinting, right? Wrong! By telling. Come on. You're a big girl. If you want someone to know something, you tell him. If you want someone to know something without telling him, move to outer space. I hear space aliens communicate via telepathy. I saw that on the Discovery Channel.

  The good news, again, is that if you tell him what you want him to know, he will then know it. If he doesn't know what you want from him, he almost certainly won't give it to you. I know he's supposed to listen and pray and wonder and hear your dreams and touch a tuning fork to your knee to divine what you're thinking. I know. The problem is that he stinks at that. Throw him a bone here, and you'll get your cards, your flowers, your sweet nothings.

  In my life, I have had to create a sort of “meaningfulness hourglass” concept. What I mean is, I keep track of when I do something meaningful for my girlfriend. Buy her flowers, take her out for a special dinner, get her a card or something. Stuff that I wouldn't want to receive as a gift myself (because it doesn't do anything) but that I know that she will (because it means something). When enough time has gone by, I do something else nice for her, and I flip the imaginary hourglass and start the timer again.

  I do this because I want her to be happy. But I also know that I will never, never actually think of these things without consciously reminding myself to do them.

  Now, if this makes me the world's most wonderful man, hey, so be it. It is my cross to bear.

  So how are you going to drop hints so that your man knows you want this stuff? Hmm. Not easy. I only learned it in response to some serious crying. My girlfriend had just had a horrible week, and, man that I am, I didn't think to get her flowers or anything. And she kind of flipped out a little. Can't recommend that route—it wasn't fun for me, and it sure didn't look very fun for her either.

  You know what you can do here? It's sort of trickery, but it will work. You have to find an example to show him. Could be on TV, could be an ex of yours or a friend's boyfriend. You need to find an example of this “moron who didn't know how to treat a woman.” You know, this total fool didn't even know that women like to get little notes, cards, flowers from time to time for no reason! I mean, how does a guy not know that?

  Very likely, he'll say, “Pff! Yeah! What a jerk!” but he'll be thinking, “Holy crap. I gotta not be that moron.” It's not even all that underhanded—you're just telling him a little parable about what happens to jackasses who don't know how to be thoughtful. Who doesn't love a good parable, I ask you?

  This guy dumped me a year ago, but he keeps contacting me every couple of months “just to see what's up.” It's not like we're still friends, so what is this??!

  The Resurfacing Dude is a guy who gets a little lonely and feels like talking to any woman who might still like him. He's not interested in you. He's not interested in a relationship. Probably not even in sex (though I'm sure he'd consider it, if offered). All this guy likely wants is to believe that someone out there still thinks he's a cool guy. He's afraid he doesn't exist at the moment, and he's checking in with you to find out for sure.

  If you want to stop receiving such calls, blow him off mercilessly. Don't give him what he's after, i.e., affirmation. Don't let yourself get angry with him though. He might interpret that as you not being over him, and that will still give him what he's after. Don't take his call; forget to call him back; and if you actually do talk to him, sound vaguely uninterested and maybe a little confused as to why he's calling.

  He's harmless, so there's no real need to smack him down too hard. But if it's annoying to you, that should do the trick. I know it's a little passive-aggressive, but it's also effective and relatively kind.

  He's totally committed to me—we live together—but he says he's “anti-marriage.” And I want to get married.

  I've gotten this one a few times on the website. And also it sounds… cough… vaguely familiar to me, personally… for some reason. Ahem.

  Okay, we've already talked about how a wedding ceremony might not mean the same thing to him as it does for you. It's just how it is. Now, that doesn't mean men don't want to be married. We just don't really care about the getting married part. Not as much as, say, getting a sixty-inch LCD television. Now that's awesomeness, okay?

  All right, not helping. So here's what I'd say about how to get your guy on board with the wedding so you can get what you want, and he doesn't have to feel weird and uncomfortable the whole time.

  Ask for it as a gift from him to you. Given that he wants to be married to you forever, just let the “him being psyched about the wedding ceremony itself” part slide. Let him know that you realize that the actual wedding ceremony is mostly about you. (Because, again, if every wedding I've ever attended is any guide, it will end up that way.)

  Tell him, “Look, this day is really important to me. I'm getting a sense that the ceremony isn't a big thing for you, but it really is for me. How about you make this day a gift to me? I know it's not your thing—it's all girly with all the flowers and the dresses and everything—but this is something that I want, and I'm asking for your help in making that happen, as a gift to me.”

  What this does is twofold:

  It puts it in terms that he understands. You want his help, and you are asking for something specific. That's not hard for him to do.

&nb
sp; It takes the heat off the part he doesn't understand. He might be freaked out by wedding talk because he senses that you want him to be psyched about the invitations and the centerpieces and stuff. And most men just are not and never will be. And as long as he loves you and intends to do so for the rest of your lives, is it really important that he also loves this ceremony itself, which is only going to last one day?

  If you can be okay with that, he'll be way more on board and thrilled to be let off the hook. This should smooth the way for both of you to get right on the verge of all of what you want. You'll get the wedding, and he'll get an elk that's just begging to be poked with a pointy stick. He will be able to feel like he's being all help-ish and doing something that he can actually do.

  You could also promise him a sixty-inch LCD TV. I don't believe in bribery in relationships, but… I mean, I'm sure he'd take it.

  I was with this guy and it was going perfect. He was so sweet and thoughtful and crazy romantic, and then poof, he was gone. Nothing went wrong that I could see. Wha happa??

  Ah, the man who goes poof. You found yourself a Romantic there, didn't you? Remember him? The man who loves the rush of falling in love. And more importantly, he loves the rush of you falling in love with him. But once things started to settle in, once you started to get used to him being around, his work was done. He was in it for the rush, not for you specifically.

  The sad part is that many of these men are as baffled by it as you are. They don't want to be like this. And one day they might figure it all out and change. But not today. Let this one go. It's not that you had him for a while, and then he was gone. He was never really there to begin with. The clock was running down from the moment you met. The best thing you can do with a Romantic (or with anything, really) is enjoy the ride while it lasts and don't go too nuts about it later.

  I'm with a guy, but he won't be exclusive with me or call me his girlfriend. How can I get him to realize that we're already in a relationship?

  I've gotten several versions of this one on the website. The non-boyfriend. He's around on his terms, but he's not fully admitting you're together. How can you get him to just be with you? You can't. And what's more, you don't want to be with some idiot you have to “convince” to stick around. You want to be with someone who wants that all by himself, desperately.

  How about this—do you want to be with a guy who didn't want to be with you until you somehow talked him into it? No, of course you don't. Who needs that crapola?

  As my lady fair once pointed out to me, some women seem to feel that their relationship with a man exists objectively, outside of them. As in, if a woman is in love with a man, she thinks that she is responding to some capital L “Love” that is out there, and he must be feeling it, too. This leads some of them to have a thought very similar to “how come he doesn't know we're in love?” If he doesn't know it, it's because “we” are not in love. You are, and he's not. Nothing either of you can do about that. And again, who would want to?

  He just will not pick up after himself, and it's gross. What do I do?

  Many men seem to have a hard time keeping their things neat and tidy. Why is this? Well, the main reason is that the following things have never happened in the history of the world:

  A supermodel saying, “Wow. Look at how clean that guy keeps his apartment. God, he is so hot…”

  A Navy SEAL saying, “We're in big trouble. Quick, find me a guy who never—repeat never—leaves his socks lying around on the floor!”

  Now, as you well know, if you try to make a man feel like a little boy as punishment for not cleaning up, he'll fight you on it. Why? Because the best-case scenario would be to do the thing right and have you think of him as a good little boy. Not awesome. My solution? Similar to the thoughtfulness parable. Give him an example of some other moron doing it wrong. Make him understand that the kind of man you like is a man who knows how to take care of himself. Not some little boy who can't pick up after himself. So unmanly, so unsexy. Like some lost little toddler.

  See what I did there? Again, don't tell him that you think of him that way. Somehow let it slip that you know some other guy who is like that, and that's what you think of that idiot. This way, he'll think, “Ah, I don't want to be like that moron. I want her to think of me as a man.”

  Stupid and silly? Sure. But you want him to pick up those socks off the floor, don't you?

  CLASS DISMISSED

  I'll tell you what. If you don't know everything that there is to know about men right now, well, I have only myself to blame.

  CHAPTER 11

  final thoughts, or is that all

  there is?

  (hint: yes)

  Not my final thoughts ever, you understand. At least I hope not. But we've definitely hit the last chapter in this book—let's all agree on that, shall we? And yet I feel that I've barely even begun to scratch the surface of how to create a better world, a world in which men and women understand one another with absolute clarity and love. A world in which someone will pay me gigantic sums of money. I mean, I'm talking the kind of bucks where you can fly first class anywhere you go, and you never have to get onto a bus ever again.

  Ah, well. It was just a dream, after all. Let's wrap this thing up so we can all get on with our lives as smarter, wiser, dare I say sexier people. What can you, the common man-misunderstander, take away from this book so that you can become a fully credentialed manslator in your own right?

  YOU ARE MORE DIFFERENT THAN

  YOU THINK YOU ARE

  Many of the really good arguments that happen between a man and a woman (and I'm talking about the truly spectacular ones that you can hear clearly from down the street) can be traced to a failure to understand just how different from one another the two of you truly are. It's not always so obvious to see this, since you're (presumably) both speaking the same language, using the same words and everything. But lurking behind those familiar-sounding words is a brain that might be absolutely nothing like yours.

  We've spent most of this book learning how you can understand what's going on with him. (At least that's what I've been doing. For all I know, you've spent our time together trying to say the entire alphabet on one burp.) Here are some tips for how you can help him understand what's going on with you. Which, let me tell you, is much more difficult.

  Be Clear

  Throw him a bone here, okay?

  I know that many women hate having to tell a man what is going on with them. And hey, you're obviously free to be as vague with him as you like. All I can tell you is that if you don't actually tell him what you are thinking, he's never going to be able to figure it out. And if you do tell him, he'll know. See how that works?

  When you are mad at him and then won't tell him why, for example, he'll just never get it. Not even if you're really snippy for hours, I promise. Remember our doggie we've talked about: When you yell at that little guy, he has no earthly idea why you are so mad at him. He just knows that he is a bad doggie. And since he is clueless as to what set you off, he's more than likely going to be a bad doggie again sometime real soon.

  You're going to have to come to terms with the fact that you are not always very clear with us, even when you think you are.

  I can hear some of you out there saying, “Well, you men aren't clear either!”

  Yes. Yes we are. But you are so complex that you think we must be, too. We really aren't. We're pretty simple for the most part. But you women—you have different sets of rules for different types of situations and try as we might, we just can't wrap our minds around it without your help. Which brings us to…

  Male Misconception: We Think You Have Rules

  See, I just misconceived it right there in the last paragraph. Men think that you have rules. You don't. You have emotions. And emotions are fluid. You might say that you like something. We mentally jot that down, thinking we know something solid.

  See, with our guy friends, we know where we stand: “Darryl doesn't like Chinese
food. I won't bother to bring that up anymore.” And then, if one day, Darryl says, “Let's go out for Chinese food,” the man goes, “Oh, okay. Sometimes he likes Chinese food, sometimes he doesn't. And he'll tell me which time is which.”

  That's the difference. That's what we don't get. When you say that you don't want Chinese food, we don't know if you are saying

  I don't like Chinese food.

  I do like it, but I am not in the mood for it.

  I love it, and I want it right now—but I am feeling fat, and I need you to play along and convince me that not only am I beautiful but that I can have Chinese food and it will not make me fatter, and you will love me either way.

  I really wish we were getting Italian food, but rather than saying that, I'll just say I don't want Chinese food and hope he figures out that means I want Italian… somehow.