Let me use my own experience as an example. Mauricio and I first met at a nightclub in Beverly Hills called Bar One. We talked a lot that night and hit it off immediately, and he asked for my number.
But then he didn’t call me for a whole week! He had actually gone to Mexico, but I didn’t know that. So when he finally called me to ask me out, I had to make him wait a little. I had to say, “Oh, no, sorry. I can’t do anything until … let’s see, not until Thursday. I’m busy.” I mean, really, how dare you wait a week to call me? No way I’m jumping and saying yes right away!
It’s good to play a little bit hard-to-get, but don’t be obvious about it. I have a friend who told me one day, all proud and triumphant, “Oh, I was so good! I told him, ‘I’m not going out with you tonight because you didn’t give me the two-day warning!’”
I said, “What? Are you an idiot? You just defeated the whole purpose—and now you might as well sleep with him and get it over with!” Don’t be afraid to provide a challenge to a guy you’re interested in, but do it intelligently and discreetly.
Now, all this may seem like game playing to you, but in my mind it is just being smart. Playing the game is part of the mating ritual—especially if you’re in your twenties or thirties. As we all know, men mature more slowly than women and they never really catch up! So young men are simply going to require a little more guidance.
* * *
Take It Up a Notch
If your man isn’t moving things along as quickly as you like, you may have to help him a little bit. But you must do it with finesse. Don’t just say, “Hey, we’ve been going out long enough now. When the hell are we going to get married?”
Right off I’m going to tell you that if the two of you aren’t even monogamous yet, then forget about it! Forget him! Move on. That’s an absolute rule. If you want more out of the relationship than just fooling around and having fun, take him off your list entirely. And I also don’t believe in living together before you’re married, or at least engaged. The old saying is true: Why buy a cow when you can get the milk for free?
Otherwise, if you want to take it to the next level, you have to be subtle. Plant seeds. Play with his nieces and nephews to show him how good you are with children. Cook dinner for his family so that he’s more likely to see you as part of it. Get to know his parents. Get his mom to like you. (I went to a sculpting class with my future mother-in-law. I didn’t care much about sculpting, but I wanted her to love me! I got more than I bargained for, though. We had nude male models, so there we were, the two of us, sculpting penises! Ha-ha!)
If the subtle approach doesn’t work, you may have to resort to scaring him a little. Start to pull away from him a bit. Pull back emotionally, and don’t be as quick to go out with him. “No, sorry, I’m just going out with my girlfriends tonight.” Make him feel there might be a risk of losing you.
If that doesn’t work, you’re going to have to make some decisions. If the relationship doesn’t move forward the way you want it to, are you willing to walk? If so, then you need to talk to him. Don’t mention the word marriage. Just say, “Look, I don’t know if this is going in a direction I’d like it to. I love you but I don’t want to be wasting my time.” And then you leave, and you stick with it. He may come running and he may not, but you stick with it.
* * *
If you’re older than that, in your forties or fifties or whatever, you don’t have to play as many games. At that point, most people are more mature and know what they want, but … you still have to play games a little bit. Because men and women are different creatures who speak different languages, and playing games helps you bridge that language barrier!
Of course, how you communicate when you’re with a guy also matters—you know, actually talking! Conversing back and forth in English. It matters a lot.
My mother used to say that a girl should always be “sparkling” around a guy, outgoing, fun, funny, and smart. Obviously, those are qualities that are going to draw anyone toward you, male or female. Most human beings gravitate toward fun, upbeat people. I think maybe in my mother’s day, though, girls and women felt obligated to be so upbeat and positive around their suitors that they almost couldn’t be themselves. Or maybe that’s just the way it seems to me, because things really have changed.
Now we tend to feel so comfortable with men, so casual, so let-it-all-hang-out, that I’m afraid we sometimes go a bit too far. Yes, you definitely want to be very good friends with the man in your life. But don’t make the mistake of relating to him as if he were one of your girlfriends!
In other words, you don’t have to tell him everything. You definitely don’t want to complain about how you feel fat today, or just hate your hair and don’t know what to do with it, or say, “Oh my God! My feet are disgusting! I am so overdue for a pedicure!”
* * *
Sparkle!
Diamonds catch your eye because they sparkle, right? That’s why you want to sparkle when you’re with your man!
» Look like a million dollars!
» Flirt with him, even if you’ve been married decades.
» Be in an upbeat, happy mood.
» Make sure he feels loved and adored.
» Be affectionate.
» Once you’re married, act like you’re on a date.
* * *
First of all, this kind of talk makes you look insecure. Second, he doesn’t want to hear those things. More important, you don’t want him to hear them. Don’t ever put yourself down in front of your man. Don’t put those images or thoughts in his head—especially because, you know what? Most of the time he won’t even notice! We might be convinced we look like Quasimodo on a bad day, but guys don’t zero in on the flaws we see. They see you as more beautiful and less flawed than you do.
One day I was wearing a Spanx under my outfit and my skirt flew up a little bit. Mauricio said, “What is that you’re wearing underneath?”
I said, “Oh, those are running shorts, I just wanted to make sure if the wind came up no one would see what they’re not supposed to see!” I wasn’t going to tell him I was wearing this newfangled kind of girdle because I needed it to suck all my chub in!
Even if you’re not putting yourself down, you still have to be aware of what you’re saying and the effect it has. Simply put, you do not want to bore a guy. Don’t tell him every gruesome detail about shopping for shoes today. And don’t provide a blow-by-blow story of what happened when one girlfriend said something to another, and then so-and-so said that, and now so-and-so’s not talking to the other one, blah, blah, blah. I actually did this the other night; I started filling Mauricio in on a whole night of shooting Real Housewives. For a while he was like, “Oh really?” and, “Oh my God, what happened then?” But after about five minutes I knew he was about to start snoring, so I said to myself, Cut!
You can only go on about the mundane details for a couple of minutes before you’ve lost them. It’s hard, girls, I know. One night my husband and I were out to dinner with some other couples and one of the wives said to me, “Oh, I love that lip gloss!”
I responded, “Oh! This is Trish McEvoy. It’s called Irresistible. Isn’t it great? Yeah, it does sparkle more than the others…” and so on and so on about the lip gloss, but then all of a sudden I thought, What am I doing? If I had to sit through ten minutes of a man talking about his cologne I would say, “I’m leaving the table now!”
So even though I really do love lip gloss and I could talk about makeup all night (and also about how they just discontinued this other one I like!), I don’t want to overdo it in front of my husband. It’s something I prefer to save for lunch alone with my girlfriends.
Otherwise, it’s like speaking Urdu to them for hours. They just don’t get what we’re talking about because it’s not in their vocabulary.
There are plenty of things to talk about that he will be interested in—because you have all sorts of interests besides him in that busy life of yours, right? You want
to make it clear that you’re intelligent and have some depth. Maybe you can discuss spiritual topics, as long as you can do so without sounding like Shirley MacLaine. Or current events. Art, literature, music, culture.
Mauricio and I, of course, spend a lot of time discussing the kids and the house and family matters, and we talk to each other about our work too. I even try to talk about sports with my husband, which is amazing because I couldn’t care less about sports! Believe me! I read the sports pages in the newspaper sometimes, and Mauricio is pleasantly surprised when I happen to know about so-and-so who got traded to the Lakers. Ha! I like to ask my husband about golf too, because he loves the game and he always goes into a whole story about it. I don’t know a birdie from a bogie from an eagle, but it makes Mauricio happy to talk about it!
I also believe it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in the world so you can have intelligent discussions about it. I had my baby when I was nineteen and I didn’t go to college. That’s something that always bothered me, so I try to educate myself by reading as much as I can. If I hear about something and I don’t know what it is, I do my research.
* * *
First Love
By the time I met my first boyfriend I had absorbed some—but not all—of the love lessons I was exposed to growing up. I was thirteen—though I lied and said I was fourteen—and the boy was C. Thomas Howell, the actor who played Ponyboy in The Outsiders. Remember that movie? Tommy was so famous at the time we were dating that it was like dating Brad Pitt! I remember being with him once at Disneyland, where girls were literally screaming and throwing themselves at him. I was so immature and jealous that I was ready to rip every hair out of their heads—but I never let him know!
We were together for a long time, about four or five years. At one point Tommy was doing a movie called Soul Man, costarring with Rae Dawn Chong. He had begun acting kind of weird, and one day he called me and said he didn’t want to be a cheater, so he had decided to be straight with me: he was curious about getting to know another girl. That was Rae Dawn Chong, who he eventually ended up marrying.
When he told me he wanted to date someone else, I was devastated. It just killed me. I was so upset that I couldn’t hide it from him. I became hysterical. I got off the phone and ran to my mom’s bedroom, and first I fainted, then I was just crying and crying. I thought I was going to die. He was my first love!
“Pull yourself together!” my mom barked at me. “You never let him know that you’re affected this way.”
Meanwhile I was hyperventilating. “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” I laugh about it now!
I finally calmed down and by the end of it, I had learned my lesson. After that, I would never allow anyone to get to me like that again—and certainly never let him see me that way if I did.
* * *
That way when it comes up again I can join in on the conversation. When you’re up on the news and aware of the world outside your own little universe, that’s when you can “sparkle.” Men understand that kind of sparkle.
Now, before we end class for today, one more thing.
What if you’re doing everything right but you’re not getting the results you want? What if you’re speaking his language, you’re exuding confidence, you’ve got your fabulous life going on, and you’re not counting the hours and minutes and seconds before he calls? You’re treating yourself with respect and insisting on the same from him, and you’re not boring him with the saga of your favorite lip gloss. You haven’t even given in to temptation and gone to bed with him, because you’re giving the two of you time to really get to know each other first. You’re playing by the rules and you’re playing smart, and yet he seems to be avoiding you. You’re feeling some resistance from him, but surely that can’t be true. You’re just being paranoid, right?
* * *
Keeping the Egos in Check
As you might imagine, egos grow amok in Beverly Hills. Oh yes.
Occasionally you might even find that someone you care about is letting her ego run wild. I’m not the kind of person who keeps things inside. If I feel something important about someone I care about, I talk to them. I’m not two-faced; if I’m going to complain to my husband about a friend’s behavior, then I have to be willing to say the same things directly to my friend.
So if a friend of mine is acting out of control, I talk to her about it with as much kindness as possible. I’ll say, “You know, I love and care about you, and that’s why I’m talking to you about this. I hope I’m not hurting you by raising this with you, but I think perhaps you’re not aware of how you’ve been acting lately and how it’s affecting others.”
No matter how nicely you say it, it doesn’t always go over well. Some people are open to seeing their flaws and will appreciate your honesty and thank you for pointing things out to them. But some people really won’t! Oh well. I hope my friends would do the same for me.
* * *
Wrong. If you’re sensing that the guy is putting distance between you, you’re probably right. Don’t try to make yourself feel better by dismissing your gut feeling. That’s the moment to begin giving him some space. Give him some time to come around. If he wants you, he will come around.
And if he doesn’t come around? Well then you don’t want him. Why would you want someone who wasn’t sure of his feelings for you? You think far too much of yourself for that.
You deserve someone who totally wants to be with you.
Sometimes it can be a struggle to come up with that kind of confidence. But remember: fake it till you make it!
Faking it till you make it is a great way to come across as the kind of self-assured, independent woman that men love to pursue. It’s called the code of the jungle; you have to trigger a man’s natural urge to chase you.
I’m a little nervous sharing my secrets like this, because I know my husband will read this book and I don’t want him to find out all my little tricks. Ha-ha! Maybe I’ll just have to black out parts of it, because I definitely want you to have access to what I’ve learned.
For example … here’s something I found out early on during my course of studies at Dating U: if you want to be conversant in the language of men, you have to realize that they are competitive by nature. They tend to want what other men want. It’s just plain human, really. It’s like the super-hot Christmas toy that kids have to have because all the other kids have to have it!
Sometimes men need to be gently reminded that you’re a hot commodity—you’re on other men’s wanted lists! It’s part of playing the game, communicating with them on a primal level that they comprehend deep down. It’s not so much that you have to make them jealous. You just have to make them realize they’re not the only lions in the jungle!
Once when I was quite young I resorted to sending myself flowers “from a secret admirer.” Roses. Red roses! It’s so ridiculous, but it worked. This trick is an oldie but a goodie!
It’s different when you’re married, though. Why would you want to make your husband jealous if you’re married? I would never do anything to try and make Mauricio believe another man was interested in me. I think once you’re in an exclusive, long-term relationship it’s very sexy to a man to know that he’s the only one you’re interested in. (Not during the dating phase, girls! After they pop the question!)
But that doesn’t mean I don’t try to look my best when I go out with Mauricio so he’s proud to have me on his arm. I try to be upbeat and have fun and be engaged with people. I might even dance extra sexy. I act like an attractive woman, and if there are men around who find me attractive and possibly even show it, well, it doesn’t hurt!
I mentioned before that when Mauricio and I started dating, we spent almost every waking minute together. So I was very surprised when he said to me one day, “I have some friends coming to town, and I’m going to have to ignore you this weekend.”
Uh, excuse me? Did you say ignore me?
Well, this is strange, I thought. Wh
y wouldn’t I be invited to come along with his friends? It didn’t make sense, and I didn’t like it.
So I called my ex-boyfriend, who was my good friend, and asked him out to dinner. And I suggested we go to The Gate, which was the hot club at the time and the one where Mauricio went almost all the time. I pretty much knew he would be there. And then I went out and bought the shortest, tightest, sexiest dress I could find. I took forever getting ready that night because I knew I had to look my absolute best. It was as important as my wedding day, as far as I was concerned. It’s what was going to get me my wedding day! Ha-ha!
So my “date” for the evening and I went to dinner then went to The Gate and walked right past the table where Mauricio was sitting with all his friends. His jaw dropped.
After a while he came over and said, “Hi, honey,” very normally. But I said, “Hello,” rather formally, then said, “Okay, well, have fun! I’ll see you later.” Like, skedaddle!
He could not stop looking over at my table. He couldn’t concentrate. He was definitely not ignoring me! And then, lo and behold, I couldn’t have scripted it better—my ex-fiancé walks into the club! He was the man I’d been seeing right before I met Mauricio. So I swung into action. I quickly jumped up and said to my date, “We have to go!” and dragged him along as I headed for the door. And I timed it perfectly so that we’d bump into my ex-fiancé right in front of Mauricio’s table!
When my ex-fiancé saw me, he got upset, because the breakup had been hard on him. “How could you have done this to me?” he said. “Look at me—I’m a disaster!”
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