Romance for Real Women

I have sometimes criticized relationship gurus and no doubt I’ll have other criticisms as new so-called experts pop up with boneheaded advice for gullible young men and women. But real women know good advice when they see it and the advice quoted by Maureen Dowd in Sunday’s New York Times is the best I’ve ever seen.

Prompted by news articles about Christie Brickley’s notorious divorce from Peter Cook, Maureen Dowd found a 79-year-old Catholic priest, a Father Pat Connor, who gives marvelously refreshing, common sense advice on what to look for in a husband.

I won’t quote the entire column. You can look it up easily. But I do want to emphasize one important point.

Father Connor suggests you never marry a man with no friends. That this indicates intimacy problems.

I’d go a lot further.

Talk to your friends when you’re contemplating marriage or a relationship. Then really listen. Their advice is even more important than any you may get from your parents or siblings.

Friends, unless you’re running with a totally evil group, don’t have agendas. They actually want you to be happy and want you to be happy on your own terms.

Parents, however, well meaning, can’t always see beyond their own perceptions of what’s good for you. For example, you’re a doctor. He’s a carpenter. They see the socio/economic difference without understanding the stability issue is more important to you than the economic one. Your friends will get it.

Another piece of advice. Think long and hard before you ally yourself with someone from another, vastly different culture than your own. I did not say skin color here, please note. I said culture.

The female relatives of the gorgeous Muslim man you met in college wear burkas. But he’s Americanized, you say, he doesn’t believe in burkas, the headdress worn by Muslim women.

Sorry, my child, it’s not going to work. The world is growing closer together all the time, but not that close. You’ll be in for a world of hurt.

So, listen to your friends and carefully consider his background. Throw in Father Connor’s advice about intimacy, money management, humor, ability to disagree and more and you have an excellent starting point for evaluating your relationship.

If I do say so myself.

If you’re a man, getting a date can be hard. If you read some of the relationship gurus who are popping up by the dozens on the web, getting a date can be harder than say, storming the beaches at Normandy or getting the kids to sleep at bedtime. But, if it wasn’t hard, then relationship gurus would have nothing to sell.

Real women know men need to be careful what they buy. A case in point is a fellow who runs a website called “Alpha Unleashed, the official new alpha resource for success in life and in love.”
Michael “Bishop” Emery, who owns the blog, recently posted an entry asserting that women “test” men before giving out a phone number or accepting a date.

This is true. Real women certainly don’t give their telephone numbers to anyone who asks. We look a guy over. There are obvious factual issues to consider. Is he married? We look for the “tell,” say, the tan line on his ring finger. Divorced? How many times? Does he seem to care about his children? (This would be indicated by knowing their gender, their ages, even where they go to school.) Does he support himself? What kind of work does he do?

Then there is instinct. Can he put together a simple sentence? Can he look you in the eye? If you’re in a public place, is he caging money from his buddies? Does he need a bath? Do they all? Women note these things instinctively and insofar as you might want to suggest these are “tests,” you’d be right.

But women don’t run the kind of tests Emery suggests. He’d want his followers to believe that women formulate specific questions for men and then want men to ignore them. By ignoring them, Emery says, men assert their power, power women find irresistible. This is the insight he’s selling.

Here is a direct excerpt from his Thursday, May 29 blog entitled “How Women Test Men – How to Pass”

So, the next time you’re standing in front of a beautiful women who you’ve just asked for her number and she says, “why don’t you just give me your number and I’ll call YOU…” try CHUCKLING out loud and saying:

Then hand her a pen, point to the paper, and look her in the eye expectantly.

Once I got over the bends, I doubled checked the column to be sure he is completely serious. I then had an insight of my own. I realized that this isn’t just half-way funny bad advice. It is, in fact, dangerously aggressive stuff.

I wonder what he’d suggest if the woman in question persisted in declining to give out her number. I hesitate to think.

If you’re confronted with the kind of situation Emery proposes, don’t stop to ask if the guy is a fan or has bought “Fire of Seduction,” the book he’s is peddling. This is not the time to chat. Run away. Quickly. Quickly.