Ten Rules about Women

Ten Rules about Women

Fire up Google, search for “advice about women” and, well, this essay probably doesn’t come up. But it should! Welcome to a collection of my very own rules about women.

I started working on this list in a moment of panic. And not just panic, but young panic: I was in my mid-thirties and my oldest son had just turned ten years old. I remember that his double-digit numeric freaked me out a little, as my age was also double-digits, and somehow that meant we were more alike than ever before. At the time I was also struggling to become a good father and good husband — not struggling in a bad way as if I was resisting adaptation into something I didn’t want to become, but struggling in a good way, like climbing a hundred-foot knotted rope without necessarily knowing that you’re strong enough or skilled enough to do so. The marriage counselor my wife and I were seeing at the time referred to the process as “trying for grace in our interactions”. Which, if you know any young men in their thirties, basically equates to the verb “struggle”.

So to review context: I was young, and I was panicked. I was a novice in understanding women myself, but the clock was ticking until my son could actually use some advice about them: twenty just doesn’t seem as far from ten as ten does from zero. And not just “I-can-make-this-up-like-I-did-about-tooth-brushing” advice, but genuine, thoughtful guidance about something important. I tasked myself to craft something I wish I had received, an informative perspective that a know-nothing twenty-year-old could work with. For him, as well as for fewer nights of fitful sleep for myself, I came up with a list of guidelines which I playfully referred to as my “Rules About Women”. I’ve more to say about this journey after the list. But for now, enjoy…

Rule 1 — All About Food

First the rule: if your woman-of-interest (e.g., your date, your girlfriend, your spouse — basically that woman together with you that forms “a couple”) ever says to you “I’m hungry”, you should very much try to feed her. Do not wait. Do not say: “okay, let’s eat during halftime”, or suggest: “we’re almost there, let’s just keep driving”. No, no, no. Get some food into the situation with all possible haste.

Next the explanation: food is weird. Most women have a complicated relationship with food, very often because of body-image stereotypes that men often help propagate, and also because of the exhausted gender roles between the females and the hunter-gatherer males of the tribe. But food is also weird chemically: for example, almost all of the most incredible, most combative arguments I’ve ever had in my life were, much later, explained with at least one of us saying “well, see, I was low blood-sugar.” So if your woman-of-interest overcomes all of the food-weirdness issues and reaches out for support here, it is terrifically easy to underestimate the significance of the moment. Do yourself a favor and make finding the girl a sandwich your life’s most near-term mission.

Postscript: it’s been suggested that this rule could be safely extended to most basic bodily requirements: “I’m thirsty”, “I need to pee”, “I need to go dancing”, etc. But while I’ve disappointed women by not immediately addressing concerns such as these, I’ve never gotten anything thrown at me except for the food one.

Rule 2 — Ex-Girlfriends

In my experience, guys stumble around here a lot, especially while you’re in the early phases of a relationship where you’re teaching each other about the miles you’ve travelled before you ended up together. Fortunately, the rule is simple: there is nothing — not one bloody iota of a tiny little thing — that is in any way redeeming about an ex-girlfriend. Nothing.

This rule is simple but tricky, as it can occasionally require you to disagree with your woman-of-interest. If she says, for example, “Wow, Linda was a good tennis player”, you have to be careful how you respond. Coming back with: “Sorta, sure. But you’re much more fun to play with, and you’re way better at golf than she ever was”, is the right idea. Even if Linda won Wimbledon. Twice.

Eventually, if you’re lucky enough to survive those early phases, your woman-of-interest will come to trust that the women of your past are substantially in your past, and she may even afford them some specific praises that you are allowed to not refute. But as you get started: no, not at all.

Rule 3 — On Being Beautiful

My wife actually explained this to me back when we were first dating: men in a relationship need to know that we are one of three things: the smartest, the funniest, or the sexiest. Ideally all three, but we can be fabulously content for years convinced that, in your opinion, we’re just one of them. Any one of them, doesn’t matter. Women, on the other hand, need none of these things. They just need to know that to you, their man-of-interest, they are simply “The Most Beautiful”. Period.

And “beautiful” is not the same as “pretty”. Beautiful is a whole package kinda thing: the writer behind the words, the heart behind the heartbeat, the energy behind the everything. “Pretty” just means you take a good picture. So, do what you can to make sure she knows: if, for example, she asks you to — quick! — describe her in three words, you’re allowed a few seconds to produce the second and third words, but never, never the first.

Rule 4 — Flowers

Some women like being gifted flowers from their man-of-interest, it’s true. But guys are often flummoxed about how often to buy flowers as a gift. You don’t want to do it too rarely, becoming the you-only-give-me-flowers-when-apologizing guy, but you don’t want to do it too often either — flowers are nice gifts once in a while, but too often seems like your relationship has become a landscaping project. So how much is too little? Is it ever a bad idea?

Turns out, surprising your woman-of-interest with flowers is almost always a good idea. As a guideline, guys should buy flowers whenever you actually happen to notice flowers for sale. Many stores sell them now; sometimes there are whole flower sections. In my experience, I happen to notice actual flowers for sale a few times a year, which is really nice. Other times, for reasons I cannot explain, those same flowers in that same store don’t even register on my visual cortex. Go figure.

Oh, and gas station flowers don’t count. Tricky, but those aren’t the same thing as store flowers. They’re sold for people whose relationship fuel tank is as depleted as their car’s, and they’re in a “oh-shit-I-better-get-her-flowers” state. Somehow that desperate stink ends up embedded in the flower’s biology, and giving them to your woman-of-interest could initiate hours of denials and recrimination that could neutralize flower’s unbelievably helpful apology-enhancing power in your relationship forever.

In short: for the sake of your future self’s “oh-shit” moments, shop about once every ten weeks, but not at gas stations.

Rule 5 — Shoes

My wife used to argue with me about this one, but she’s not a guy who knows nothing. Rule is: force yourself to take an interest in women’s shoes.

In my experience, most guys cannot comment intelligently on women’s fancy shoes (heel height, texture, designer, style, etc). It’s actually a lot of work and really arbitrary, like learning to speak Tolkien’s elvish. But like the elves, most women take their shoes very seriously. And if you have just a few basics down, your woman-of-interest may start to genuinely rely on your opinion of her shoes (“Honey, which one of these shoes goes best with this skirt?”; “I like the open-toe with the sling-back, it’s much more playful than the flats.”). I’ve found that if you can develop the part of your brain that has to process “shoe info”, it leads to other collaborative abilities that many women-in-a-relationship find really beneficial, leading to whole new levels of trust and confidences. So it’s not just a “shoe thing”, it’s a “becoming an us-against-the-world social-partner” sort of thing.

Rule 6 — Forbidden Topic

This one is easy: guys must never invoke a woman’s “monthly visitor” in any capacity whatsoever. It’s just off-limits.

Even if your girlfriend is openly sobbing in the grocery store aisle because the Tampax package has a new floral pattern on it that reminds her of her mother (who isn’t deceased or estranged, but is shopping with her, just over in another aisle), you still may not make any comment regarding her potentially sensitive emotional state during specific periods of her ovulation cycle. Just pretend it’s an invisible thing that only women can see and understand; look right past it, an apparition you politely ignore.

Rule 7 — Sex Details

Finally, some sex advice! Guys tend to over-think this one, but if you’re ever promoted to a role of physical intimacy with your woman-of-interest, it’s surprisingly easy to get into her top-three list of Best Lovers Ever. Here goes: when your woman-of-interest requests you to do something sexually, do it. Just do it. Say for example you asked her, you know, what she might enjoy: whatever she says, do that.

No, really, that’s it. Just do that one thing, exactly as requested. Don’t try to embellish, don’t wing it, don’t touch on that one thing and then move onto something you think is far more creative and clearly more relevant. Just stick to the request until they adjust you. Think of them as having their own private combination lock: the combo that opened your locker in high-school isn’t going to help you here, and you don’t have to randomly spin every tumbler. Just let them tell you the digits; it’s in both of your interests for you to know it, after all.

Really. Thank me later.

Rule 8 — Choose Carefully

Continuing on the brief sexual theme, this one is just as important: if your woman-of-interest wants to become physically intimate, it is reasonable to first consider: should you? Here’s my guideline: in general, never sleep with anyone crazier than yourself. You are your own best guideline of how much crazy you can stand.

And I don’t mean that having sex makes all people crazy. But having sex with someone changes your relationship with them permanently, it just does. Okay, not for everyone on the planet, sure, but definitely for anyone who’s spent the time getting to number eight on this list. It’s as if we’re all walking around with a “Dolby Surround Sound” button on our relationship construct, and having sex with someone is like pushing that button. It’s never quite the same afterward, and it doesn’t necessarily make everything better.

And unfortunately, sometimes you don’t actually know how crazy someone is until after you sleep with them, and the relationship goes full Dolby. In that case, be prepared for the worst. She will show up at your parent’s house at 3AM on Christmas morning with a ladder, an air-raid siren, and a GoPro. Oh yes she will.

Rule 9 — Look Over There

Know-this: women are at least as good at visually identifying other attractive women as you are. So when you’re out being social with your woman-of-interest, it will be nearly impossible for you to check-out other attractive women without the check-outs being detected. And you don’t ever want to be so disrespectful to end up in that minefield. Easiest solution here is, of course, just don’t: don’t even try to check-out someone else while you’re out together.

Which, many readers tell me, is impossible. Okay. For those of you with some combination of remedial self-control and advanced thrill-issues, a more ambitious solution is instead to try to notice when your woman-of-interest is checking out the other woman, and then, very innocently, turning to see what got her attention. Done well, you can enjoy checking-out the other women as a team, and at the same time demonstrate yourself as being in-touch with your woman-of-interest’s interests.

Rule 10 — How To Tell

Guys are often lost in telling whether a woman finds them attractive or not. I think that’s because most guys are unskilled when it comes to adequately signaling those whom we find attractive, so we presume it’s equally complicated for women. It’s not.

Here’s my advice: if a woman is: (a) in prospective-partner-evaluation mode, and (b) pays you any out-of-the-ordinary attention at all, anything is possible. In my experience, most women have developed an ability to utterly ignore those men they find unattractive — it’s as if the matter you exist within has been simply sucked out of this universe and replaced with idle space. So if a woman pays you any unusual attention — something beyond simple courtesy or professional obligation — (e.g., comments positively on your new Facebook profile picture, bakes you cookies, visits you in the hospital, etc.) it’s yours to lose.

There’s a caveat to this rule: in my experience, women who are considering you as a possible social partner know within five minutes of meeting you whether they will ever be physically intimate with you. So if you find yourself in a social situation that could become your “how we met” story, do your best to make it a good five minutes.

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So that’s it, my list of rules. Many thanks to my female friends for their candid feedback about the balance between utility and absurdity of these various rules — especially to my wife, my very best friend. She and I eventually found that path to grace, and our younger child — my daughter — grew up into a passionate, well-informed feminist, adding new layers of complexity to my younger perspectives. But that all being said, I did have to start somewhere. So if you’re just starting out like I was then, where you perceive women as gloriously confusing creatures, I can only hope my ideas here help you appreciate them more fully and relate to them more successfully. If your perspective is, like mine now, more mature and nuanced, or if you happen to be one of those fascinating creatures yourself, please forgive my youthful clumsiness as my journey started.

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