But -- here is my but -- I have a pet theory about this. [My now-husband and I] were both young [when we met] (early twenties) and he was really very sweet and excited to have a nice girlfriend (he had had prior non-religious girlfriends who turned out to be Not Very Nice), so that helped.
Also, I've found, and friends have found, that as the men you are dating get older, some of this sweetness dissipates. My friends have found that older guys expect more, and faster, whether religious or no. They are also more likely to play games, e.g. texting only after a time lag of a certain length, not signalling whether or not they are dating only you or others too, etc etc. I was wondering: what do you think about this? That yes, it depends on the guy -- you'll find jerks and non-jerks distributed through the religious and non-religious population, but that also that game playing and sexual expectations seem to increase with age? Does this hold true for anyone else, or is it just my friends who've seen this pattern?
Guys playing games sounds like "Game" to me. And "Game" is the plaything of men who are so frustrated by women, they begin to see us as a kind of commodity for which they are in competition with other men. And, unfortunately, some of the psychological tricks of Game work on some women.
Occasionally I try to imagine what it is like to be a man. This isn't as hard to do as you may think as men write so many books--especially novels--about being men. Also, I had brothers and I generally mined boyfriends for stories about their lives. (Poor boyfriends.) Two themes crop up: the beastliness of bigger boys towards smaller boys--the awful violence of childhood that damps down to adult competitiveness--and the mystery and confusion of women.
When I was a child, the boys I knew were very nasty to girls, and so boys seemed to improve as I got older. Although boys in my elementary school class were fond of obscene language and sexual harassment, boys I met in high school were not at all like that. They were rather sweet, now that I think about it. My principal crush objects from that era married shortly after they graduated from university. The only real trouble I had from Men Who Expected Stuff was from someone who assumed all Western women were sexually active and from a Gamer in his late thirties who was very possibly insane.
I suspect I sidestepped a lot of garbage by avoiding non-Catholic dating sites and by usually dating only guys who were Catholics or work buddies.
The reflection on guys I knew in high school gives rise to a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that sweet men--men who believe in love--form attachments at a relatively young age, and hang on like limpets to their beloveds. Most of them get married young, too, or move in with their beloveds in such numbers that, yes, it does indeed look like "All the good ones are taken." Asses--men who believe they deserve a non-stop smorgasbrod of sex--tend not to form stable, loving attachments when they are young.
However, some of these sweet and tender limpets get scraped off by their beloveds, for not all young women are sweet and loyal (Exhibit A: the young Seraphic, whom I advise all Eavesdroppers to avoid should they ever have access to time machine), which makes them available again. And either they are still sweet, or their broken hearts make them bitter.
If bitter, they are encouraged in their bitterness by the Asses. And the Asses make misogynist jokes which shock but also amuse the Mr Broken Hearts, and if the Mr Broken Hearts admire the Asses, they try to be more like them. And they can do this quite easily if they start reading Pick Up Artist blogs or even shelling out the cash to take notes in Pick Up Artist seminars.
(I've noticed that PUA is never about finding ONE gorgeous woman who will MARRY you and HAVE YOUR CHILDREN and MAKE YOUR HOUSE LOOK NICE and STAND BY YOU when your HAIR FALLS OUT.)
The thing is, though, that there are men who carry on like Asses in their teens or twenties and suddenly, or not so suddenly, feel ashamed of themselves and want to be better men. In short, they grow up and get married--possibly to the women who inspired such grown-up thoughts--and have heart attacks fourteen years later when their little girls appear at the dinner table dressed in stripper wear for their first high school dances.
And those are my thoughts. In short: most sweet men settle down young, some sweet men become available latter, some asses have conversion experiences, and some rejected sweet men fester and join the remaining asses.
My own solution to the problem, were I a merry widow, would be to look for such delightful, unbrokenhearted, unattached and still-sweet young men in their twenties who admire ladies in their forties, and with that I shall now go look up what the PUAs have to say about COUGARS.
Update: Since we are talking about men's experiences, it's okay for Eavesdroppers to leave comments today. However, it's not Gentleman's Day, so I am removing my strict protection and code of conduct. Y'all can fight. No bad words, though.
Update 2: Game for women? Okay, this post is rather, um, frank and, um, coarse. But it has some good points, mostly gleaned from Why Men Love *itches. Incidentally, why do some women think it makes them sound more authoritative to use coarse language? My gym teacher never did, and when she said, "Jump", we darn well jumped.
Update 3: I have been reading another blogpost , which boils WMLB down (up?) to 100 points, and gave up at 37 because the points made me sad. The war between the sexes is, for me, primary evidences for the lingering effects of Original Sin. How nice if we just let our yes be yes, and our no be no, and nobody ever needed to tell anyone not to be a booty call.
Update 4: Once I got an email from a Catholic guy who said that Game really helped him, even though he understood that PUA culture was really disgusting. And so my loathing of Game wavered a bit. But today I saw this:
- Several Heads Are Better Than One – like wolves hunting in packs, this chapter teaches you how to get your friends to "wingman" for you. With these teamwork techniques, the ladies won't stand a chance and you and your friends will be enjoying the results one night after another after another after another!
