Life Is Not a Reality Show (5 page)

When you’re trying to appeal to a man, you do
not
want to look desperate for his attention and approval. That’s a huge turn-off.

One day when I was filming, a stranger ran over to me. She said, “Can you give me some advice?” I was thinking,
Hmm, I bet she doesn’t realize we’re miked at all times!
But of course, I was happy to help if I could. “I’m thirty-nine years old,” she said, “and I’m going out with this guy. I just know that this is it. He’s the one. I love him so much—but I get so insecure!”

I cut her off and practically shouted at her. “Well don’t let him know that!”

The reasoning seems obvious to me: you’ll be more attractive to a man if he doesn’t think you’re hanging on his every word and smile and invitation. You always want a man to think you have plenty going on in your life. In fact, you always want to
have
plenty going on in your life, period! You’re not only more interesting to other people if you do, you’ll be much more interesting to yourself.

Seriously, you never want the guy to think you’re waiting around for him to call. I had lunch with one of my friends recently and she told me this guy she’d been dating wasn’t calling her back. She said, “So I left a message saying, ‘Why are you ignoring me?’”

Oh my God! “I don’t even know if I can be your friend anymore!” I said. “Are you joking?” I would cut my finger off before I would ever call somebody in that situation. Okay, so you’re feeling insecure. I get it.
Just don’t let him know!

You have to commit yourself to playing it cool when you’re dating. If your guy wants to have a night out with the boys, just say, “Great, have fun!” You may feel a little threatened—personally, I don’t love guys’ night out once you’re married, or really even girls’ night out, because I think nothing good can come from it—but don’t let on. Don’t tell him you’ll just be at home waiting for him either. Don’t say anything but “Have a good time!” Just let him think that you’re totally fine with him going out to have a good time, because you’ll probably be out having fun too.

Men are predatory animals, but that’s not really as bad as it sounds. It’s their biological nature; it just means that they like a challenge, a chase. That’s the language they speak and understand. Make it clear that you’re a prize worth fighting for. Don’t just present yourself up on a plate and tell him you’re available by room service twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week!

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.

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!”

Diamonds catch your eye because they sparkle, right? That’s why you want to sparkle when you’re with your man!

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.

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.