Manslations (25 page)

All right, not helping. So here's what I'd say about how to get your guy on board with the wedding so you can get what you want, and he doesn't have to feel weird and uncomfortable the whole time.

Ask for it as a gift from him to you.
Given that he wants to be married to you forever, just let the “him being psyched about the wedding ceremony itself” part slide. Let him know that you realize that the actual wedding ceremony is mostly about you. (Because, again, if every wedding I've ever attended is any guide, it will end up that way.)

Tell him, “Look, this day is really important to me. I'm getting a sense that the ceremony isn't a big thing for you, but it
really is
for me. How about you make this day a gift to me? I know it's not your thing—it's all girly with all the flowers and the dresses and everything—but this is something that I want, and I'm asking for your help in making that happen, as a gift to me.”

What this does is twofold:

It puts it in terms that he understands. You want his help, and you are asking for something specific. That's not hard for him to do.


It takes the heat off the part he doesn't understand. He might be freaked out by wedding talk because he senses that you want him to be psyched about the invitations and the centerpieces and stuff. And most men just are not and never will be. And as long as he loves you and intends to do so for the rest of your lives, is it really important that he also loves this ceremony itself, which is only going to last one day?

If you can be okay with that, he'll be way more on board and thrilled to be let off the hook. This should smooth the way for both of you to get right on the verge of all of what you want. You'll get the wedding, and he'll get an elk that's just begging to be poked with a pointy stick. He will be able to feel like he's being all help-ish and doing something that he can actually do.

You could also promise him a sixty-inch LCD TV. I don't believe in bribery in relationships, but… I mean, I'm sure he'd take it.

I was with this guy and it was going perfect. He was so sweet and thoughtful and crazy romantic, and then poof, he was gone. Nothing went wrong that I could see. Wha happa??

Ah, the man who goes poof. You found yourself a Romantic there, didn't you? Remember him? The man who loves the rush of falling in love. And more importantly, he loves the rush of
you
falling in love with
him.
But once things started to settle in, once you started to get used to him being around, his work was done. He was in it for the rush, not for you specifically.

The sad part is that many of these men are as baffled by it as you are. They don't want to be like this. And one day they might figure it all out and change. But not today. Let this one go. It's not that you had him for a while, and then he was gone. He was never really there to begin with. The clock was running down from the moment you met. The best thing you can do with a Romantic (or with anything, really) is enjoy the ride while it lasts and don't go too nuts about it later.

I'm with a guy, but he won't be exclusive with me or call me his girlfriend. How can I get him to realize that we're already in a relationship?

I've gotten several versions of this one on the website. The non-boyfriend. He's around on his terms, but he's not fully admitting you're together. How can you get him to just be with you? You can't. And what's more, you don't want to be with some idiot you have to “convince” to stick around. You want to be with someone who wants that all by himself, desperately.

How about this—do you want to be with a guy who didn't want to be with you until you somehow talked him into it? No, of course you don't. Who needs that crapola?

As my lady fair once pointed out to me, some women seem to feel that their relationship with a man exists objectively, outside of them. As in, if a woman is in love with a man, she thinks that she is responding to some capital L “Love” that is
out there,
and he must be feeling it, too. This leads some of them to have a thought very similar to “how come he doesn't know we're in love?” If he doesn't know it, it's because “we” are not in love. You are, and he's not. Nothing either of you can do about that. And again, who would want to?

He just will not pick up after himself, and it's gross. What do I do?

Many men seem to have a hard time keeping their things neat and tidy. Why is this? Well, the main reason is that the following things have never happened in the history of the world:

A supermodel saying, “Wow. Look at how clean that guy keeps his apartment. God, he is so hot…”


A Navy SEAL saying, “We're in big trouble. Quick, find me a guy who never—repeat never—leaves his socks lying around on the floor!”

Now, as you well know, if you try to make a man feel like a little boy as punishment for not cleaning up, he'll fight you on it. Why? Because the best-case scenario would be to do the thing right and have you think of him as a good little boy. Not awesome. My solution? Similar to the thoughtfulness parable. Give him an example of some other moron doing it wrong. Make him understand that the kind of man you like is a
man
who knows how to take care of himself. Not some little
boy
who can't pick up after himself. So unmanly, so unsexy. Like some lost little toddler.

See what I did there? Again, don't tell him that you think of
him
that way. Somehow let it slip that you know some
other
guy who is like that, and that's what you think of that idiot. This way, he'll think, “Ah, I don't want to be like that moron. I want her to think of me as a
man.
”

Stupid and silly? Sure. But you want him to pick up those socks off the floor, don't you?

I'll tell you what. If you don't know everything that there is to know about men right now, well, I have only myself to blame.

CHAPTER 11

final thoughts, or is that all
there is?

(hint: yes)

N
ot my final thoughts ever, you understand. At least I hope not. But we've definitely hit the last chapter in this book—let's all agree on that, shall we? And yet I feel that I've barely even begun to scratch the surface of how to create a better world, a world in which men and women understand one another with absolute clarity and love. A world in which someone will pay me
gigantic
sums of money. I mean, I'm talking the kind of bucks where you can fly first class anywhere you go, and you never have to get onto a bus ever again.

Ah, well. It was just a dream, after all. Let's wrap this thing up so we can all get on with our lives as smarter, wiser, dare I say sexier people. What can you, the common man-misunderstander, take away from this book so that you can become a fully credentialed manslator in your own right?

Many of the really good arguments that happen between a man and a woman (and I'm talking about the truly spectacular ones that you can hear clearly from down the street) can be traced to a failure to understand just how different from one another the two of you truly are. It's not always so obvious to see this, since you're (presumably) both speaking the same language, using the same words and everything. But lurking behind those familiar-sounding words is a brain that might be absolutely nothing like yours.

We've spent most of this book learning how you can understand what's going on with him. (At least that's what I've been doing. For all I know, you've spent our time together trying to say the entire alphabet on one burp.) Here are some tips for how you can help him understand what's going on with you. Which, let me tell you, is much more difficult.

Throw him a bone here, okay?

I know that many women hate having to tell a man what is going on with them. And hey, you're obviously free to be as vague with him as you like. All I can tell you is that if you don't actually tell him what you are thinking, he's never going to be able to figure it out. And if you do tell him, he'll know. See how that works?

When you are mad at him and then won't tell him why, for example, he'll just never get it. Not even if you're really snippy for hours, I promise. Remember our doggie we've talked about: When you yell at that little guy, he has no earthly idea why you are so mad at him. He just knows that he is a bad doggie. And since he is clueless as to what set you off, he's more than likely going to be a bad doggie again sometime real soon.

You're going to have to come to terms with the fact that you are not always very clear with us, even when you think you are.

I can hear some of you out there saying, “Well, you men aren't clear either!”

Yes. Yes we are. But you are so complex that you think we must be, too. We really aren't. We're pretty simple for the most part. But you women—you have different sets of rules for different types of situations and try as we might, we just can't wrap our minds around it without your help. Which brings us to…

See, I just misconceived it right there in the last paragraph. Men think that you have rules. You don't. You have emotions. And emotions are fluid. You might say that you like something. We mentally jot that down, thinking we know something solid.

See, with our guy friends, we know where we stand: “Darryl doesn't like Chinese food. I won't bother to bring that up anymore.” And then, if one day, Darryl says, “Let's go out for Chinese food,” the man goes, “Oh, okay. Sometimes he likes Chinese food, sometimes he doesn't. And he'll tell me which time is which.”

That's the difference. That's what we don't get. When you say that you don't want Chinese food, we don't know if you are saying

I don't like Chinese food.


I do like it, but I am not in the mood for it.


I love it, and I want it right now—but I am feeling fat, and I need you to play along and convince me that not only am I beautiful but that I can have Chinese food and it will not make me fatter, and you will love me either way.


I really wish we were getting Italian food, but rather than saying that, I'll just say I don't want Chinese food and hope he figures out that means I want Italian… somehow.

And not only does it mean any of these or a hundred other things, but also you
know
which one it is. And we know that you know that. And we know that we don't know. And we fear that you know that we don't know.

Many men think that if we can understand enough of these situations, someday we will finally have you figured out. This is why men like working with technology. There is a rhyme and reason to it. If you push this button, this is what happens. Always. Women don't work that way, but we, for some reason, want to believe that they do—and so we'll never get it. Doesn't make sense, but we're still trying. I know for a fact that women don't work that way. I've been told many, many times (and sometimes I actually was listening). And yet even I am still trying to figure it out.

All I'm suggesting is to allow us to stop trying to figure you out. We probably should be able to. But we can't do it. We just can't. And we never will, so let us off the hook. Please accept us anyway. We tried to understand you without you telling us. We did it about a zillion times. We really did. And we hit about 50 percent of the time. About as often as if we flipped a coin.

If you can be as clear with us as possible, well, we'll still probably screw things up quite a bit. But at least it won't be about that. We'll find new things to screw up. And isn't that what life is all about? Finding newer and better things to fail at? Wait, it's not? Okay, then I've been doing this whole thing wrong.