Not Your Mother's Rules: The New Secrets for Dating (14 page)

Juliana, twenty-nine, recently e-mailed us to say that the guy she has been dating for three months is head over heels with her and she attributes it to this
Rule
. They met on
Match.com
and after three e-mail exchanges, he asked her out for drinks. They hit it off and he texted her the next day, “Hey gorgeous, any chance I can take you out to dinner tonight or one night this week?” Juliana was unemployed and had absolutely nothing going on that night or any night that week. But she was determined to do
The Rules
and said she was “crazy busy all week.” So he asked Juliana out for the following Saturday night and she accepted. After their third-consecutive Saturday night date, he asked her, “Is it too early to get serious? I don’t want to share you with anyone else.” Because Juliana had turned him down a lot, he assumed she had dates and asked to be exclusive. When he introduces her to friends today, he still says, “This is the girl I told you about who wouldn’t see me.”

We have spoken to couples who have been married for decades. The husbands who seem the craziest about their wives never forget how the women refused to hang out or see them more often, whether by design or accident. Steven remembers chatting up his future wife, Alice, at a mutual friend’s party and how she wouldn’t give him the time of day. Truth be told, Alice was recently divorced and gun-shy about dating again. She had also heard that he was a player, so when he approached her she immediately told him she was “divorced with a young child” so he wouldn’t waste her time. He said, “I thought we could hang out sometime.” She clearly told him, “I don’t hang out.” He said, “Then let me take you out for dinner.” She accepted. He proposed after a year and they just celebrated their thirtieth anniversary. Alice wasn’t
exactly following
The Rules
(there was no book back then); she was just being cautious. Of course, her caution turned a player into a devoted husband and father. “Honestly, I couldn’t get rid of him!” she said.

Remember, courtship is not casual!

T
HESE DAYS, YOU
can be in a long-distance relationship and literally never be with the guy you are dating. There are so many ways to video chat now: Skype, ooVoo, FaceTime, and probably many more ways that hadn’t even been invented yet when this book went to press. But video chat does not make a relationship! Skype and FaceTime are glorified phone calls—they are
not
dates. The guy is not taking you out to dinner or really doing anything. His efforts are next to nothing! Don’t be flattered if a guy wants to video chat every day for hours. He may just be bored or lonely. Unless he comes to see you—whether by plane, train, or automobile—every other week, he either has a girlfriend or is just not that interested. If it’s a semester-abroad situation or you live in different countries, that’s a different story—but more about that from our daughters!

If you are confused as to whether you are in a
Rules
-y long-distance relationship, pretend you live in the 1980s. Before any kind of video-based technology existed, a guy would have to travel to see you. We already know that too much technology is not always a good thing. Don’t be so quick to agree to long Skype sessions morning, noon, and night. Sign out of or pretend you don’t use ooVoo, and decline FaceTime
invitations sometimes so you are not always accessible. When you do accept a video chat, end it after twenty minutes—you don’t have time to sit around! Not only should you take these actions, but you should also never initiate them, just like with every other form of communication. Initiating a video chat is even
worse
than texting or calling because you must be sitting at your computer. How are you going to do that if you’re out living a full, busy life?

A long-distance relationship should not stay that way for long stretches of time. He should be figuring out when to see you and how you can be together, whether that means his relocating or your relocating—but the latter will happen only after he proposes with a ring and you set a wedding date. In a
Rules
relationship, the guy wants to breathe the same air as you; he never wants to be apart for too long. As we said in our first book, he must visit you three times in a long-distance relationship before you visit him. If may sound funny to say, but the situation should not be equal. If the guy you are dating is making excuses as to why he can’t visit you every week or month, it’s not a long-distance relationship—it’s a fantasy relationship, courtesy of the internet and video chatting. We know. We hear the war stories.

Erica, a thirty-year-old gallery owner, met Max, a thirty-five-year-old teacher’s assistant, at the Louvre in Paris. They were both staring at the
Mona Lisa
when Max said, “It’s smaller than you thought, right? Where are you from? I’m from Chicago.” Erica laughed and told Max she was from Washington, DC. They hit it off and Max asked Erica if she wanted to get coffee and croissants at a nearby café. Erica said, “Pourquoi pas?” They talked nonstop for three hours. Erica could not believe how much they had in common. They soon realized they were both leaving Paris the next morning,
so they decided to meet up for dinner as well. After splitting a bottle of wine, Erica ended up staying at Max’s hotel room; they had sex that night and again in the morning. They shared a cab to the airport. They talked about art, philosophy, religion, and history effortlessly, as if they had known each other for years—not just one day. They finished each other’s sentences.

When they got back to the States, Max was texting and e-mailing Erica all day, every day. “I dreamt about you last night, I will write you a poem. Who is your favorite poet?” She wrote him back with equal frequency and gusto. They began to Skype at crazy hours and Erica started skipping her morning cardio classes to be available to Max, who liked to chat early in the day. Erica updated her Facebook status: “I think I found love in the city of light!”

Despite the flurry of texts, e-mails, Facebook messages, and Skype sessions for two months, Max never mentioned meeting up again. Erica was so flattered by the constant contact that she did not notice (or pretended not to notice) the obvious, until her
Rules
-minded friend said, “If this guy is so crazy about you, why isn’t he visiting you?” Erica blamed it on Max’s busy schedule. Nonetheless, she decided to invite him to DC to a gallery opening to “move things along.” Max said he would love to come but was tied up with work. Erica did not want to let another two months go by and remembered that she had a friend on Facebook in Chicago she could reconnect with as a pretext to see Max. Max seemed thrilled, but said that his car was being serviced so he would not be able to pick her up from the airport. He invited her to stay with him and said he would take her out to dinner. Erica was as excited as a schoolgirl about the prospect of spending a few days with Max and becoming closer, but she should not
have been. After all, how much effort does it take for a guy to let you stay at his place in exchange for sex and companionship? Very little!

While their reunion was nice, Erica noticed that it was not nearly as romantic as their texts and e-mails and video chats. Max’s phone beeped constantly and it seemed as if he was juggling her into his busy schedule, not making her a priority. When Erica left, she felt empty and disappointed. She decided to call her
Rules
-y friend, who gave her a copy of the book and suggested she call us for a consultation. We went over the whole relationship from the moment they met to the present. Erica forwarded us all their texts and e-mails to see if we could salvage the relationship. We nicely told Erica all the mistakes she had made from day one: spending more than twenty minutes with Max when they first met, sleeping with him too soon, baring her soul on Skype, and visiting him first. The relationship was not only a case of too much, too soon, but Erica was the only one keeping it alive. Because she had been so easy to get, Max didn’t feel that she was special. Max was happy to chat with her online or to see her when she visited him, but he was not going out of his way to see her. He might have even been dating one of his students—Erica was his pen pal/hookup buddy—for all she knew. Erica agreed to distance herself from Max and put
The Rules
into practice.

Erica suddenly became very busy with work and the gym and her friends. She also joined
Match.com
, as she and Max were hardly exclusive, despite their many deep talks. She ignored his texts if they weren’t about visiting her—and they weren’t. We told her to sign out of Skype so he could not reach her spontaneously and would have to e-mail her to schedule a video chat instead. We told her to limit these sessions to once a week for twenty minutes and to go back to
her morning cardio classes. If Max wanted to see her pretty face, he would have to hop on a plane to DC. No more long e-mails or texts about poetry and religion, just “swamped at the gallery.” In response to questions like “What are you up to?” she wrote, “At the gym, can’t talk” or “at movies with friends… got2go!” For all of Max’s musings about poetry and life, he had never said
anything
about getting together with her.

After a week of
Rules
boot camp, Max noticed that Erica was less available and sent her some texts asking her what she was up to and if she planned to be in Chicago again, but he said nothing about visiting her. Fortunately, she had met a guy who lived nearby in Virginia on
Match.com
, who took her out on a real date, which helped her get over Max quickly. She realized, thanks to
The Rules
, that the long-distance relationship she was in was not really a relationship at all.

In some cases, a client will insist that she followed the long-distance
Rules
, specifically that she waited to visit him after he had visited her three times, but wonders why the relationship still did not work out. When we review her situation in a consultation, we find out that after his third visit, she threw
The Rules
out the window. It’s important to remember that even once you reach that three-visit threshold, it’s still about letting him pursue you. It’s about dating a guy who doesn’t want to be apart from you. A woman must follow the spirit of
The Rules
, not just the fine print.

Sophie, thirty-four, a New Yorker, met Jordan, thirty-seven, at a happy hour near her office on a Friday night. Jordan had flown in from Seattle for a real estate conference and was leaving the next morning. He walked up to Sophie and asked her if he could buy her a drink. They talked about work, weather, and travel. After twenty minutes, Jordan asked if
she wanted to have dinner, but Sophie declined. In the past she had rationalized spending five hours with out-of-town guys because they were leaving the next day, but she had read
The Rules
and knew that was a big mistake.

Jordan took Sophie’s number and said he would be in touch soon. The next day he texted her from JFK airport to say that he had a great time and would love to see her again. He asked if she had any plans to be in Seattle and she wrote back, “No, can’t get away anytime soon.” Jordan wrote back, “Well, if the only way I can see you again is to fly to New York, so be it.” He booked a flight two weeks later and took Sophie to dinner and on a horse-and-buggy ride around Central Park. Jordan asked if he could stay at her apartment but, following
The Rules
, she said, “Sorry, I’m not comfortable with that yet, but I can recommend a great hotel.” Two weeks later, Jordan had another work conference in New York and took Sophie out to dinner and a show. She let him sleep over, but on the couch—no sex. Again, Jordan asked if Sophie would consider coming to Seattle and said he would even pay for the plane ticket. She wrote back, “I just can’t take time off from work right now.” Jordan had a college reunion coming up in New Jersey a month later, so he wrote, “No problem, I will swing by and see you then.”