Well, I couldn’t resist this:
Our mission: To find out exactly what men are looking for in a good girlfriend. Impossible? Not exactly. We simply turned to Lisa Daily, syndicated relationship columnist and author of Stop Getting Dumped, who promises to help readers find and marry “the one” in three years or less. Daily followed her own advice and married her dream man, who proposed at the top of the Eiffel Tower after a six-month courtship. Now, she is determined to help other single gals do the same.
Yes, single gals, you’ve come to the right place. Her name is Lisa; my name is Lisa. (Okay, her last name’s most commonly an adjective while mine’s always a proper noun, but the congruence is still uncanny, right?) She got married to her “dream man;” hell, me too! All you jealous, bitter, cat-feeding spinsters on the wrong side of thirty, you know you all want to know–what’s our secret?
Lisa Adjective says, “about the 10 traits every man is looking for in a serious girlfriend:”
1. She has a life of her own — and it’s pretty good to boot.
That sounded reasonable to me at first. You do want somebody who isn’t massively codependent either on you or his or her parents, right? Someone’s who is interested and engaged in life, has dreams and ambitions, etc?
…er, apparently that’s not what that means.
Ladies, this means that you take care of yourself, pay attention to your personal style and find time to hang with your fabulous friends and family.
Oh, okay. A good life of your own means you need to obsess over your appearance and make the people in your life your number one priority. Looks first, service second, anything else about you or your life that you might possibly value or want a distant third!
2. She never makes the first move. …Daily says that she strongly believes women should never, ever pursue a man. Instead, she suggests waiting for the man to initiate and plan dates. Her reasoning: If the woman is always the one calling, she will never know if he is really interested in her or if it’s just convenient for him…Men simply aren’t programmed to think like that and therefore are better suited to the chase, Daily says.
I agree; shy men should be forced to lead lives of quiet and celibate desperation, because clearly their programming got botched at some point and they may not even really be men in the first place. Women who aren’t obsessing every second over whether or not the man they’re with is REALLY that into them obviously have botched programming too. I think we all need to find this programming person and set him or her straight about “quality control.”
3. She is sexy without being trampy. This means something different at the beginning of the relationship than it does down the road, Daily says. In the beginning of courtship, a woman should refrain from making any comments that are overtly sexual. She also flirts by using nonsexual touch like placing her hand on his forearm or even the knee but only briefly. When the relationship gets more serious, and presumably more intimate, sexual touch and public displays of affection are more appropriate. At this point, it’s okay to play footsie under the table.
This must be where I really blow things. I always forget to pretend I am a sweet, shy virgin who nonetheless is so overwhelmed by these strange, new feelings that I periodically cannot stop my hand from every so briefly and hesitantly fluttering towards that bronzed, muscled forearm before I snatch it away with a blush and downcast eyes. Once he’s managed to plead you into bed, though, then you can brush his foot with yours under the table where nobody can see you do it, on purpose. That is sexy! and not trampy! hear that, you sluts?!
4. She waits to have sex.
I said, did you hear that, you sluts?!
…when women have sex, they release a hormone called oxytocin (also referred to as “the cuddle hormone”), which some scientific researchers believe makes women feel extra warm and fuzzy for their sex partners. Daily warns that if women do the deed too soon, they might make too much of a relationship that barely ever existed outside of the bedroom. When you inflate the significance of a relationship, the man often bolts. Daily’s advice is to wait at least one month into the relationship before having sex with your new man.
I recommend using your pill pack to track the days–oops, I guess it’s not very virginal to have a pill pack, huh? So much for that idea!
Just a brief segue–people, if you have no science background or knowledge, please do not attempt to use impressive-sounding chemical words and/or phrases to make your bizarre bullshit sound remotely scientifically-based. Unless you can draw out the structural model for oxytocin for me right now, on demand, and demonstrate the receptor mechanism (preferably with diagrams using all standard chemistry notation and conventions) that occurs in the brain during uptake, just…please, shut up!
Relationship-wise, I’ve already botched the whole thing so badly that there probably isn’t a point in me reading any more. I hide from my family; I have routinely asked a man if he wanted to go out and called or emailed him whenever I had the urge; I have always had sex whenever it was we both felt like having it, both the first time and every subsequent time thereafter; if I have a “personal style,” that would be news to me unless “whatever I feel like wearing to whatever level of grooming I’m in the mood to engage in” is a personal style.
Nobody ever proposed to me atop the Eiffel Tower, though–if you want that experience, maybe you’d better go the Lisa Adjective route. All the Lisa Noun route’ll get you is a cheap trip to the nearest county courthouse. 