Unwelcome Blasts from Your Sexual Past

When it comes to exes, there’s always one type you’re almost guaranteed to hear from in the future: the ones you never really dated in the first place.

These are the guys that blew you off. They’re the ones you hooked up with on Halloween, the ones who took you out for a few dinners, the ones who kept canceling plans or forgetting to call you back, and the ones who, when you look back, you can’t quite remember how or why it ended.

They always try to reenter your life at the most inopportune moments. Maybe you’re seeing someone new, having a bad week, or looking for a new job, and suddenly there’s a text, an email, or, in the rarest of cases, a phone call that hijacks all your focus.

First things first: you’re allowed to feel smug. You’re holding proof that he thought about you at least once, and he’s given you the upper hand.

But that’s probably because he’s 99 percent sure you’re going to throw it away.

You can still gloat, but realize that he’s almost certainly not texting you because he’s realized the error of his ways. If he’s left a voicemail apologizing profusely and begging for another chance, that’s one thing, but if you just got a text that said, “what up”, don’t start picking out your wedding dress.

So what should you do?

Nothing.

The temptation is to bitch him out or brag about your new (and potentially nonexistent) boyfriend, but the second you do that, he’s holding the power and you’re feeling like shit.

We know: you don’t want to be rude. But chances are, he probably didn’t bother much with manners with you. And besides, you don’t owe him anything.

As soon as you say, “Sorry, I have a boyfriend,” you’re giving him the chance not to respond. And then you’ll be checking your phone every 5 minutes, making your friends text you to make sure your texts are working, until finally you can’t take the suspense and text him something really eloquent, like “????”.

But if you don’t respond, he’ll be the one squirming, wondering if you got his message, and why you’re not answering.

So let it go.

It’s tempting to use this whole one-sided-on-his-part exchange to help you move on. And chances are, it’ll make you feel at least a little better.

But realize that the most effective path forward shouldn’t involve him. If you can’t get over a guy until he shows a little more interest, you’re going to waste a lot of time waiting for revenge from guys who are updateable to begin with.

The less you can care about the whole thing, the better.

How to Keep Things Casual (Without Getting Hurt)

We usually advise our readers to stay away from casual dating.

A lot of hearts get broken in that gray zone between committed relationship and platonic friendship, and most 20-something women have outgrown the highs and lows that come from just hooking up (even if they aren’t willing to admit it) and, deep down, they’re looking for something more serious.

But sometimes you’re six months away from moving to a new city, or you just got out of a really serious relationship, and you just need to have some fun!

If you know what you’re getting yourself into (and this involves more than just telling yourself that you know what you’re getting into and that you won’t get attached—namely, spending some time figuring out what you are getting into and when it’ll be time to pull out), casual dating doesn’t have to be a scarring experience.

But successful casual dating is less about getting attached and more about respect and honesty.

Honesty might seem counterintuitive when you’re engaging in nonmonogamous sex, but the key to getting the most out of something neither of you is putting a lot into is making sure that you feel comfortable.

But to understand how that works, we need to talk about respect. The problem with most noncommitted relationships is that they can be the worst thing to happen to a girl’s self esteem since middle school happened.

When a guy engages in typical blow-off behavior (e.g., responding to a text two days later, only calling when he wants sex), the girl has a tendency to blame it on herself. She thinks that if only she were prettier or blonder or skinnier, he’d be showing up at her door with flowers every night, when in reality it’s probably her behavior, and not her looks, that are driving him away.

If a guy expresses sexual interest in you and then falls off the face of the planet, it’s probably because you made yourself too available. If you’re going to be engaging in casual sex, you have to realize that, and when it happens, you need to examine your behavior, not spend an extra three hours at the gym.

Casual dating can sometimes wreck havoc on your self-esteem. You meet a guy, hook up a few times, maybe come off as a little too eager, and then he starts blowing you off. So you think, “Oh, OK, he’s too hot/rich/smart for me—I need to focus on guys who are in my league. But also maybe he didn’t realize that I was interested, so he went off to find someone who was.” So then you start seeing this guy who maybe isn’t as good on paper (or in person). You hook up a few times, but you’re not going to make the same mistakes you did with the last guy. You start telling him how much you like him on the third date, and then he never asks you out on a fourth. You decide to lower your standards and up the eagerness. You’re miles out of the new guy’s league, and you tell him you love him on the second date, and when he tells you he doesn’t want to see you anymore, you can’t believe you got dumped by the unemployed 40-year-old your friend’s aunt set you up with.

Sometimes you can avoid this by being upfront. Tell him that you’re not looking for anything serious.

But if he does start blowing you off, or mentioning other people he’s seeing, or doing anything else that makes you feel shitty about yourself, break it off.

It’s not worth your sense of self worth—and this is what vibrators were invented for.

News Roundup: The New Math on Campus

The New York Times recently published an article on the gender imbalance in many of the nation’s prestigious colleges and universities.

The article explores the ramifications of a widely noted trend in undergraduate admissions: female applicants tend to have higher SAT scores, better GPAs, and more extracurricular activities than their male counterparts.

So what happens when girls get to campus and find themselves outnumbering the boys? The article argues that the boys have all the power when it comes to dating, and the girls have to play by their rules. According to the author, college guys are more interested in sex than relationships, and the girls who want “something more” have to settle for casual sex because the guys are calling the shots.

While the gender ratio may contribute to this dynamic, it’s not the root cause of the problem.

The author chronicles the mating rituals these coeds employ to find “the one.” Here are the highlights:

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.

‘I was talking to a friend at a bar, and this girl just came up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the wrist, spun him around and took him out to the dance floor and started grinding,’ said Kelly Lynch, a junior at North Carolina, recalling a recent experience.

‘A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,’ Ms. Lynch said. ‘They’ll text them and say: “I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?” And they don’t respond’

Even worse, ‘Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,’ Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, ‘that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,’ said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. ‘If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.’

“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” [Kathleen A. Bogle, a sociologist at La Salle University in Philadelphia] wrote. “This results in more casual hook-up encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”

‘A lot of guys know that they can go out and put minimal effort into their appearance and not treat girls to drinks or flatter them, and girls will still flirt with them,’ said Felicite Fallon, a senior at Florida State University, which is 56 percent female.

So, basically, these girls aren’t making the guys put in any work whatsoever. This sentiment is oh-so-eloquently by one of the (few) men interviewed for this article:

‘You don’t have to work that hard,’ said Matt Garofalo, a senior at North Carolina. ‘You meet a girl at a late-night restaurant, she’s texting you the next day.’

The issue, it seems, is not the gender imbalance, but rather the way these girls are behaving.

When you make things too easy for guys, they’re going to lose interest. After all, if you seem so desperate to date the nerdy guy who monitors the computer lab, he’s going to wonder what’s driving the desperation. And he’s probably going to conclude that you think he’s too good for you. And if you think that, why shouldn’t he?

When girls are borderline-raping guys on the dance floor and taking them home for a one-night stand, the guys are going to assume they can do better. Not because the odds are in their favor, but because the girls seem really available.

And because we all want what we can’t have (especially when it comes to sex), these guys are going to look for the girls who aren’t giving it up as easily.

And if you read between the lines, that’s what the guys are saying.

‘Guys tend to overshoot themselves and find a really beautiful girlfriend they couldn’t date otherwise, but can, thanks to the ratio,’ [a male North Carolina alum] said.

What this guy’s saying is, the guys want to date girls that seem out of their league. But how can you tell who’s out of your league?

Yes, some people fall at extreme ends of the attractiveness spectrum. But most of us are somewhere in the middle. And, at that point, a lot of it comes down to personal preference. Some guys go crazy for redheads. Others are turned on by blonde hair, regardless of the face underneath it.

It’s the same for girls. Some girls want the lacrosse-player shaggy hair, while others like guys who look like they just got out of basic training.

So when a guy’s trying to figure out if a girl’s out of his league, he’s going to take a lot of clues from her behaviors/action.

If she’s texting him the day after a one-night stand to say, “I had a great time last night. Let’s get lunch this week.”, he’s probably going to assume she’s at least at (if not below) his level. Because if she were out of his league, she wouldn’t be giving him the time of day.

But if she’s not even going home with him in the first place, he might start to wonder if he’s good enough for her. And that’s going to pique his interest, not “[doing] more than [you’re] comfortable with to lock it down,” as the girls in the article suggest.

The guys agree.

‘Even though there’s this huge imbalance between the sexes, it still doesn’t change the fact of guys sitting around, bemoaning their single status,’ said Patrick Hooper, a Georgia senior. ‘It’s the same as high school, but the women are even more enchanting and beautiful.’

Presumably, the “enchanting and beautiful” women these guys are pining over aren’t putting out after the late-night diner.

All the guys are quick to point out how easy it is to get sex. But they all also bemoan the fact that they don’t have girlfriends.

The problem seems to be that the girls who put out don’t seem like girlfriend material. And the girls who don’t suddenly become these “enchanting” beauties that the guys actually want to date.

The girls who do put out aren’t ugly. The article goes into irrelevant detail about the outfits they wear and the time they put into their hair and makeup. So the girls who hold out probably aren’t more beautiful in an objective sense, but they seem more attractive because they seem less attainable.

These women aren’t single because they outnumber the guys. They’re single because they don’t know how to behave in a way that encourages men to date them.

And in cities like DC, where smart, motivated, and attractive women seem to outnumber men with the same characteristics, we could all learn a thing or two from these coeds’ mistakes.

Lessons in Love from the Jersey Shore: Part 2

Yesterday, we talked about Snooki’s not-so-smooth moves on the MTV is-this-really-real? reality TV show Jersey Shore.

Today, we’re going to talk about Sammi, a somewhat cuter version of Snooki who gets involved with a fellow castmate, Ronnie, who’s determined “not to fall in love at the Jersey Shore.”

So isn’t it so cute/surprising that he ends up hooking up with Sammi?? It’s so meant to be, it’s almost like the producers planned it.

Anyway, so Sammi and Ronnie start hooking up, and Ronnie takes Sammi on a date, and he pays, which is how Sammi knows “it’s for real.”

But then they all get wasted and go to a club, where Ronnie (who, by the way, is the only character without a nickname) starts dancing with another girl. Sammi is obviously pissed, so she decides to flirt with a firefighter (yes, a firefighter) and give him her phone number.

This sends Ronnie storming out of the club. The two have a teary reunion a few hours later (yes, Ronnie cries), which seems to signal that this fight is a thing of the past.

When Sammi saw Ronnie grinding up on some random chick, she could have confronted him on the spot. She could have told him what an asshole he was and threatened to break up with him.

And here’s how Ronnie (probably) would have reacted: He would have accused her of making a big deal out of nothing. He would have dismissed it as “just fun.” He would have used this as an excuse to bring up things like, “Well, I’m not sure we’re ready to be exclusive.”

Ronnie did try to play down what he did in the confessional. But that wasn’t (the bulk) of what he said to Sammi. Because she showed him what it’d feel like not to be with her, he was suddenly reminded of how much he wanted to date her (remember, he cried). And so he would do anything to get her back—including apologizing for what he did and swearing he’d never do it again.

While this whole back-and-forth isn’t the healthiest way to approach a relationship, Sammi got what she wanted. And Snooki didn’t.

This isn’t to say that you can learn much about dating from watching Jersey Shore. In fact, few of their relationships (or even male-female interactions) are healthy, let alone enviable. But the show does let the audience spy on 20-something mating rituals from both sides. And a careful viewer might learn a thing or two about how to tame someone who’s just looking for sex.
Or not.

OK, we can’t believe we spent this much time analyzing Jersey Shore. Back to the real world tomorrow.

What Not to Do: "The Talk"

When a guy’s behaving badly, it often feels like grand gestures are in order.

After one of our friends received two 3 a.m. texts this weekend (which she didn’t return), we had to restrain her from jumping on the Metro Sunday morning to go “yell at him and explain that I don’t play games.”

But threatening bodily injury isn’t necessarily going to scare him into inviting you to be in a relationship on Facebook.

So what can you do to encourage a guy to treat you the way you want to be treated?

The key is not to be too direct about it.

No one likes to feel that he’s being forced into doing something. The worst thing you can do is tell your guy that you need to “talk.”

In an ideal world, we’d all sit around and talk about our feelings and expectations and no one would ever get hurt.

But the real world, as we know, is far from ideal, a truth that was reaffirmed the other day when we overheard the following conversation in a coffee shop:

Bro 1: My girlfriend keeps bugging me to hang out with her.
Bro 2: Dude, that sucks.
Bro 1: She’s all, “We never hang out.”
Bro 2: Yeah.
Bro 1: But, it’s like, the more she tells me we have to hang out, the less I want to.

People don’t like being told what to do. That’s why teenagers break every rule their parents set and young adults spend a good deal of their 20s rebelling against everything their upbringing stood for (which explains why we studied economics for three years… oops).

So when you start telling a guy, “You have to introduce me as your girlfriend,” that proclamation becomes another chore that immediately seems as unappealing as spending a Friday night doing laundry.

If you call him out on doing something wrong, he’s going to get defensive. It’s human nature. When a friend calls you and asks you to explain why she hasn’t heard from you in two weeks, you’re immediately on the defense. The whole interaction is very uncomfortable, so you begin by listing excuses, and then you start wondering what right she has to attack you like this, and so maybe you lash out at her—but regardless, you don’t think, “Hm, that was a bitch move on my part—I’ll make sure I don’t do that again.”

When a guy does something wrong, the reason you want to confront him to make sure he doesn’t repeat it.

But confrontation isn’t going to get you what you want, and he’ll be more likely to get angry and start thinking you’re a crazy bitch.

Asking nicely can be tricky too—especially in the early stages of a relationship. If you’ve been casually hooking up with a guy for a few weeks and you tell him, “Look, I really like you, but I want you to start taking me out with your friends once a week,” he might do it. But chances are, he’ll be acting out of a sense of obligation.

There’s nothing sexy about an obligation. That’s why housemates always fight over who has to take out the trash.

And the mystery is gone. He knows he has to do X to get Y. Like we’ve said before, mystery can be a powerful force of attraction. People tune into CSI because it keeps them guessing until the end. If the CSI version of Las Vegas installed closed-circuit cameras in every hotel room, no one would watch the show. Instead of calling the crime lab, the detectives would head to a projection room. It might take them a few minutes to pull the tape, but, even on a lazy Friday afternoon, the case would be solved in ten uneventful minutes.

It’s the same way when it comes to sex. The less you know about someone, the sexier they seem. Have you ever been out with a guy who laid way too much on the table on a first date? You probably didn’t agree to a second date.

On the other hand, you know the cute guy in your office that you’ve only talked to a few times? You don’t know him at all, but you spend the 3 p.m. slump daydreaming about all the cool things he does on the weekends and how good he’d be in bed. But you’d rather go through a 6-month dry spell than hook up with your best guy friend who constantly talks to you about jerking off.

The more you get to know someone, the more you notice their flaws. But when there’s a lot that you don’t know about someone, you can imagine them as being a lot closer to perfect than any real person could ever be. These ideal mental images are a lot sexier than the real guy that you know, from experience, gets really bad gas after he eats ice-cream.

When you tell a guy exactly what you want, you also run the risk of exposing insecurities. If you have friends and a life, why do you need him to call you every day? The more you start demanding he do, the more needy and clingy you’re going to seem.

So, if you’re not going to confront him, what should you do to make sure he treats you right? We’ll talk about that next week.

When You Can't Ignore a Text

Like we’ve said before, a weak-thumbed texter is usually not worth your time.

But when you really like a guy and don’t hear from him for two weeks, it can hard to ignore the text he finally does send.

If you can’t stop yourself from responding, at least try to communicate on your terms.

Take our friend’s latest conversations with one of her hookups. They’ve gotten into the habit of hanging out at his place, but she wants to spend time outside of the bedroom.

He texted her on a Monday night and asked her if she wanted to come over. She replied, “I have plans tonight. Friday would be better.”

Her schedule was actually wide open that night, except for her regular spin class. But because she hadn’t heard from him in a while, she didn’t want to make it look like she was ready to drop everything to see him. And she didn’t say, “How about Friday?”, which would give him the final say. Instead, she told him what the plan was, which it seem like she was calling the shots.

As it turns out, he had a dinner Friday evening, but would be back around ten. He asked her if she wanted to come over then. She replied, “Ten would probably be too late to go out and do something. Some other time.”

She didn’t say, “No thanks, I’m only going to hook up with you if you start taking me out.” But that’s the message she sent. He ended up canceling his dinner plans.

This isn’t to say that texts like this will work every time. If a guy has already been flaky with communication, he’s not necessarily even going to respond to your first text. But it’s better than getting a “Wanna hang out?” text and jumping in a cab and to head over to his place before you’ve even hit the send button on your reply.