A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Memo to straight guys: women like it when you call them up for no reason and chatter on.

Sullivan then links to Dan Savage who has more on the subject. Savage's commentary is interesting, but neither Savage nor Sullivan ever address the straight guys' dilemma.

Said dilemma is as follows: We find a lady. We like the lady. We want to call the lady because speaking to her/being with her/thinking about her allow chemicals to flow down established neural pathways that give us quite the pleasurable psychological sensation--akin to a drug high. A number of us straight guys would have no problem whatsoever engaging in the kind of "just chatting" behavior that Sullivan encourages and that Savage's lady correspondent laments is lacking in the males in her life. We find such activity highly enjoyable for the aforementioned reasons.

Here's the problem, however: Ladies like to play games. One of those games apparently is playing hard to get on the phone. Now, to be sure, men like playing games as well and since men are not oftentimes as verbal as ladies like them to be, games don't even have to be played to (inadvertently) mess with a lady's mind. But the traditional male compulsion to remain relatively Stoical and silent along with the fear that the ladies are wrapping us around their lovely fingers with "will she call me/will she not?" phone games compel us to be relatively shy in the conversation department.

Want to have a few of us break out of our shells? Then stop playing games! I know this won't universally solve the problem of eradicating the Stoical Man that so many ladies appear to object to and I know that there will remain plenty of men who decide to continue toying with the psyches of their ladies. But if you want those of us who thrive on the give-and-take of intellectually stimulating verbal repartee--which could lead to other kinds of fun--to give vent to our desire to shoot the breeze with you, charm you out of your skins, then meet us halfway. Call us when you say you will. If you are glad to speak to us and you enjoy the experience, say so without making us have to jump through one hoop after another. We men like suspense and mystery as much as you do, but there is a fine line between suspense and tortuous madness the likes of which should have been outlawed by the Geneva Conventions decades ago.

This is my plea: Help us help you. Otherwise, enough with the complaining. If your philosophy is going to be that playing hard to get on the phone is acceptable because all is fair in love and war, then don't have the temerity to object when we place our own artillery on the high ground and fire back. Conversations are supposed to be a two-way street, after all.

If this post doesn't excite the hate mailers, nothing will.

UPDATE: Okay, so not much hatemail. But I probably should clarify a few things . . .

For one thing, it was probably silly for me to seem to call for a complete moratorium on any and all game-playing. Both men and women need to treat themselves as currency in the dating game and that means possessing a sense of mystery and preventing overexposure. Fine. I can definitely go along with that and it would be foolish to think that there will or even should be complete transparency. At the same time, there is such a thing as overdoing it, and when the game-playing is overdone, then it gets silly. Men certainly want women not to push it, and of course, women can make the same complaint about men.

Repeat: Women and men play games to excess. Each can be found to be at fault in a unique fashion and each has some legitimate general gripes about the other. Please do not read this post as placing blame entirely on one side because that was never my intention.

In the end, my major complaint with the Savage article is that it never took game-playing into account in any way while analyzing the "why doesn't he call" question. The failure to address game-playing is what prompted me to write. Whether we like it or not, we have to admit that there are certain strange rituals that we go through in the courtship process. These rituals have their own logic and to an extent, they are defensible. When they are overemphasized, trouble begins in a major way. That Savage chose not to address this issue led me to believe that his commentary was incomplete. Of course, Savage's commentary was humorous, so perhaps he chose simply to skirt the issue since addressing it may have taken away from the humor. But I am not a mindreader, so I can't be certain about that.

Enough of this. I am going to write about something less controversial. Maybe the Middle East peace process . . .