When a young woman asked my son to the girl’s choice dance and he didn’t accept immediately, I offered some fatherly advice.
“Are you nuts? What if she changes her mind? Call her back right now and say you’ll go!”
“That wouldn’t be creative Dad,” he said in a not-quite-patient tone. It’s the same tone the cashier uses when I try to sneak eleven items in the ten-items-or-less line by claiming that hot dogs and buns go together naturally so they shouldn’t really count as two things.
Creative? As it turns out it meant sending the young lady a mystery to solve. My son left an encrypted message in her locker which directed her to the choir room where he’d hidden another message agreeing to go out with her. When did dating turn into The DaVinci Code?
According to my two boys, the days of walking up to a girl, staring at your shoes and mumbling, “So you wanna go out sometime or something” are done. Now it’s all about being interesting before the date even starts.
One website I found recommends writing the information about the date (time, location, appropriate dress, her share of the cost, how much of a dweeb you aren’t, etc.) on slips of paper and putting them into balloons. Inflate the balloons with helium, deliver them and watch the squeaky-voiced fun as your date-to-be pops the balloons while wondering what kind of idiot can’t just ask her out.
Actually, I’m told that’s very romantic. Personally, I think it’s a way for guys to try to duck rejection. The thinking goes, “If I can just be creative enough she’ll melt and the deal will be sealed before she realizes she’s agreed to go out with a total goofball.”
It’s all about protecting the male ego.
We guys would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West in a thunderstorm if we knew what women actually thought of us. The most fragile thing in the universe is the male ego.
That’s why nature has equipped all guys with an ego-protecting reality distortion field. How else can you explain comb-overs, hairpieces, beer belles, and virtually all male fashions from the 70s?
The field has been positively identified by guy scientists at the Imaginary Institute for Guy Science. In earlier, pre-scientific times it was known as the “rose-colored glasses” field or more recently “beer goggles”. It works by taking any unpleasant information in the real world and turning it into something that a guy can accept.
If a woman points out that the bulge around a guy’s middle looks like a snow tire from a dump truck he hears, “I like a man with a little meat on him.” A disparaging comment about a decades-old leisure suit with lapels wide enough to act as airplane runways comes across as, “What a bold fashion statement.” An observation about his limited intellectual gifts turns into, “You should run for public office.”
Safely wrapped in this field, nothing can harm a guy’s ego. Except direct rejection from a female. That’ll blast right through the field like a hit-man’s bullet through squealer’s pin-stripe suit. The guy’s ego will be flat on it’s back bleeding before it has a chance to construct a plausible alternative explanation like she was rejecting some entirely different guy and the fellow who got hit just happened to be in the way.
All of the subterfuge that goes into asking girls out is just a way of deflecting the pain. She wasn’t rejecting you, she was rejecting the balloons you sent.
Right.
I’m no stranger to dodging rejection. The first time I asked my own personal wife out, I did it in the weeniest way possible – through a mutual friend. And the worst part was that I was already pretty sure she’d say yes.
In college I ran with a small crowd of other geeks. We were like those meerkat families you see on TV, always getting up to mischief and trying to avoid the big dangerous animals which in this case meant the jocks, the academic stars, and pretty much anyone who wasn’t us. By some magical happening, an attractive and very non-geek young woman was dating one of our number.
The time came when she decided to break up with him (possibly because of the company he kept). She dropped by the dorm to tell us that she wouldn’t be seeing us any more and by an even more magical happening, I was the only one there. In the course of the conversation she said, “You know, if I hadn’t been dating him I always thought I’d like to go out with you.”
My reality-distortion field had no idea how to handle this. An extremely attractive person of the definitely opposite sex had just voiced an interest in me. Drawing on every suave male role model I had ever seen (mostly from James Bond films and the occasional episode of Remington Steele) I took a deep breath and answered, “Ulp.”
It sounded exactly as if a large multi-winged insect had suddenly flown down my throat. To ensure that she knew what an amazing hunk of manhood I was, I followed up with a witty comment. “Ah…um….”
She assumed I was offended, terminated the conversation, and left. I tortured myself for two days until I worked up the courage to ask another friend to ask her out on my behalf. I operated under the assumption that she’d say “no” and I didn’t actually want to hear that with my own ears.
Except she said, “Yes.”
I think I’m glad creative date invites weren’t hip back then. To protect my ego I’d probably have made a puzzle so complex that she’d still be working on the solution and I’d still be wondering if she’d go out with me.
