The Rules: a preview

As I've mentioned here once or twice, I'm writing a series of Rules. Things that I think guys should know, but that guys generally aren't smart enough to figure out for themselves. There are quite a few draft copies (in various stages of completion) that have been floated to various people at various times, but the most recent version exists only on my laptop, since I've been working on them pretty much every day. It has become clear to me that I don't want to spend the rest of my life actually working for a living, so I'm trying to finish The Rules up and take a stab at getting published: any sort of royalty check will cut down how hard I need to work, and there's alway the hope of landing some sweet columnist gig.

So. I have a whole bunch of Rules, which average in length at about a long paragraph, and there is also a one-page explanation for each Rule. Here is a sample:

The Snap-Judgment Rule

Within the first few minutes of meeting a guy, a woman has decided whether or not she would sleep with him. Not whether or not she’s going to, but whether or not she would. So try to make a good first impression: if you can get through the first few stages of a conversation in good form, you’ll generally be in pretty good shape.

Note that the way a girl treats you generally has no relation whatsoever to whether she would sleep with you. Girls often save their most bitchy cold-fish behavior for guys that they want desperately.

Explanation: The Snap-Judgment Rule

I know what you’re thinking: something along the lines of ‘no fucking way.’ But the reason for that is differences in the intrinsic programming of the sexes. Guys make little or no differentiation between ‘I would sleep with her’ and ‘I want to sleep with her.’ And when you reach the latter, it’s only a short hop to ‘I will try to sleep with her.’

Doesn’t work that way with girls. They are blessed (or cursed) with the ability to be largely indifferent to whether or not they score with most of the people they would consider scoring with. This is not to say that women are not occasionally bedazzled by members of the male species; that happens too. Pheromones work, and rest assured that at least once over the course of your life, girls you have met just have thought things like ‘Oh My God I Want This Man.’ They simply didn’t act on it, for a variety of reasons, most of them societal. Keep an eye out for the signs. When a girl you just met can’t take her eyes off you. Dilated pupils. If she’s so bold as to actually reach out and touch you. Those are good signs. Don’t take anything for granted, but be aware of the possibility that she finds you sufficiently non-repulsive that she might be willing to go back to your place, even on short notice.

In any rate, you should do your best to be clean and presentable, especially if you’re going into some place where you might meet new members of the female species. Maximize your chances of lightning striking, by simple efforts to make good first impressions, because while history does record instances of women changing their minds about what they want, you don’t want to rely on those kinds of odds. (Talk about an uphill battle.) Much easier to land yourself within the category of ‘acceptable’ right from the get go.

Pay special attention when a girl you just met goes out of her way to throw some abuse at you, or gives you a hard time about something you don’t deserve (or at least, where you don’t deserve a hard time of it from her). In most cases, the girl is just having a bad day, and taking her bitchiness out on you. But in other cases, some pheromone combination involving you has short-circuited her mind back to third grade, where she reserved her ultimate queen-bitch behavior for the boy(s) that she found most interesting.

The really funny part is that whether she’s being a bitch because she’s hot for you, or if she’s being a bitch because she really is a bitch, the right response is to look her in the eyes, smile, and calmly, politely, and with all possible sincerity tell her to fuck off because she’s got nothing you need.

If things go in the right direction from there (and you might be surprised at how quickly they can go right), the sex will be spectacular. If they go in any other direction, you still hold the moral high-ground. Savor both those positions, because neither happens very often.