Horrors. I’ve Been Going About It Wrong The WHOLE TIME!
14 Comments Published by Lisa Kansas November 25th, 2008 in For the ladies, She's (or he's) crafty, What would we do without such great advice?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. 
Well-researched articles getting to you to the point where you just want to shoot fish in a barrel?
Nail on the head, missy.
The frustrating thing is that everything she lists could be reasonable advice if it wasn’t justified in such idiotic ways.
I love how much of her worldview is encapsulated in this one sentence:
Because, obviously, you’ll never be able to communicate about something like this. Or anything else, for that matter—at least, not without layers upon layers of masks. You’ll never see this person as another, well, person; you will never have an authentic relationship. It’s physically impossible. The only way to know anything about your partner is through rigorous single-blind testing.
Besides, the are-they-interested-in-me butterflies are so awesome, why would you ever want them to pass? Though, be warned, they do tend to grow rotten and foetid in the bottom of your stomach.
This is why lesbians basically cuddle all the time.
Which, actually, we do.
The husband and I cuddle all the time too; I’ve always been cuddly with my serious SO’s, and he says that cuddling is super-important to him and something he really needs in a relationship to feel happy and connected.
Interestingly enough, though, when I want to have sex, cuddling is the last thing on my mind, and if it’s on his, he certainly hides it well. I’m a tad suspicious that the two urges are really all that connected, especially via a single hormone pathway.
I love the arbitrary slut deadline. One month from when? The first time you meet, the first actual date? What if you were friends first? What if one of you has only three weeks to live? Or – and God willing, this will be my spring semester – what if his visa expires? Anyway, it reminds me of Scrubs.
Eliot: I always wait 4 dates to have sex.
Carla: Four?
Eliot: Yes, one more than the sluts and one less than the prudes.
Eliot’s Boyfriend: Ready for our third date?
Eliot: Fourth, you’re forgetting about that time we bumped into each other at the water fountain.
And I can never think of oxytocin without thinking of that commenter (I think on Pandagon) who said “I guess this means I only love my first child, and the second and third were just a desperate attempt to recapture the high.”
snork!
I think one basic assumption here is that women and men never are actual friends. So that one particular situation never arises to mess up your count.
So, the oxytocin thing. I’ve done some layperson research on oxytocin, because I think it’s a fun and funky thing. A fascinating fact: out of all the mammals in the world, humans and prairie voles produce the most oxytocin. Prairie voles produce it just off the charts, and all they do in their free time is cuddle with each other in their hidey holes. Aw.
Okay, let me blow the evil Lisa’s mind: oxytocin is produced in men, too.
I mean, you could maybe say that oxytocin is potentially produced more in women, because lactation and uterine contractions during birth are triggers for oxytocin release (to bond one to the baby creature). But a woman who never gives birth and never breast-feeds will produce the same amount of oxytocin as a man. And, actually, women without deft fellows will be producing less than their male counterparts, since it’s triggered by orgasm.
Yeah, snap.
And the way this works, see, isn’t because oxytocin somehow magically imprints obsessiveness and crying jags upon women. It’s that oxytocin makes you feel all extra nice and cuddly, and the moments it’s released become associated with that love feeling, creating a nice feedback loop. So if a nice guy constantly releases your love goo, you will start to feel the love goo even when you are not having orgasms with him — just thinking about him might be enough to trigger the joy.
And if you choose to have sex with multiple partners IN DEFIANCE OF ALL THINGS LISA DAILY, the oxytocin will still get released (assuming here that “sex” is a synonym for “orgasm”, which is a pretty big assumption), but won’t be associated to any one partner. In fact, it might be associated with having good sex. Which is why we can, say, masturbate and feel all love gooey afterwards, and not be consumed with the desire to make the first move on ourselves, or call ourselves just to see what we are doing. Because feeling good after an orgasm, and generally pleasant towards the means of arriving there, doesn’t really have anything to do with behaving like a freakish martian stereotype. It’s just evolution’s way of saying, “Keep doin’ that thar stuff, we likes it, mm.”
Here is my scientific research, FTW: I googled “oxytocin”, and couldn’t find a single article that didn’t mention men. Try it! It’s a new game, called “More Well-Read Than Relationship Columnists.”
“Scientific researcher” sounds a lot like “scientific journalist”. I wonder if those were the asses in my o-chem class making badly attempted obscene figures with the chemical models.
OH NOES! I did it all totally wrong when I got together with my lovely chap seven and a half years ago. What a failure I am.
“I think one basic assumption here is that women and men never are actual friends. ”
Aah….. So this is the Seduction Community for women. I guess you get what you pay for. Poor thing.
Dude, sluts totally put out on the first date. Duh.
Brilliant! This is the first time I’ve visited your blog, and I’m already hooked.
Um, yeah. I’m a fat American woman who’s married to a gorgeous scientist from Scotland. He proposed 6 months after we got together. How did I land this guy? Well, we were friends, and I propositioned him. Then, we moved in together a few months later and it turned out that we were really compatible. He was the one who wanted to get married – it didn’t really matter to me. So, let’s see…
1. I’m pretty sure that I automatically don’t fit her criteria for “taking care of myself,” even though I’ve active and dress well. I do have a pretty impressive “life of my own,” mostly consisting of an interesting career and a lot of hobbies. I don’t live close to family and am not super-social.
2. I made the first move.
3. I only try to be sexy when I feel like it – it’s not a normal part of my presentation.
4. I slept with him immediately. That was originally the whole point. I wasn’t looking for a relationship.
So, my opinion? Her “dream man” is probably not my “dream man,” she’s probably nothing like me, and her advice probably only makes sense for women her are just like her, who like the same sort of men she does.
Why are people like them considered the default? Who knows. I think they’re boring and kind of sad. It must be hard keeping up that kind of a front, even with your partner.