Act like a lady, think like a man (17 page)

This is the story of all-too-many women—girlfriends who are putting in some serious work not only because they love their men, but because they want to prove they’re The One.

Everybody is clear about how you prove to him you’re The One: Do all the things for him a wife would do—support him emotionally, be loyal, work it out in the bedroom, tell him you love him often and show it, too. Maybe live with him. Have his babies. Get close—really close—to his mom and sisters and friends. Basically, you give him everything he needs and all of what he wants.

Check out this “Strawberry Letter” from a listener who called herself “Biological Clock Ticker,” a thirty-one-year-old single, childless woman in a relationship she said feels like a

“three-year-long booty call”:

He tells me he loves me and wants me to have his children. My biological clock is ticking like crazy, and we have been trying for the past year to get pregnant, to no avail (I believe that this is a sign). The problem is that he says he does not want to be in a committed relationship or marriage because he doesn’t want to answer to anyone. As long as I have known him, I have shown him that I am not at all like the other women that he has dated. I was there for him when he injured himself, quit his job, when his father died, and when he was unemployed for months. I have been encouraging him, and am there for him financially and physi-

cally. I’ve been waiting and hanging in there, hoping he’ll marry me because I don’t think that I will get anyone else that would want to have a child with me.

Am I being a fool for waiting for him? Should I just let it go?

She and all too many women in similar predicaments can’t understand why, after all of this hard work, he won’t give her the one thing she needs and wants. Well, let me break it down for her and you. Your man hasn’t asked you to marry him because of one or more of the following reasons: (1) he is still married to someone else; (2) you’re really not the one he wants; or, the real answer you don’t want to hear, (3) you haven’t required him to marry you or set a date.

In fact, I know of a few guys whose ladies are smack-dab in the middle of this predicament right now. One that stands out is a couple that dated for a year before she ended up pregnant.

To her credit, the single mom (she has a son from an earlier failed relationship) knew she didn’t want to have a second child with a man who wasn’t there to help raise her kids, so she made it simple for him: “I’m only going to have this child if you’re willing to be a father for real—not this part-time/every-once-in-a-while/when-I-feel-like-it kind of dad.” And, faced with the prospect of losing her and his baby, he stepped up to the plate: He agreed to be there for their child, and gave up his apartment, and moved in with his girlfriend while they prepared for the birth of their son.

Oh, she thought the proposal, the ring, and the wedding would follow shortly after the baby was born. To his credit, her boyfriend did come through with a ring. But she’s been wearing it for
seven
years now, and though she’s been hoping, waiting, and praying for a wedding date, they’re no closer to walking down the aisle today than they were the day their child was born.

They share a home. They share parenting responsibilities. They share bills, schedules, car notes, church pews, and most certainly a bed. But they don’t share the last name or a marriage certificate.

She can’t understand why they’re
playing house
instead of making an
official home
together. He feels as if they’ve got a home, and really, there’s not much more need to go any further than they already have.

And this is the dilemma.

See, to some men, marriage fits into the same category as eating vegetables: you know it’s something you should be doing, but you don’t really want to because, well, the greasy, fat-filled, salty, juicy burger and fries is just so much more satisfying. I’ve told you time and again in this book that we men are very simple creatures, and if it were not for women, we’d be living rather, well, simply—the money would go to mostly shiny things, our time would be spent watching sports and strippers, and there would be no need for most of us to keep a clean house or dress nice or do anything other than play video games. We’re happy living this way—it makes us feel young and carefree.

Marriage does not. Responsibility and marriage do not fit into that feeling, until all of the playing gets tired and we realize we have to be grown-ups, or something—or someone—makes us grow up.

But here’s what you need to know: men are pretty clear that marriage is what women want—that despite your independence, despite the statistics that say half the marriages in America end in divorce, despite the amount of time, work, sweat, and tears you know you’ll have to pour into building an imperfect relationship, in the end, you women still believe in the fairy tale of the husband and the house and the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids.

Men are also clear that they can slowly give out the things that make it seem like they’re making the march to the altar—just to keep you hanging in there. Trust me when I say this: men do everything with a purpose, and in the case where a man dates you for an extended length of time, or moves in with you, or gives you a ring, but still refuses to be pinned down on setting a wedding date? He’s doing it to lock you down. He wants you, and he doesn’t want anyone else to have you.

And I’m here to tell you, the only reason a man gets away with a lengthy engagement or holds off the proposal altogether is because his woman hasn’t
required
him to set the date; she is stupidly sitting there allowing her boyfriend to dictate to her when he’s ready, though she slept with this man, cut off any other prospective husbands, and, in some cases, moved in with him and even had his children.

I simply can’t be diplomatic here.

It’s just plain dumb.

Get into your man’s mind-set here: if a man is willing to be your boyfriend at length, live with you, be an involved father, or give you a ring, he has already taken himself off the player’s list—technically, he’s scratched his name off the sport fishing registry. He can’t bring babes to the house. He can’t talk on the phone or take any phone calls from babes at the house. He can’t leave to go see a babe when he wants to—or stay with her all night. He knows he can’t give his money to any other woman because he’s pooling it with you. Why does a man in a committed relationship with you accept the above list of “he can’ts”?

Because he wants you and he doesn’t want to lose you.

So now there’s only one more step to get the marriage equation: the setting of the wedding date. You know you want it, so here’s what you do: get some requirements and standards and enforce them—tell him, “I love you, you love me, we’re in a terrific relationship—one that I’ve always dreamed about. And what I want now is to be married to you. So I need you to set a date, and get back to me in a couple of weeks. If I don’t get asked by then, then please know I’m not sitting around waiting for you to dictate when my happiness button gets pushed. The arrangements we have now are not making me happy.”

What? This is a perfectly reasonable request. Otherwise, how long are you going to stay in the arrangement where you’re not getting what you want—four years? Ten years? Forever?

The timeline is yours; stop giving up your power. The moment we see you’re willing to put aside your hopes of walking down the aisle, we’re going to shelve it, too. And we’re going to go on ahead and keep on renting you out, with the

option
to buy if you let us. Don’t be the Baltic Avenue on the Monopoly board game—the one that anyone can just roll the dice, land on, and pay a couple of dollars to chill on without any obligations or worries. You’ve got to go to Broadway on the game board; make your man round the corner and land on that high end property—recognize that you’re prime real estate that’s for purchase only.

Note: This is
not
about asking your man to marry you. It’s about taking yourself out of that 1945 mentality, where you stand around waiting for some guy to beg you for your hand in marriage. You’ve had it drummed into your head so cold—that

“I’ll never ask a man to marry me” thing—that you’ve lost all sensibility when it comes to getting what
you
want. But it’s not 1945 anymore! Back in the day when my parents and their generation were courting and getting married, women could afford to wait around for the man to get it together because really, the options for men were limited. If a guy lived in a farmhouse, the next farmhouse was two miles away, and that one might not have a girl in it—just two more boys—so he’d have to walk another two miles to actually see a potential mate, much less find
the
one. And when they courted, they
courted
; he had to walk over there, write little messages on rocks on the way over so everybody knew his intentions, leave a note by the tree and send up smoke signals so the girl knew what was up. Oh, the courtship was far more romantic, because the men knew they had to behave properly—not just for their intendeds, but their intendeds’ daddies. The boys had to go over to the house, ask permission to sit in the room together, and the adults were present because there weren’t any extra rooms for them to sit in alone. And that courting culmi-nated in the men pulling the fathers aside and, with their shoulders squared and chins up, asking the fathers for their daughters’ hands in marriage. And whatever the father said is what went.

Now women have been taught all their lives that if a man loves you, he will court you and ask for your hand in marriage.

The problem with this is that you’ve been trained to use twentieth- century logic in twenty-first-century situations.

There’s no slim pickings of women out here—women are at every turn, working with men, living in apartment buildings with them, riding the bus and trains with them, hanging out at the clubs with them. Technology’s such that you can contact a woman without ever even seeing her. It’s not 1945 anymore—you can’t hang on to those old ways. This, “If he wants to marry me, he’ll ask me” thing has got to stop. Because we’re not going to ask you when you’re ready—we’re going to play with you until you give us your requirements and standards, and stand by them. I’m not telling you to get on bended knee.

I’m telling you to set a timeline for the ring and the date, and tell the man you want to be married to what it is.

I recognize that this is hard. But let me tell you what’s really hard: dating/living with/having a baby with a man who has no intention of marrying you and eight years up the road, he walks out and you’re left to find a new man/pay all the bills after years of splitting them with someone else/raising those kids on your own. Oh, it can be done. But recognize just how hard that will be. All I’m suggesting is that you get the little uncomfortable moments out of the way early—let him know now what you want and expect. Make clear to him what you’re worth, and that you come at a cost; tell him how much you’re worth like you’re about to list yourself on eBay for a million dollars. Break down your value: say, “I respect you, I adore you, I’m affection-ate, I pay attention to you, I’m punctual, I’m kind, I’m loyal, I’ll have your children and love them madly—and all of this is available for a handsome sum. I need
your
time, loyalty, support, affection, attention, punctuality, kindness, gentleman ways—I need the doors opened, chairs pulled out, your respect, and above all else, your love. I also expect a diamond ring and a walk down the aisle.”

Now when a man hears this, he’s going to pay attention, because you’ve placed a high value on yourself. He’ll see that and question the situation: “Is she worth all of that?” If your cost is too high, he will move on. But you don’t want that guy anyway, right? He’s just looking to rent you. People who rent don’t care anything about the property they’re with—they let it get run down, beat up, don’t care what it looks like. They use the space, and when they find something better, they decline the new lease and they move on out and on to the next rental.

You want the guy who is ready to make the Broadway purchase—the one who’s looking to move in, stay awhile, take care of the lawn, make sure the plumbing is right, paint the walls, add furniture, pay the mortgage faithfully. You know, make your house a home. That guy right there? He’s the one who will take responsibility and pop the question, like you need him to.

After all, boys shack. Men build homes.

Demand that he be a man about it. If he’s not in love with you, he’s not going to go for any of this, so now you know. But if he loves you, he will profess it, he will provide for you, and he will protect you. If he really loves you, the ultimate profession is, “This is my wife.” You can start with, “This is my girl,”

or “This is my baby’s mother,” or even, “This is my fiancée.”

But after a couple of years, you need to move beyond this fiancée title. At the very least, you deserve clarity. Because women do not do well without clarity. The thing you all want to know is: Where’s this relationship going? Do you love me? Am I the one? What do you see for us?

That’s it in a nutshell—every man knows this is coming up the road for him. He may not be ready for it now, but if he’s not ready for it now and you are, then you don’t have a good match, do you? So why waste all of your valuable years on something that’s not going where you want it to go? Instead, you should seek out someone else who wants to go where you’re going. I truly believe that’s why there are so many women in their midthirties unmarried—because somewhere along the line, they just didn’t put their foot down and move on. But I can tell you from personal experience: put your foot down, set some standards, and watch how fast he falls in line. The reason I’m married to Marjorie today is because she had a timeline, some requirements, and some standards. I saw them early in our relationship; I saw them on the night our relationship was about to end; I saw them when I got her back. I’ll tell you this much, if I still had the factory job at Ford and she needed $400 of my $600 paycheck, I would have given it to her.

I want to protect her.