The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (32 page)

But of course there’s enormous individual variation in how serious male intentions get expressed. Not to mention that there’s a subset of callous jerks who will deliberately mimic all the signs of serious intentions to deceive women. In Jane Austen’s day there were no self-identified “PUAs” (pickup artists) who bragged about their mastery of “the Game”—such as we lucky twenty-first-century women are blessed with—but there were jerks like Henry Crawford. That is, there were men who pretended to more serious intentions than they really had, with the avowed purpose of plunging women into love they had no intention of returning. Which is one reason that, in her six novels, Jane Austen gave us eight detailed case studies of what we might call “men who are afraid of commitment”—that is, men who confuse us by seeming unwilling to commit themselves, for reasons that we can’t fathom. Some of these men who mysteriously fail to commit are real villains, while others have the potential to be Jane Austen heroes.

In chapter 14 we’ll be looking at just what Jane Austen has to teach about separating the sheep from the goats when it comes to men “afraid of commitment.” But in
all
cases the first and essential thing is to be aware of the chance that the man you’re getting interested in has “no intentions at all.” His “admiration,” as Jane Austen calls it, may be just admiration and not “attachment”; maybe he’s just not that into you. You need to keep that possibility clear as clear in your mind, or you’re going to make excuses for even really obvious signs of lack of interest and commitment, deceiving yourself
¹⁵
and setting yourself up for totally unnecessary heartbreak.

The general rule, applicable in all cases, is to look for inconsistencies.
¹⁶
You’re measuring what you can observe about a man’s conduct against two different standards, as it were: 1) what you know of his character; and 2) what you’re hoping about his intentions. The fundamental question that the wise Jane Austen heroine asks herself:
Knowing what I know about him, is this the way he would act if he really felt the way I hope he feels?
Or does his actual conduct betray intentions that don’t match what I’m wishing and hoping? It’s a tricky question, because the answer depends on all kinds of
givens
that vary from situation to situation and man to man. But it’s exactly
what Elinor Dashwood manages—not only when it comes to her sister’s lover, but even when it comes to her own.
Given
Willoughby’s open temper and habits of unreserve about everything else, is it really reasonable to believe that he would leave without declaring his love to Marianne if he had honorable intentions?
Given
Edward’s quiet habits and apparent affection for the Dashwood family, is his unhappiness when he visits them—not to mention his insistence that he must leave their house after a week, without any definite plans for where he’s going next—really compatible with an intention to be Elinor’s suitor?

Jane Austen’s eight different ways that men have of being, as we say, “afraid of commitment” supply plenty of opportunity for similar questions from her female characters—though they don’t always think to ask them. But before we plunge into a really close look at the range of her male characters and of their “intentions,” it’s time to take a look at a question that some of you may think is long overdue in this discussion of men’s intentions.

Why do
we
have to discern
their
intentions?

Okay, so maybe Jane Austen heroines have to let men take the lead and, as Emma rather pompously advises Harriet: “Consider what you are about. Perhaps it will be wisest in you to check your feelings while you can: at any rate do not let them carry you too far, unless you are persuaded of his liking you. Be observant of him. Let his behaviour be the guide of your sensations.” But to the extent it’s true for Jane Austen heroines that they have to keep their antennae up for evidence about how quickly and deeply a man is committing himself, isn’t it a relic of their pre-feminist era when Jane Austen could say (tongue firmly in cheek) that “there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty girls to deserve them”? What’s dignified about parsing men’s words, reading their conduct, putting all this elaborate effort into deliberating the signs of their intentions? Doesn’t pacing our relationships by men’s progress from “admiration” to “attachment” give them way too much say over our happiness? Isn’t the
whole exercise a concession of weakness—a weakness that we no longer need to concede in modern conditions of equality?

Well, actually, in Jane Austen, women as well as men have “intentions.”
¹⁷
And sometimes Jane Austen’s men do have to struggle to figure out the intentions of the women they’re interested in.
¹⁸
When Mr. Knightley canvasses the match between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, he’s no less struck by the fact that her character “vouches for her disinterestedness” than by Frank’s genuine attachment to her.
¹⁹

But still, there
is
a difference. “Women fancy admiration means more than it does,” is Jane Bennet’s excuse for Bingley. Darcy says, “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” Admittedly, that’s from the male point of view. But notice that there’s no such thing as
Modern Groom
magazine. And there’s no bestselling self-help book entitled
She’s Just Not That into You
. (Instead, there’s
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
.) Women do seem to be at more risk of letting our imaginations carry us ahead of where the guy is.

When it comes to falling in love, there are some important differences between men and women. Those differences fascinated Jane Austen. Whether she saw them as weaknesses where women are concerned is the subject of the next chapter.

SO
ARE
WOMEN THE WEAKER SEX? WHY ARE WE THE ones who have to discern men’s intentions (in the nineteenth century) and read self-help books (in the twenty-first)—while they get to stumble through life blithely unaware of the need for any tips or special skills to manage their relationships? How come they never write letters to advice columnists asking why we don’t call the next day? Why do we put so much more effort into dealing with
them
than they do into dealing with
us
? Are women after all the sensitive plants, more easily hurt than men? Do we really need special protection?
¹

Did Jane Austen believe that women were weaker than men—that we’re not equal? Well, she certainly believed the sexes were
different
. She writes about differences that have a powerful effect on how men and women relate to each other, and on how they ought to. Her observations on sex differences are quite instructive—if we want to run our love lives more intelligently and get more of what we want from men. But to profit from her insights, you have to be willing to see past your assumptions to what’s in
front of you. In this chapter I’m going to ask you, reader, to play clear-eyed eighteenth-century realist and look straight at some important differences Jane Austen noticed between men and women—before getting up on your high horse and objecting that those differences can’t be real because you’re afraid it all might mean we women will have to think of ourselves as second-class citizens. (And honestly, there’s no need to panic. You can trust Jane Austen to maintain the dignity of our sex.)

Let’s start with the fact that women are generally more faithful than men. In Jane Austen, as in reality, women regularly find male infidelity not only painful but astonishing. It’s not simply that men are more likely to cheat, though that is the case. It’s that the gap between the capacity for fidelity in men and women is so wide that women routinely fail to imagine what men are capable of. We’re continually relying on men’s being as committed to our relationships as we ourselves are. And we’re inevitably getting nasty surprises.

Elinor worries about Edward’s mysterious failure to follow through on the beginning of their love affair. But until Lucy Steele reveals his secret engagement to her, it never occurs to Elinor that the answer might be another woman. Marianne is completely blindsided when she finds out that Willoughby’s going to marry somebody else: “Who is she?—Who can she be?—Whom did I ever hear him talk of as young and attractive among his female acquaintance?—Oh! no one, no one—he talked to me only of myself.”
²

Jane Austen is brutally realistic about the male capacity for inconstancy. Henry Crawford’s adulterous elopement with Maria while he’s actually in love with Fanny was too much for some contemporary readers to swallow.
³
Do
we
find it believable? “He was entangled by his own vanity, with as little excuse for love as possible, and without the smallest inconstancy of mind toward her cousin.... he went off with [Maria] ... regretting Fanny, even at the moment, but regretting her even more, when all the bustle of the intrigue was over.” From our twenty-first-century perspective, Henry’s behavior seems all too realistic. Fanny is shocked, of course—exactly the same way we’ve virtually all been shocked at one point or another by the
discovery that we’re less important than we thought to a man we were sure was in love with us.
⁴