Dating tips for those single and searching

Linda
We enjoyed the sexual revolution, didn't we? We got better pay, we got the Pill, we got the ability to go to law school and play professional basketball. I mean, I can't actually play basketball, but the patriarchy couldn't stand in my way now, if I were taller, or talented. At any rate, things have changed enormously for women in the last, say, hundred years. And sure enough, with the right to do what the boys do, we got the dangers of ... well, doing what the boys do.

Okay, pretend you're a really weak dinner-theater comedian, and you're serving ancient clichés along with the flavorless chicken. What are you going to say about men in relationships? Well, you'll say they fear commitment. They work endless hours and don't have time for their partners. They cheat. They don't express affection. Most of these issues have turned green and fuzzy in the back of our collective cultural refrigerator. But when was the last time you considered the possibility that you fear commitment? Or that you're too busy to give a relationship your full attention?

Take the commitment issue, for instance. I don't think fearing commitment is an ethereal, groundless fear that men came up with just because monogamy clashes with their taste for serial dating. It's natural — and appropriate — to like the life you have as a single person, and to be nervous about the things you're going to have to give up if you're hooked to somebody else. Women used to be essentially shuttled from their fathers' houses to their husbands' with barely a stop in the middle, so what was there for anyone to miss? It seems natural that the more women construct an independent identity for themselves between childhood and marriage, the more they're going to — exactly like a guy — hesitate to give it up. And exactly like a guy, it's a fair fear to have, because it is inevitable that your coupled life cannot amount to an exact replica of your single life except for the fact that someone else lives in your apartment.

Women don’t go to college to catch a husband anymore, either. We go because we have plans, and relationships can disrupt those plans. Commitment means building somebody else into an arc that may stretch from college through years of grad school and internships and whatever other kind of professional purgatory, and when there's already a lot on your plate, that's a lot to take on, and it makes fear of commitment not look quite so frivolous.

And speaking of work, its demands aren't going to do any favors for your love life, either. In the common romantic imagination, relationships are about an intense connection that exists on a spiritual plane where you can be across the country from each other, hold up a finger like E.T., and feel your chest light up.  But you're unlikely to make it work that way indefinitely.

You're ultimately going to have to make space in your life for the things that are important, and if you can't because of other priorities, then that's the choice you're making. However long that choice lasts, you should embrace it and live with it and not feel bad about it. But it's a real choice, the same way it was a choice for Ward Cleaver whether to come home to the family for dinner. And — just as guys started hearing from Phil Donahue or whomever — if you choose your job for a long enough period of time and you choose not to leave space for your personal life, you risk hitting whatever age you find most depressing and discovering that you aren't where you were meant to be.

A lot of these things loosely fall under the umbrella of a form of neglect, I think — a sort of inattention to detail that arises out of expecting someone else to do the heavy lifting while you're busy with other things. Guys get a bad rap (largely undeserved I think) for being unable to pony up emotionally when the rubber hits the road, to the point that women trying to diagnosis their failing relationships rarely wonder whether they're guilty of the same behavior. 

If you want your relationship to work, you're going to have to show up for it. You're not being graded on a curve, so if you think all you have to do is be a member of the Class of Women that's better at connecting with other people than the Class of Men, it's probably time to get over it. Look at what men do that drives you batty. Look at how they drive you away. We have the vote now, and we own businesses and have jobs and furnish our apartments and don't wait for our weddings to get a blender or a cute set of dishes. None of this means that switching from one stereotypical approach to relationships to another is going to do anyone any favors.

For more information, visit whyyourestillsingle.com.

Excerpted from “Why You're Still Single: Things Your Friends Would Tell You If You Promised Not to Get Mad” by Evan Marc Katz and Linda Holmes. Copyright © 2006, Evan Marc Katz and Linda Holmes. All rights reserved. Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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