Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (31 page)

In an all-married gathering, I always found the best course of action was just to shut up and smile. Nobody will understand or care a bloody thing about what
you
do anyway. Of course, if you absolutely insist on entering the conversation, you can open with, “I understand this is one of the few neighborhoods in the city where property values have gone down consistently since 1956.” That will put you in the action.

The worst mistake I ever made at a party was getting into a game of liar’s poker (you play it with the serial numbers on dollar bills) with all the husbands. I was not only getting hate-waves because our rather large splinter group was having such a good time but because I was winning all the money. Really unforgivable!

You do run the risk of collecting husbands at parties. Be prepared!

Don’t Suffer So Much Getting the “Big” Date

You think the only person who will
do
for the classy bash, the wedding reception, the company banquet, is a roving prince. And the only person you can muster is a drag, a drone or a droop.

I found every time I moved heaven and earth to come up with Cary Grant (never, of course, succeeding) that it never really made that much
difference.
People are too preoccupied with whom
they
brought or weren’t able to bring.

If it’s the kind of party where you
must
bring a date, don’t fight the system! Just bring anybody. Even escorts who are older, younger, dumber or seedier than you
deserve
sometimes look and sound quite nice in their party clothes. Also, couples
can
get separated from each other for quite a bit of the evening!

Trust in Retribution

When a beau, a boss or other person does you dirt persistently and efficiently, bide your time. Get away as soon as you can, of course, though this may take a while in the case of a job situation or death-grip love affair.

Don’t even
consider
sticking pins in wax effigies. Without lifting a finger, you will probably live to see them lose all their hair, be named in a paternity suit by a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl whose legal counsel is your city’s Jerry Geisler, be broken to junior account coordinator sharing an office with three other fellows.

One friend of mine has found the law of retribution so inexorable that she feels guilty about a major airline crash, as well as a head-on collision between two cars near Las Vegas last year. Her mortal enemies were involved in both.

There’s nothing spooky about retribution. Pill-people louse themselves up with
others
just as they did with you. And then the Fates come marching in!

Put Your Guilt Away

Would it surprise you to know that your most wicked and base thoughts—secret fantasies—even leanings to homosexuality, are not unusual, and should not alarm you? You may share your desire to make love to an African lion with the vicar’s wife—or even the vicar! Far from making you a depraved monster, your thinking is probably not even original. This is the consensus of psychiatrists.
Doing something
about these thoughts and not merely thinking them is what makes you cuckoo!

Perhaps you will reconsider the idea that sex without marriage is dirty. This is not a plea to get you into bed—your moral code is
your
business—but if you are already involved, you might remember that sex was here a long time before marriage. You inherited your proclivity for it. It isn’t some random piece of mischief you dreamed up because you’re a bad, wicked girl.

The psychiatrist I mentioned before frequently shows sexually guilt-ridden patients pictures from an entomology book. All the patients can figure out at first look is that they are seeing some kind of bug. “And do you know what the bugs are doing?” the doctor asks. No, they don’t know. Well, the bugs, according to the text, are Mediterranean fruit flies engaged in the act of mating. “Okay, so what?” asks the patient. And the doctor explains that, by the patient’s own concept of sex, he is looking at some
very dirty pictures, indeed
!

The point is, you may be much harder on yourself than you are on other creatures of nature who are less deserving of your tolerance. When you accept yourself, with all your foibles, you will be able to accept other people too. And you and they will be happier to be near you. (Big order, but you can fill it.)

Borrow Children

There is no reason not to have children in your world. Friends will happily relinquish two, four or more at a time to your care.

Shawn took two eight-year old boys to a Walt Disney movie last week and on to an ice-cream parlor for banana splits. They think Shawn is beautiful, smells terrific and is a swell Saturday-afternoon date.

I used to borrow Megan Buchanan, a six-year-old enchantress, for part of a weekend. Her parents would come for dinner on Saturday and leave Meg at my apartment until Sunday noon. She was the greatest for cleaning out closets. (
She
started it. I’m no child exploiter!) Any fifteen-year-old rabbit-fur slippers or old champagne bottles you weren’t using, Megan was thrilled to take home in a brown paper bag.

Agnes and Betsy both teach kids’ Sunday school classes. Laura does scout work.

Live a Little

There are a lot of half-alive people running around in the world, any number of whom are single women. Possibly you learned as a child that to get on with Mommy and Daddy you’d better keep your voice down, your anger contained, tears controlled, curiosity stifled, not get stung by wasps or dig any holes to China in the back yard. Gradually but surely your imagination was stifled, the fear of doing anything adventurous instilled.

If you’re partially dead, it takes a little doing to begin to venture again. You may have to “discipline” yourself to care where a fire engine is going. I read that the great French writer Colette used to take flowers and leaves apart to figure out how they were made. Maybe
that
would be a place to begin. Or just try to change a washer on the faucet yourself!

Everyone has a favorite octogenarian who still has the zest for living. My pet is the eighty-one-year-old widow who sold us our house. People variously call her pushy, nosy, meddlesome and insincere. She is possibly all of these things, but I think she’s out of this world. The last time I visited her, two teen-age grandnieces were her house guests for the weekend. They alternately giggled, squealed, drank Coca Cola floats and sun-bathed in their bikinis; and she was enjoying every minute of their visit. (I’d have been in the fit stage. Raucous teenagers absolutely drive me nuts.) Shortly after that visit Mrs. M. took off for London for six months. The year before that she was in the Orient.

Paradoxically, living dangerously lengthens and strengthens your life.

R.S.V.P. Means Respond!

Many a popular girl’s reputation was built on her
enthusiasm.
Praise the switchboard girl who tracks you through the office to deliver your personal phone calls. Don’t figure that’s her job and let it go at that. It isn’t. Don’t just accept for dinner. An invitation from the Wine and Food Society for the same evening couldn’t keep you away. There are so
many
ways to respond. When somebody hands you a paper or letter they’ve written for approval, start liking it from the first paragraph. Don’t let them sweat out the whole thing before you give them a lukewarm grunt.

If you’d like to be loved, then
love
. You appreciate and applaud and say “You did right,” and, “I was proud of you,” at the least provocation.

Mind Your Phone Manners

The first thing
you
say—or at least the second or third—after someone you’ve telephoned says “Hello,” is, “Are you busy?” This goes whether it’s a housewife or a tycoon and whether you’re planning to chat two minutes or all morning. Everybody’s been trapped by a friend who has nothing to do but gossip and you’ve got nothing to do but work.

Baby Your Friends

Be the hostess who gives a guest a big heaping tuna salad because he actually prefers it to the lavish and immoral lasagna you are serving everybody else. (Also, pastas make him break out in hives.)

Let a guest who is absolutely beat flake out for a quick nap while the rest of your guests are sipping cocktails.

Give girl guests scuffs if their footsies are aching.

Let guests who are getting up at dawn to go camping leave by ten-thirty, if that’s their pleasure.

Ask who’d prefer Sanka to coffee. (The sleepless nights you coffee fiends put us caffeine-abstainers through! Never
mind
it’s all in our minds!)

Give the nonalcohol drinker something special … like orange juice squeezed by your own loving hands. Many hosts and hostesses seem to do their best to
punish
these people. Let your apartment be a place where people can be
themselves
… comfy, cozy and uninhibited … up to a reasonable point.

Faraway Places

I hope you’re saving for a European jaunt. It can be single-girl heaven if you go alone or with not more than one other girl, and if you collect lots of names to look up when you get there.

Is there a really good reason you couldn’t live in another country for a while? Girls who’ve tried it are more interesting the rest of their lives, and some say they aren’t sure they’d really been living up to then. There’s
such
a long time to settle down by the hearthside.

A friend of mine just lined up a job in Australia which will pay her almost as much as she makes now, and living costs will be far lower. She only has to stay one year by contract, and they pay her round-trip boat fare. Since she’ll already be halfway around the world, she’s coming home around the other half. And yet the scaredy-cats are trying to talk her out of it!

Not Getting Any Younger

Men
adore
young women, it’s true, it’s true! … their honeyed skins, muscle secured firmly to the bone … even their innocence.

Every article written about aging gracefully reiterates that the only way to compete with younger women is
not
to compete with them. I agree. Your seventeenth year or twenty-seventh year are over and done with, but you have some
new
things going for you which the children haven’t—your total chic, poise, professional standing, warmth, true friendliness born of compassion, charm and experience. Don’t underestimate these qualities—they are surprisingly attractive to men. Nevertheless, as long as youth is made a cult of in our country I don’t think you can afford
not
to try to
look
as young as you can.

What is so tsk-tsk-tsk about it? If your figure is still junior and petite at fifty, why should you wear any but the good, sophisticated junior clothes you have always worn? If you were a delectable blonde at twenty, why should you not have beautiful blond hair now?

Some writers on the subject of aging are very deprecating indeed. For example, a recent article in the Los Angeles
Times
stated:

The man of forty or fifty, with his thinning hair, his glasses, his paunch, his tendency to tire easily and to fall asleep in the shank of an evening should not be fearing that he isn’t young any more. By George, he ought to be accepting the fact and going on from there.

If he sets out to prove he is still a young buck, what can he expect but some dismal confirmation of the fact that he is middle-aged after all—and everybody knows it?

One man of forty-five, who had been taking his secretary to lunch with a rather fanciful notion of where the relationship might lead, confided, “Everything was going fine until I asked her if she would call me by my first name, and she said, Oh, I couldn’t do that—but I’d be glad to call you Uncle.”

My reaction to this is that the man with the secretary has been spared a boring relationship with an idiot (
uncle
? !!) and the man with the paunch shouldn’t be, by George, accepting
anything,
but should be out pricing rowing machines.

By that writer’s standards, Cary Grant, William Holden, Photographer Paul Hesse (sixty-six and fabulous), Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Bob Cummings, Fred Astaire (sixty-three and devastating) as well as many less famous men who make us drool, are all making fools of themselves by their efforts to stay young and sexy-looking.

While it is easier for a man to bring off this attractiveness late in life (the lined craggy look which becomes a man’s features in later years is
not
so entrancing on a woman), women with effort can do it too. Look at Ingrid Bergman, Loretta Young, Susan Hayward, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Doris Day, Lauren Bacall, Rhonda Fleming, Lana Turner—none of them under thirty-five and some—which?—are now in their fifties!

Since bodies are easier than faces to keep taut and lovely (although the face machine I mentioned in Chapter 11 can do a lot of good), you should be making the maximum effort with
them.
After all, your body is what you make love with!

I believe the fetish for youth that makes people keep their bodies in good shape is
good.
A lean, exercised body is a healthy body and you will keep breath in it all the longer.

It, along with other attributes, can keep you attractive to men indefinitely … maybe not to hordes of men, and perhaps they no longer swivel around on bar stools just to gaze at you, but enough men to keep you busy. Maurice Goudeket fell madly in love with and married Colette when she was sixty-two, which brings me to still another point. Colette had genius on her side. As you grow older, it helps to have other things going for you—a little money (which should be no problem if you have worked for many years), a little travel, the ability to cook well and entertain.

Use the Time

The single years are very precious years because that’s when you have the time and personal freedom for adventure.

Of course, maddeningly, the least appealing time to do
anything
is when you already aren’t doing something.

If you can forget the stultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive (what an assignment!), I believe half your single-girl battle is over.