Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (6 page)

Naturally you mustn’t be flagrant about your dating. Besides being an affront to your less fortunate girl friends, holding hands with a conquest at lunch or favoring him at the water cooler with your Mount Everest look (“I could climb all over you”) may send
him
off to the next county!

In companies that do allow dating, I have known unmarried twosomes who left the same bed in the morning, drove to work in the same car, shared the same elevator and were so cool to one another in the hall; you would have sworn they were in litigation.

That’s how you have to play it.

The quality of men you meet at work is usually pretty satisfactory. At least they are not chaps who go to movies all day in hopes of sitting next to a nine-year-old girl.

Generally there’s no great strain or embarrassment to getting better acquainted with a co-worker. You’ve been properly introduced. He can’t suspect you’re chasing him just because you both attend the same staff meetings. You’re free to lower the boom as unobtrusively as Lucrezia Borgia mixed poison. It’s also less humiliating to be looked over as you file or clean test tubes than be displayed on spec at a cocktail party.

That last bit has the feel of the Christians being looked over by the lions. Another advantage of a job is that it offers you a chance to meet some of those pleasant traveling executives on expense accounts. And they’re so meetable!

An executive secretary, for example, has one of the all-time great spots for meeting men. If you’re a top secretary but working for a dullard, consider abandoning him for somebody shinier. The caliber of beaux you meet through him is in direct relation to the caliber of success
he
is. You may have to start as a “second girl” in his office and move up. Don’t be afraid to.

If you adore your job, men or no men, stay. Getting lost in your work, getting raises, getting recognition—these are some of the all-time thrills. They are particularly available to single girls who haven’t houses, meals on time and the business of dropping off nine pounds of weekly laundry to distract them.

But if it isn’t a very interesting job
and
you’re not meeting any men in it or through it, think once more about the ones pouring out of cars on parking lots, out of buses, streetcars, taxis and commuter trains. They’re checking in somewhere. Shouldn’t you be checking in there too?

Friends of Friends (Personal Sponsorship)

The best of all possible ways to meet men, I think, is through friends, on a planned basis. Somebody picks somebody out for you and picks you out for them.

Heaven knows they can make some hideous mistakes, and you wonder if they’ve taken leave of their senses or are trying to drive you into a nunnery. It isn’t so surprising that they misjudge. How many gruesome twosomes have
you
seen flourish? Aren’t you continually fascinated by who finds whom attractive? And who doesn’t?

I know a man who is absolutely daffy about a girl twice his size. Nobody would have picked
them
for lovers. When she stands between him and the door, you can’t see
him
at all and very little of the door. How are friends to know, really, who will “take” and who won’t? The next time somebody sends you a “discovery” she could only have discovered under her kitchen sink among the Drano and empty beer bottles, forgive her. The next find she comes up with may be a jewel.

A true married-woman friend frequently shows the skill of a Broadway producer in lining up talent. We don’t know for sure why she does it. She isn’t always thanked. Possibly some primordial instinct drives her to try to get everything matched up for procreation. (She winces at scrambling eggs that might have hatched. She goes completely ape when her cat has kittens, even if they must be put to sleep the next week.) Maybe she likes you or maybe she hates you—and all single women—and wants you hustled into her own discontented group. Perhaps it’s her intensive background as a shopper. She can’t see an ocelot-covered piano bench marked down at a sale without trying to figure which one of her friends can use it. She can’t see an unclaimed bachelor without trying to figure out which of her friends can use
him.

At any rate, she’s indispensable. For one thing, a married girl has access to different sets of men than yours—not necessarily better, just different. If it’s on your behalf (not her own), she can be bolder. When she says to an attractive bachelor at a party, “There’s a girl I’d love you to get to know. Why don’t you come by the house Wednesday?” nobody will impugn her motives. You can say roughly the same thing to the same man (about yourself) and nobody will doubt
your
motives either. The trouble is that your motives are completely unacceptable in polite society (the same society that criticizes you for not being married, by the way) and it’s better to keep them at home in a mason jar.

Do let your friend help rope. You tie!

The husbands of married girl friends could help too, if they would, but they’re usually damned uncooperative. A wife can badger her mate for months to canvass the office for “somebody nice for Jeanne”; he can be sitting on top of a virtual Cary Grant and never mutter a word. Probably he doesn’t have anything against his wife’s girl friends. He just tends to consider bachelors a vanishing but admirable group—like the bison—and is determined to help preserve their dwindling numbers.

A married man whose wife you don’t know is hardly more helpful. Even if he has no plans for you himself, he is loath to do anything that might take you off the market. At best he will introduce you to another married fellow and thus insure your still being in circulation a year hence.

Occasionally a kindly, lovable, philanthropic husband does cooperate with his wife in sponsoring romance for a single woman, and those couples deserve a place in Westminster Abbey—later.

Getting a shiny gift-wrapped male from a friend is a relatively painless way to meet him. It’s super-respectable, even innocent. It was their idea you get together, wasn’t it? You can even convince yourself that you are doing them a favor.

Also a friend-sponsored man spares you those painful mid-romance discoveries. If a find is represented as a single, practicing architect, he has usually put up a few buildings and files a separate tax return. Contrast him with the fascinating real estate magnate you meet on the plane who, it turns out, actually manages a six-unit motel with his wife. (It can take
weeks
to unscramble a pack of lies like his.)

Motherly sponsors will usually arrange a rendezvous in their home. For example, they might invite you and their find to come by for cocktails. Then, if you like each other, you can take off from there. If he presently remembers a boss he was supposed to pick up at the airport, or, you recall an aunt you forgot you’d asked for dinner,
c’est la vie.
Your sponsors can try again.

A small dinner party is an equally satisfactory way for friends to introduce friends, providing, of course, that the hostess is not one of those predatory females who won’t let you shine for trying to outdazzle the Kohinoor herself. Beware the married girl who only
thinks
she wants you to meet and marry a delicious find. She will arrange an evening for you, her husband, the find, and herself. Then she wears a gown that would bring a wooden Indian to life. She insists on having the find teach her how to cha-cha-cha that very night, and if the conversation ever
does
get around to you, which isn’t likely, she will lapse into a kind of catatonic withdrawal until things liven up. Obviously this girl needs you as bait worse than you need her!

My husband was a find. (Which is probably why I like the system.) A dear friend plotted our meeting; for three years. The first year was hopeless because David was in the middle of a divorce. The second year he was drowning himself in starlets, or so she reported, and not apt to appreciate the charms of a plain but sensible girl like me. “Is there really any hope?” I queried, as we went into our third fiscal year. “Yes,” said Ruth. “Sit tight.”

One day, when Ruth felt that David was possibly going down for the third time, she arranged a meeting—with no great expectations, I’m sure. If the meeting hadn’t “taken,” she would have produced other girls for David. (A matron can’t afford to let a good bachelor get away when she has many needy friends.) The meeting took, however, and we were married … as I may have mentioned, with little more than a year’s labor with the trident and cast net on my part.

Now suppose a friend of yours, either man or woman, knows somebody you would like to meet, only they haven’t thought of it and you have. Be forthright. In as frank and charming a way as you can, ask them to introduce you.

For example, Alice panted to meet the thirty-year-old scion of one of the wealthiest men in the world … oil yet. (This is a true story, as all mine are, with names and sometimes occupations changed.) Her coveted was actively engaged in running his father’s company, and Alice knew a man who knew him through business, an ex-boss of hers. One day she telephoned him and said, “Mr. Adams, I’m going to be very frank with you. I want you to do me a tremendous favor, and when I tell you what it is, please don’t be afraid to turn me down. I’ll simply understand it’s something you can’t do. I’d like to meet Frank Glazer (pause) and I think you know him. You probably also know he’s one of the most eligible bachelors in the city and he’s dated girls, girls, girls without finding anyone to marry. I’m not nearly as eligible as he is—who
is
, for heaven’s sake?—but it’s possible he’d like me. What do you think?”

Mr. Adams, probably not typical of ex-bosses, said, “Alice, I think it’s a wonderful idea. Now let me think about this and see how we can fix it up.” A week later he called to ask if she would join him and Mrs. Adams for dinner in a restaurant. Frank Glazer would be in tow. After dinner he and Mrs. Adams would bow out to visit relatives. Then she was on her own.

Like many true stories, this one has no happy ending—or unhappy ending either. Alice and Frank met, dated several times, so you might say their introduction “took.” (She, incidentally, boned up on his work with books on oil refining and Saudi Arabia.) However, as she might have suspected if she had been truly honest with herself, this young man hadn’t remained single for want of finding somebody. He could barely sort
through
his finds! He played the field because he loved it.

Not all the desirables turn out to be so difficult to land.

Think carefully now. Who do you know with information that could lead to the capture of a most-wanted fugitive? Act now. Other bloodhounds are on his trail.

Blind Dates (You’re on Your Own)

When people ask you to their home to meet a man, that’s a blind date of sorts, but the blind dates now under discussion are those more casually arranged. Instead of meeting in a friend’s patio, protected and nurtured like a debutante, you identify each other under the clock at the Biltmore by carnations in your lapels.

Blind dates happen many ways. Somebody gives somebody your phone number; a girl friend rings up to say her date brought a pal. (He’s probably standing at her elbow as she describes him on the phone, so don’t quail when her knight of the evening turns out to be a slope-chested, liver-complexioned Lilliputian.)

Another kind of blind date is when you decide to take a chance on the “voice” who has dialed your phone number by mistake. He does, after all, sound a little like Laurence Olivier. (And will look more like Sir Laurence’s Richard III, beak nose and all.) But let us not be cynical.

Blind dates are a perfectly good way to meet men. You may feel like Madame Curie going through pitchblende trying to find one usable gram of radium, but don’t despair. All you need is one usable man.

In some ways it’s good to start the duel without seconds. It’s often easier to talk with a blind date alone than under the beady gaze of a matchmaker—especially a “confused” one who can’t remember which one of you she’s selling.

Every girl’s blind-date experiences would make a television series, save some which are completely unfilmable of course. Classic is the predator who tries to devour you like Little Red Riding Hood as the last course of his dinner. And the nature boy who wants to perform the rites of spring right in your living room when he picks you up. Everybody has propped up the chap who is tipsy by nine, tanked by ten and passed out cold on the parking lot by midnight. Then there’s the stingy sadist who not only wrecks stomach linings but
budgets
by drinking
your
liquor and eating your salted nuts, hours after you were supposed to keep a restaurant reservation.

Some blind dates are strong on talk but light on listening. You might as well try to get through to somebody singing in the shower behind a closed door. Others there wouldn’t be any talking at all with if you didn’t speak up. You feel like Scheherazade trying to keep your head from being severed by telling fascinating stories.

Some blind dates are oily, some are mossy, some are creaky and some are … just right!

The more blind dates notched in your gun, the more wary you become of accepting really
blind
blind dates … those not arranged by someone you trust.

It’s okay to be a little choosy. Barbara told me of a recent blind date who turned out to be a bellboy at night, a bookie by day. Sometimes he made book by night but said it wasn’t too safe using the hotel house phones.

To avoid wasting too much of your precious time on the Totally Hopeless, it’s a good idea to make your first meeting at lunch instead of dinner, cocktails instead of an evening. You can always make a second date. Finishing a good book or polishing the silver may enrich your life more in the long run than a free dinner with a drag.

Active Sports

Never mind you were voted the kid most likely to drown when all the kids on your block took off for the old swimming hole. Never mind that a baseball flying at you kindles the kind of panic that routed the Carthaginians before Scipio. Never mind when they handed out the muscular coordination you were in the powder room redoing your mascara.