Playing by the Rules

by Gwen Cooper — September 5, 2007

Those of you who've been reading this blog for any length of time probably know where I come down on things like The Rules. The entire idea of women needing to follow a specific "game plan" in order to trick or trap guys into liking them goes against much that I believe in. I've always felt that books like this make women too self-conscious--that if you're out there on the dating market with a certain amount of self respect and the confidence to, at the very least, be who you really are, and not who some dating book tells you to be, you'll find the right man eventually. However...

The more I'm out there, the more I realize there are certain women (and men--but I'll leave that to co-blogger Nicholas Allen to deal with someday) who have developed no spine at all when it comes to dating. They'll call or text a guy they've just started dating all the time, be available whenever he calls, get way too caught up way too quickly, and generally make it clear to the man in question that they're entirely at his disposal whenever and however he gets around to figuring out what he wants. For such women, approaching dating strategically--with a set of (cough) rules (cough)--might at least allow them to create the illusion of having a spine, even if no such spine exists. And maybe if you mimic the actions of a person with a spine long enough, one actually develops over time.

I've been thinking about these things because I spent some time with a dear friend over the weekend, who joined Robert and me and several other friends at the house in the Hamptons where we were staying for the long weekend. My friend has recently gone through a divorce (ending an absolutely horrific marriage), and more recently got out of a relationship with another recent divorcee. She was incredibly into this new guy, who quickly grew bored with a woman who was so continually at his beck and call--and who figured to himself that if this one woman was so crazy about him so soon after his divorce, there were undoubtedly thousands of women out there who would dig him just as much.

Now my friend is dating someone new, another recently divorced man who's in the process of moving from California to New York. They've been seeing each other intermittently when he comes out to New York to arrange things for the move, and talking on the phone on a regular basis when he's out in California. She and I were driving somewhere together on Saturday night when her cell phone rang with a call from him. I was pleased to see that she didn't answer the call, but let it go into voicemail. Then, 15 minutes later, he sent her a text message. At which point, I nearly had to wrestle the phone out of her hand to keep her from responding.

"It's 8:30 on a Saturday night," I told her, "and you have no commitment to this man. Let him know you're not sitting around on Saturday nights waiting for him to call. Let him wonder what you're doing."

She gave me a look. "You know I'm not into playing games," she replied.

"It has nothing to do with playing games. It has to do with letting somebody you just started dating, who doesn't even live in the tri-state area yet, know that he can't take you for granted so early on. If you're smart, you'll wait until you get home on Monday to call him back."

"But," she protested, "we talk every day. If I don't call him until Monday, he'll think it's weird."

"Why," I responded in disbelief, "would you be talking to a guy you just started seeing every day?!"

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure if this falls into the "getting too involved with a guy too quickly" category, or the "it's a bad idea to get too crazy about a guy long distance before you know what he's like to be around on a daily basis" category. Either way, it strikes me as being bad policy. Hey--I didn't make the rules. I just play by them.

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, recently published by Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in "The Dating Life," click here.