Matt DeCoursey

It’s been interesting, dating again in middle age. Like anyone in that situation, I began by looking for the manual, asking advice, often from younger people. A young female friend told me, “If a woman insists on splitting the cheque in a restaurant, it means she want to be just friends and not lovers.”

I very quickly discovered that this was not true. The first woman I went out with insisted on splitting the cheque, and the reason was quite different. Chinese women have a reputation as golddiggers, even among themselves. She was saying to me, “I’m not like that. I don’t want anything material from you. I really am looking for a relationship.”

My young friend was still partly right, though. When a woman allows the man to pay the whole bill, one thing she may be saying is, “We are not just two friends having a chat. I am the woman and you are the man, and that’s how I want it.”

The man and the woman do need to signal to each other whether they feel the incipient relationship as potentially sexual. It’s complicated, because people often lie in one way or another. They protect themselves by concealing a real attraction. They exaggerate a feeling of attraction because they know that the nervousness of the first date may conceal real potential, and they wouldn’t want to miss it. A man may treat a woman in a sexual way because he sees that as his role, or because he thinks she may be hurt if he doesn’t recognize her as a woman. There is a certain pressure in the social situation to pursue a woman out of politeness rather than out of conviction.

When I set this fresh experience next to the dating manual called The Rules, I think I can see both the appeal of the manual and the damage that it does. The process is confusing and difficult, and it is appealing to have rules to follow. To the extent that the Rules work, they work exactly on the kind of unspoken signalling I’ve just been talking about. Indeed, Rule 4 is “Don’t meet him halfway or go dutch on a date.” It as at least sometimes true that if a woman splits the cheque with a man she’s interested in, he may get the idea she’s not interested. The Rules insist that the woman should stay within the female role, and functionally there’s a certain sense in that.

The construction of the woman in The Rules, while conservative and restrictive, seems to me not inhumane. It pictures her as a person with her own desires and ambitions trying to get what she wants in a system of gender roles she never made, and which don’t necessarily fit her. Repeatedly, the authors recognize that conformity to female roles is difficult and unnatural. Their insistence is that conformity works, will get a woman what she wants.

The construction of the man, on the other hand, is remarkable for its simple-minded inhumanity and refusal to view men as full human beings. The authors make no distinction between the man as a real human being and the social role. The authors write,

“Men are different from women. Women who call men, ask them out, conveniently have two tickets to a show, or offer sex on the first date destroy male ambition and animal drive. Men are born to respond to challenge” (p. 7).

This passage makes me feel physically ill. I wouldn’t deny that men are different from women, and wouldn’t deny that the differences need to be recognized in dating. But the authors reduce men to a cartoon of a rugby player.

Even worse, consider this passage:

“Are men really shy? … Perhaps a therapist would say so, but we believe that most men are not shy, just not really, really interested if they don’t approach you” (p. 27).

This passage denies my entire youth, my whole younger experience as a human being. It tells women that they must not have empathy with a man such as I was, that there is nothing to be gained from seeing what that man feels and responding to it. There’s a caveat: it says “most men” here, where the previous passage was totalizing–but the rest of the book treats the statement the same as the total generalization, and the two are logically connected. If the essence of all men is “animal drive,” then the denial of shyness is a logical consequence.

The book proceeds as if intuition did not exist. How did I know what it meant when my companion wanted to split the cheque? Initially, it was intuition, confirmed later in experience. I need to be aware of what it may mean if a woman wants to split the cheque, but I don’t need a rule laid down for me about what it always means. Similarly, a woman should not need a flat rule like this to tell her what it means if a man is standoffish. She sees his face. She hears his voice. She can make a judgment.

At last I think I know who this book is aimed at: women who lack humanity. They do not see the people around them fully as people, but as data to be fed into an algorithm. The book as a whole is about power struggle, about getting what you want. Unfortunately, “getting what you want” seems to involve wilfully constructing one’s world as lonely and cold.