Thomas G. Fiffer meets a woman and seems to connect, but at the end of the evening his manhood is called into question. He wonders why.
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On a chilly winter night, I went to my favorite bar and enjoyed a bottle of wine. They offer bottles at half price on Sunday nights, which made it even more enjoyable.
I sat next to a woman who, it became clear, was a regular, as she and the bartender addressed each other by name. As I took my stool, I folded my raincoat and was starting to put it down on the foot rail, when she said, “There are hooks under the bar.” And so there were. I thanked her, and she added, “You don’t want to put your coat on the floor.” I like to turn things on their head, so I replied, “That wouldn’t be very respectful of the floor, would it?”
A long conversation ensued. It was mostly about her, her business, its challenges. She asked a few polite questions about me, and I believe she was interested in the answers, but she remained the focus. I listened and learned. About her passions, her pain points, her dreams realized and unfulfilled. There was no strong connection between us, no bond, save for the interest I was sharing in her life. And that was enough to keep us going for three hours, without a single uncomfortable moment of silence.
As midnight rolled around and we started to shift on our stools (time to go), the bartender, who is also my friend, smiled as he handed me my check. “I hardly got to talk to you tonight.”
“That’s because she and I have been talking the whole time.”
He nodded.
And the woman added, “It’s nice to sit with a man who listens.”
♦◊♦
My first reaction was to take this as a compliment. On reflection this morning, I see it differently. It may be a pat on the back for me, but it’s also a slap aimed at men in general. Yes, many men don’t listen, perhaps because we’re so intent on telling our own stories and wanting the women we’re with to appreciate those stories, to find them interesting and in doing so, find us interesting. And sometimes, we don’t listen because the person we’re with is complaining, lamenting, wallowing, or just erupting with negativity. That’s not a slap aimed at women. Men do the same thing, particularly if we’ve just gotten over a lousy relationship.
Coming back to this woman’s words about listening: they constitute, for me, a power line, a sequence of words that establishes who gets to push the judgment button. And given where she was in her professional life, having just come out the winner in a huge, expensive, and necessary power struggle, I understand where she was coming from. But there’s more.
As I retrieved my raincoat from its comfortable hook under the bar, I handed her my card—a personal card, not the business card from my current employer.
And she said, “I don’t call boys.”
I was taken aback. There had been nothing in my demeanor, not a single suggestion in our conversation that I had any romantic interest in this woman, or she in me, and it was clear that she was not looking for someone to date. I had given her my card merely to provide contact information and the option of continuing our conversation.
“It’s not a proposition.”
She nodded.
And I felt the second slap. Not the slap of rejection, of Diana the huntress raising her bow, placing a poisoned arrow in her quiver, and exclaiming, “I am the pursuer, not the pursued.” But the slap of being called something less than a man.
I spent a fair amount of time this morning piecing together where what I see as her issues with men come from. And since she may read this, I will not go into that.
Reflecting on the experience, integrating it into my consciousness, getting in touch with my feelings about it, and turning it over until I found its meaning, enabled me to get past the power lines and tap into the undercurrent of what she was saying, to understand why she was saying it.
I stand under enormous power lines at the train station every morning. And we all experience power lines in our interactions with partners, family, colleagues, and friends. After you’ve been shocked by one of these, dazed momentarily by the lightning strike, take some time to recover and reflect. You don’t have to have a smart comeback. You have to figure out why the person threw the bolt. Working through to the undercurrent will tell you that and let you know whether you want to come back for more and hope lightning strikes twice, or whether you want to bolt as fast as you can.
“I don’t call boys.”
Ironically, the card I gave her had no phone number.
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Don’t waste your time thinking about that one. She could have kindly taken the card and end of story. She behaved like a rude witch instead, so just forget about her. Pay no attention to it.
David, The woman’s behavior was surely off-putting, and to me a reflection of pain she holds somewhere concerning interaction with men. In thinking about it and ultimately writing the piece, I wanted to take readers through the process of my reflecting on my behavior as a man, of my questioning whether anything I had done that evening might have brought on her reaction, and ultimately concluding that what she said wasn’t about me. As a dear friend on Facebook just observed this morning, “she was describing her own level of maturity and not yours.” But I didn’t want to dismiss… Read more »
I can’t refute, rebut, or object to anything in this story. But it does occur to me that some men seem to have no qualm about calling women “girls” without a fraction of a thought about the implications.
Daniel, You are right that men do the same thing the woman in the story did, often with the same result, though perhaps because it is more common, the story of a woman doing it to man has more shock value. Whichever way it happens, both men and women would be well served by understanding the implications and the unfortunate gender-resentment that lines like these create.
By chance, a thought crystallized in my head yesterday, and this incident illustrates it well: I see a paradoxical conflict in the feminist movement, whereby at the societal level women want to end patriarchy, but at the personal level, so many women want to date and marry a patriarch.
Jonathan, That is an excellent point and speaks to Steve’s comment above. Some women – not all by any means – do want to have their proverbial cake and eat it too. I’m a big believer in both/and and try to avoid black and white thinking, which means I believe there is a sweet spot somewhere in between. I think that spot is called understanding with a healthy dose of flexibility, along with refusal to fall into the trap of double standards. Thanks for your enlightening comment.
i have heard this line before. in case you’re misunderstanding it, she’s expressing a firm policy she maintains: a man has to propose a date. it’s unseemly and appears desperate for a woman to do the asking so she won’t. no insult was intended.
Steve, Thank you for the explanation. My judgment at the time, based on her being a woman who was paying her own bar bill, ran her own business, and had just ousted her dysfunctional business partner, was that she was an assertive woman and not one to stand on ceremony about dating. I may have been incorrect, but that was my take on it. It may also be the case that no insult was intended, and that her line was making her policy that I had to be the caller clear. But she didn’t offer her number, nor did I… Read more »
So when you ask for their number and they won’t provide it, and you give her a card and tell her to call you instead, what other option have you if you just don’t want to be two ships in the night?
I guess the reply should be “thats good, neither do I” and smile.
Or, you simply smile at her, shake her hand, wish her well and leave. If you see her again, good, if you don’t see her again, good.
Ron, You make a good point that someone has to make the first move, an action that entails a degree of risk and vulnerability. I could see a separate post – and I’m sure it’s been done before – on why men are traditionally expected to take this step and stoically face rejection, while women who ask first are still sometimes seen as forward, even promiscuous. All the more reason for both men and women to move towards a model of clear, direct, unloaded communication.
“All the more reason for both men and women to move towards a model of clear, direct, unloaded communication.” Yes! This, exactly this! After a while a man facing continual rejection just might stop asking…
Ted, You make a good point. Many of us may be fools for love. But most of us are not masochists.
She sounds like kind of a jerk.
Joshua,
She was, as I recall, in her own world and hurt by the recent breakup and subsequent buyout of her business, which I consider reasons, not excuses, for her rude and dismissive behavior. Calling a man a boy is insulting and one of the typical power lines that gets used to achieve dominance or superiority in a conversation. It was especially galling to me after I had spent so much time listening patiently and expressing purely human and not romantic interest.
Tom