I walk into an Irish pub with a bunch of old friends. I order a Miller Lite. It feels wrong. It feels like an Irish sin, or at the very least, like I’m cheating on the Irish.
But it’s going to be a long night.
I’ll save the Harp or Guinness for later.
A few minutes later, everyone heads upstairs. Not me. This Irish Colleen wants to listen to the guitar player. I want to hear the music of my youth. I can almost feel my mom, my aunt, and my uncles singing next to me.
One of the girls comes down to tell me the band upstairs is great.
“I’ll be up in a few minutes,” I say. “I want to listen to Irish music.”
I talk to a few people at the bar.
A few minutes turns into twenty.
“I came to find you,” says one of my guy friends. “Come upstairs with us.”
I pay my tab and head upstairs. My friends are right. The band is great. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to go out and dance. It’s something I used to do a lot. I miss it.
I run to the bathroom.
I meet a few girls in there.
And you guessed it, a few minutes turns into twenty.
I walk out and there’s my guy friend again.
“I was looking for you,” he says. “I was getting worried.”
“Oh,” I say. “These are my new friends. We might have been laughing in the bathroom.”
The guys I’m out with are good men.
The kind of men who watch out for women. The kind of men who look to see if your drink is still full, or ask if you’re hungry. The kind of men who won’t let you pay.
The kind of men who open doors for you.
The kind of men who care.
At the end of the night, I am talking with my guy bestie from high school. He’s staying with me for the weekend. It goes without saying that he treats me well.
“I can’t believe our friend,” I say. “He came looking for me several times. I’m not used to having a man watch out for me. It’s such a great quality. It’s a man who’s not in his own world.”
“Yeh,” says my guy bestie.
“I mean it,” I say. “It’s sexy. A man who treats a woman like that is sexy. He did it from the beginning of the night just out of chivalry. It’s who he is.”
My comment goes over my guy bestie’s head because he is like a brother to me. Obviously, when he treats me well, it’s not sexy. Yuk. He’s like my family.
But when a man looks out for a woman it’s sexy.
When a man is present it’s sexy.
I wish I had been smart enough to realize this when I was younger.
I wasn’t.
I thought a man who was hard to get was a thrill. I thought the chase was sexy. I couldn’t stand a guy who paid too much attention to me. It wasn’t attractive to me.
I wanted to be independent.
I wanted to do my own thing.
I didn’t realize that a truly sexy man has the ability to see outside of his own world. An unsexy man can see only within his own four walls, and may not even know that you’re missing.
He may not find you listening to Irish tunes for too long.
Or know that you’ve made a few new friends in the bathroom.
They may not be good men.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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