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95% of my audience is female. Of that, 97% is age 24 and younger. So it should come as a bit of a surprise when I say I don’t offer advice to women, young or old. Most of the time the questions boil down to either “how do I get my boyfriend to stop taking me for granted,” or “how do I get this guy I like to like me back?” My words every time are “I can’t offer advice to you, I can only offer my condolences.” I say that as a joke, but it’s the truth. Women (especially young women), feel somewhat “diminished” by the idea of having to make a guy realize what he should have appreciated from the jump. So even if it sounds like perfectly reasonable advice for a guy to say, “why don’t you just go ask him out?” You know it’s something most are just not going to want to do.
Give It Time
Recently, my 18-year-old nephew came to me asking for advice about college girls. As I sat there, getting ready to tell him everything to do that I never did in hopes of somehow making it all a breeze for him, suddenly, I decided to change course. I thought about what was going on with me when I was 18 and how unlikely it was that I would retain or implement anything an older person told me. In our neighborhood, kids were raised in such a way that by the time you went on a date with someone, basically, you two were “going together,” and if you had sex it was because, basically, you two were planning on getting married. When I was 18, I was going through my first heartbreak. I avoided all other girls like the plague, convinced that there was only one in the world for me. Whenever I came home from college, I’d still go out around the same times on the weekend, drive nowhere just to sit in my car, just so at least I could keep up appearances and pretend to my family that I hadn’t been dumped. I was lucky, though, because I had a very wise best friend that told me that even though it felt like the hardest thing to do, there was nothing else to do except give it time.
“When I Was Your Age I . . .(zzzzz)”
I did give it time. Thankfully, my eyes opened up and I realized there was a whole world full of girls out there: so many that I was mad at myself for spending all that time moping; so many that oftentimes I was afraid my head might explode from having literally too many choices.
I say that because, on a serious note, a lot of young men don’t get to that moment of clarity, and unfortunately there are many cases of suicide by teenage boys. According to the CDC, there are approximately 4,600 deaths by suicide for ages 10 to 24 per year, and of that, 81% are males. In many cases, the cause is that heartbreak of losing someone they thought would be the only one. I wish I could’ve conveyed that better to at least one young man I lost this way, but I just didn’t know how to at the time. Looking back, I realize that a lot of older guys give bad advice because they treat young age like a theme park where nothing really matters except playing out their fantasies bigger and better than the first time. Older guys don’t put things in the context of the emotions and troubles weighing on the kid. It’s just, “man, if I was your age I would be doin’ this and that and yadda yadda yadda.” Even worse is the kind of advice that comes from the older guy trying to experience things he regretted not doing by living vicariously through the experimental advice he gives.
The Best Advice
I came to the conclusion that I’d had it all wrong. But, it came as a surprise to my nephew as it might as well to you, the reader, that my advice to an 18-year-old boy would be the same as it would be to an 18-year-old girl: I have no advice to give you. Rather, I have a lot of stuff I could tell you, but all that stuff came from lessons learned from things going on in the context of my own feelings, my own outlook, my own life. And come to think of it, I have to laugh when I remember how dumb I was. And not dumb like, “oh man, why did I do all that?” More like, “I did that? Wow, what was I thinking!” And then it hit me: I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t pining, I wasn’t scheming, I wasn’t yearning, I was just— doing. I didn’t listen to any of the advice I got from the old heads. I was probably so pent-up with hormones, all that advice was just going one ear and out the other, anyway. It’s like that scene from The Dark Knight where the Joker analogized his actions to a dog chasing cars to describe just doing things just to do them. I just did things, as opposed to someone who thinks they have to plan how to get girls when they’re 18.
He Didn’t Like That Answer
He didn’t come right out and say it, but he didn’t need to. Young people have a way of pacing around a question you already gave a concise answer to as they try to figure out how to reword things to make you give them the answer they want. For example:
“Does this girl think I like her?”
Me: “Do you like her?”
“No.”
“Then why do you care?”
“I really don’t.”
“You don’t but it was on your mind enough to ask?”
“I mean— never mind.”
I could go on and on with this. There’s no advice I can give this boy; at least none that I could give that would sound like what he thinks he wants to hear, but isn’t sure, because what he wants is an ever-moving target, in a dark forest, with nothing but a crooked arrow to shoot with.
The Truth
When a teenager actually asks for advice on something, you would think an answer advocating their maximum freedom to choose would be what they’d want to hear. But when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex, that answer terrifies them, because it comes with an honest forecast which reads “100% chance of screwing up.” That type of honesty will scare some guys so badly, they’ll never try. They’ll just always be the wallflower. They’ll be the guy at the bar imagining over a beer what he would do if he had the courage to approach that girl.
“The truth is,” I finally say after my nephew wears me down. “I just don’t want you to think too much at this age.”
The truth is, I don’t want you to obsess over rejection. I don’t want you to spend all your daydreams building up a perfect life with that “perfect girl” you’ve yet to even say “hi” to. I don’t want you to think you’re not enough and have to somehow “trick” somebody into liking you.
The truth is, you’re an 18-year-old young man in college; you really can’t make a mistake worth dwelling over. Please don’t ever think you don’t have time. The next “Thirsty Thursday” is just right around the corner.
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Photo: Getty Images