How to make a man fall in love with you
Meeting his friends
Somebody once said you can judge a man by his friends. Plato, probably. Then again, Plato never had any friends, so what did he know? None of those Greek deviants had proper friends. They all slept with young boys and took mind-altering drugs.
Most men are heavily influenced by their friends. They are also heavily influenced by alcohol, but mainly by their friends. Their drinking buddies, actually. Their attitude towards you will be an indirect reflection of the attitude of his friends towards your relationship. I know it sounds twisted, but it’s true. And it gets worse. Men who get together for a few beers, and don’t talk about women, are either into computers or other men. You do not want to be involved with either category.
Remember that your man is still a snigelton in his mind. No, he is not. He is a singleton. I have no idea what a snigelton is. The first time he gets together with his mates after meeting you, he will not immediately tell them that he has met the most wonderful woman in the world. It is the way of the bachelor to bemoan the lack of suitable women i.e. women who drop their knickers at the sound of a high-pitched whistle. He knows that admitting to having met you will break the sacred circle. So he buys everyone a few rounds and waits until everyone is plastered and then says, “I met someone the other night.”
The others round on him as the senators rounded on Brutus. Some look in awe, others in horror. When you tell your friends that you’ve met someone, they are quite likely to say, “What’s he like?” and “What does he do?” When he tells his friends he has met a girl, they ask the same questions but add “in bed” to the end of each.
Many single men spend a lot of their time getting laid vicariously. So if you overhear your man telling his mates that when you are naked together it’s like sharing a bed with a giant oil-coated squid, you should realise that he not only means this as a compliment, but that he is also feeding his bachelor buddies’ fantasies to help get them through another week.
The quickest way to lose your man is by turning on his friends. Not turning them on. Turning on them. It is important that you make the distinction. Remember that he has known them a lot longer than he has known you. Having met you, his loyalties are now divided and he is easily confused. Weaning him off years of Friday night debauchery with his mates will take some time. Don’t force him to go the cold turkey route. Right from the start of the relationship, you need to give him the impression that you don’t mind if he goes out for a few beers with the old crew. But don’t overplay your hand. Try to avoid encouraging him to go out for as long as he wants any night of the week. This will only make him suspicious. He will begin wondering about your ambivalence and before long he will have convinced himself that the reason you want him out of the way is because you are having an affair with his best friend who, strangely enough, hasn’t made the last two Friday night sessions. Then you will never get him out of the house.
At the same time, you don’t want to let him completely off the leash. I have found that men respond best when they are on one of those expandable leashes that gives them the impression that they can run free but, just as they reach the point of no return, the leash runs out and they are pulled up short. This allows you to reel your man in without too much of a struggle. It’s a bit like having a disoriented barbel on the end of your line.
If you reach a point where your man is still spending the same amount of time with his friends as when he was a bachelor, you may want to consider using the most powerful weapon in your arsenal to bring him to his senses. Don’t be coy. You know exactly what I am talking about. However, it is important that you do not use your hamster as a weapon. Rather use it as bait. More fish have been caught with tasty morsels than with baseball bats. So make it clear to him that if he goes out with his friends on a Saturday night, he should try to be home by midnight otherwise you and your tasty morsel will be fast asleep and quite unavailable until late Wednesday afternoon. Once he realises this, he will quickly rearrange his schedule to fit in with your hours of business.
Women and alcohol feed every man’s will to live. And he will soon enough adapt to circumstances once he realises that bottle stores are shut and legs are closed as a consequence of his actions.
Meeting his family
When he met your family, your mother batted her eyes while your father went straight to his study and began oiling the Walther PPK. On meeting his family, you will find things turned around.
His father will suck in his giant beer belly and try to make you laugh by indulging in a little horse-play with his son. His mother, on the other hand, will have you down as a cheap slut the moment you walk through the door. She may even be right. But it is more likely that she decided long ago that no woman would ever be good enough for her boy. Mothers like this worry me. What terrible things do they know about their gender that they aren’t sharing with the rest of us? Do they have some unique and terrifying insight into the female psyche that, if made public, would destroy life as we know it? Or are they just barking mad?
Your first fight
Statistics show that your first fight with him will be directly or indirectly linked to what you perceive as his inability to commit.
When you are with your friends, you make light of the issue. You paint him as a devilish rogue clinging to bachelorhood and make out that all he needs are a few gentle nudges or perhaps violent shoves to get him to commit himself to a proper relationship with you. This is all rubbish. Men don’t balk at commitment because they want to eat instant meals, talk to the cat and wear dirty underwear for the rest of their lives. They have trouble with commitment for one reason only, and that is because they are not in love. It really is that simple.
So now that the secret is out, you might want to think twice before light-heartedly joking about his inability to commit. It follows, then, that picking a fight with him on the grounds of his inability to commit is futile. You may as well fight with him for not being in love with you. At least there will be some entertainment value in watching him trying to answer one of the world’s great unanswerable questions.
Whatever your first fight is about, it is vital that you have sex immediately afterwards. If you are pressed for time, you can even make a start while you are still arguing. This is particularly effective if it looks like he is winning the argument.
My personal team of Puerto Rican researchers found that seven out of ten couples stay together beyond the first year if they engage in sex during or after a fight. They also found that two out of five couples never survived their first month because they made the mistake of having sex before fighting. The post-coital male is dull-witted and slow moving, while the female is generally dissatisfied and irritable. This is not a good combination for an effective fight.
Studies done by a separate team of researchers found that in seven out of eight cases, the man will lose an argument if he has it right after sex. Particularly if the argument is along the lines of:
She: “That was undoubtedly the worst sex I have ever had in my life.”
He: “…”
His first affair
Men have a well-developed ability to suffer in silence. Born with an innate sense of guilt, they can tolerate enormous amounts of emotional blackmail and sexual deprivation on the vague assumption that they probably deserve it.
Then, one day, a strange woman will toss a kind word his way and he will begin trembling all over like a freshly whipped puppy. And if she happens to stroke him, he will go down on all fours and keep licking her feet until he hears commands like, “roll over” and “give me your credit card”.
Unfortunately for men, women have a 95.3% strike rate when it comes to detecting signs of an affair. This means that cheating men are left with just a 4.7% chance of weaseling their way out of the situation. When men lie, they lose all control of their eyes. They swivel randomly in their sockets to avoid focusing on the object of their deception. This does not go unnoticed and the only reason the divorce rate is sky-high is because men cannot control their eyeballs when they lie.
Your first affair
An unidentified team of researchers from Tajikistan recently released controversial new findings that show women to be as duplicitous as men when it comes to fiddling with the new violinist on the orchestra. However, their findings were widely discredited almost from the moment they became known. It seems that society is more comfortable with research done in civilized countries like England and certain parts of North America.
There is broad agreement that men are genetically driven to spread their seed far and wide. Women, not having a spreadable seed, are inclined to stay at home knitting before the fire with the front door unlocked in the hope that a passing stranger will come in and do a spot of impromptu ploughing.
This is all a pack of filthy lies. Women, just as much as men, want to be ravaged mercilessly on a regular basis. The only difference is that women expect the ravaging to be preceded by dinner and perhaps a movie, followed by a bit of a hug and a nice chat.
If you want to have an affair, don’t give it a second thought. Even though, compared to men, you have a more developed sense of right and wrong, you are far better equipped to lie with a straight face. Watch those eyebrows, though. This balances things out nicely, and unless you are really careless, you should have many happy months or even years banging the butcher without being caught.
Your divorce
What I find remarkable is that one out of every two marriages does not end in divorce. This speaks volumes about what kind of society we have created and I, for one, would think long and hard before bringing a child into a world where he runs the very real risk of being among the 50% that gets stuck with the same person until he dies.
Everybody knows that beyond a certain point, every couple has to choose between love and sex. What happens is that the man chooses sex and the woman chooses love. Perfect. Now what? Neither of them have the energy or the inclination to start all over again with someone new, so they agree to stay together on the grounds of “companionship”. I have never heard such crap in my life. If you want a companion, get a Labrador. They make ideal replacements for the obsolete husband, not least because they share the ability to drool, break wind and eat like pigs all at the same time.
When deciding to dump him, it is important to bear in mind that men are extremely sensitive to rejection. For men, rejection implies failure. And, next to running out of beer, men fear failure more than anything.
Women are nowhere near as badly affected because they have never been encouraged to succeed, so they live in a permanent state of failure. Except it is not called this, of course. I would rather not say what is called because there are certain unspoken male codes that cannot be violated. All I can say is that it somehow ties in with the cycles of the moon and an ancient primal urge to breed and shop.
I am not suggesting that, when contemplating cutting him loose, you should bear his ego in mind for fear of hurting him. The truth is that he needs to be hurt, for the sake of the species. Unlike women, men grow stronger with every crushing blow dealt to them by the opposite sex. Their scar tissue is made from titanium while your scar tissue is porous like a coriander. This allows fresh, untainted love to seep through. If your wounds had to be hermetically sealed, like the wounds of men, there is a very good chance that you might not be able to continue propagating the species. And what kind of world would that be? A world without people, a world populated only by trees and birds and animals, that’s what kind of world it would be. Hmm.
Instead, I am suggesting that you treat his fragile ego carefully for no other reason than your personal safety and the safety of those around you. Men can only take so much rejection (13.4ml per litre) before they snap. Luckily, men have access to a very broad range of snapping methods, the most harmful of which is the taking up of golf. There are women who call themselves “golf widows” long before they even get around to shooting the stupid bastard as he heads for the 19th hole for the 375th consecutive Saturday.
Anyway. We have both reached a point where we have to move on. You, to the beginning of the cycle and me to the next chapter.
To be continued …
BEN TROVATO – Durban Poison 