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Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re at a party and find yourself talking to a friend’s friend. He seems really cool and makes you laugh, but honestly, you don’t find him all that attractive. Later, he asks if you want to hang out sometime. You agree… hesitantly. Then you make an excuse to leave before he can ask for your number.
Been there, done that? Then, like me, you’ve suffered from a type of romantic tunnel vision, where you lose all interest in hanging out with someone you don’t immediately see as romantic potential.
The problem with this behavior is that we need friends of the opposite sex. They help us see life from another perspective. That guy asking to hang out may be looking for something more, but he could just as well end up becoming a friend.
I go to my guy friends for their unbiased (or sometimes totally biased) opinions on everything from dating to whether I’m too fat to wear a bikini. Unlike the girls who will undoubtedly answer, “no you look great, really,” the guys will give me their honest opinions and often offer a fresh point of view.
It’s hard to explain the differences between relationships with your girl friends and relationships with your guy friends without getting into stereotypes. But it is a unique relationship I’ve learned to value as I’ve gotten older.
The most obvious example? When I need to know all the stats on the new Padres’ pitcher or an update of the Charger’s season, I get my guy friends to give me the Cliff notes version.
But more than just for sports, guy friends can be like cultural translators. Thanks to my brother’s friends for example, I can totally speak “geek.” Continue reading 'In Defense Of The Friend Zone'»
Image by Rufus Gefangenen
According to the doomsayers out there, Earth is slated for a fiery destruction barely two years from now. So, I decided to do some research of my own on the apocalypse. Fresh off my seven minutes of hardcore academic analysis on Wikipedia, I realize that the apocalypse—like women, in general—is something I’ve totally misunderstood.
Did you know that the apocalypse doesn’t refer to the end of the world? Although it could purportedly involve fracturing continents, brain-devouring zombies, or Michael Jackson, an apocalypse in itself is the disclosure of information to only a privileged few and of which a large percentage of humanity is unaware.
Isn’t it somewhat ironic that the term apocalypse could therefore refer to anything that women understand with ease, but which no man is able to comprehend?
Come to think of it, there has to be a Guypocalypse out there: knowledge hidden from all manhood; information that only the fairer, finer, testosteronally-challenged members of humanity are privy to; things that may not spell the end of the world for a guy, but will nonetheless bewilder us to no end. Things such as…. Continue reading 'Five Signs Of The Guypocalypse'»
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Ladies, if you could somehow peer into the mind of the average adult male and view his mental machinations, what do you think you would you see?
I’ll give you the answer in two simple words: hot chicks.
Hey, I admit it. Fantasies of hot chicks occupy a disproportionately large segment of our brain reserves. (Actually, chicks of pretty much every variety abound in our heads.) But it’s not all bubble baths and bikinis up in there. Accompanying these fantasies are plenty of nightmares, too! Nightmares of humiliating missteps, devastating failures, and worst-case scenarios. Nightmares that go something like these:
10. Smoothly chatting up a group of hot chicks while waiting in line at a club, only to be denied entry by the bouncer.
9. Getting shot down by a hot chick and having to make the death march back to our buddies, all of whom witnessed the shoot-down in its gruesome entirety.
8. Attempting to get in a hot chick’s pants by buying her shots and getting her drunk, only to end up puking in the men’s room after she out-drinks our pansy asses.
Continue reading 'Top Ten Guy’s Worst Nightmares'»
This time, the topic I want to write about is what my friend Kristin refers to as the sneak-a-date. Ladies, that’s when you meet a guy, and he asks you if you want to “hang out” sometime. Now, he never “officially” asks you out, so if you do hang out with him, you spend the whole night wondering if you’re on a date or not. If you happen to be interested in this guy, this is obviously a frustrating situation because you have no idea what his intentions are. On the other hand, if you’re NOT interested in him, this can be an equally frustrating situation because then you feel like he duped you into going out on a date with him. Anyway, the sneak-a-date is something that several people have mentioned to me recently, so I figured it might be interesting to strum up some discussion on this. To that end…. Continue reading 'Talk To Us: Have you ever been a victim of a sneak-a-date?'»
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Determined Derek is not the smoothest guy in the world. He tries hard, and he’s persistent. But, as real life often teaches us, effort without skill and persistence without strategy are rarely adequate.
Dawn and Dina are roommates who play on the same flag football team as Derek. One day after a game, Derek decides to ask Dawn out. She accepts, but on their date, Dawn finds that she has absolutely no romantic interest in Derek. Despite the disappointment, Derek remains undaunted.
A few weeks later, after another game, Derek asks Dina out. Although hesitant, Dina decides to give him a chance, as well. Unfortunately, she feels a similar lack of romantic interest as Dawn. Worse yet, she realizes that Derek is saying the exact same lines and taking her to the exact same places as he did with Dawn. When she tells Dawn about her date later that night, Dina notes wryly, “guys gotta know that women talk, so they should probably change up their game if they want to date a girl’s friend.”
In my quest to understand the female mind, few topics have spawned quite the discussion—and disagreement—as the following question that I posed online to a group of friends:
“If a guy asks a girl out and gets turned down, what is the ‘statute of limitations’ for how long he has to wait before he can ask out one of the girl’s friends?” Continue reading 'Determined Derek Double Dips'»
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