So FAR this discussion has been philosophical and historical but how do you personally handle sex at the office ... or the lack of it?
That depends on how you handle sex anywhere—or the lack of it, I should think—and that would be determined by your age, your background, your religious beliefs and your tolerance for the human race. Besides what your head thinks about sex, what your body thinks about it would also have some bearing on your responses to sexy overtures—or the lack of them—in or out of the office.
I haven’t a scrap of reticence in advising you about your responses. But first, I have to ask how old you are.
If you’re the baby-worker at the office—under twenty—I think you have to bear in mind the difference between your age and everybody else’s and not expect to get invited to do the things grownups do, much less enjoy them. When they do include you in, it can be lonelier and more depressing than when they don’t!
A boss in one of my early jobs promised me a ride home one day, but said we first had to stop for a drink with some of his cronies. There we were, four drinkers and baby Helen, age eighteen, crammed in a booth. I just barely got down a Tom Collins, which I had heard was the mildest thing you could drink, when a new crony joined us, turned to me and asked, “What are you drinking?” I supposed he was just curious about what a lovely girl like me drank, so I said, “A Tom Collins.” First thing you know I had another one of the wretched things in front of me. I was numb with self-consciousness and boredom in that group, and they would have been much happier if I’d been home playing with my dolls. An older girl might have enjoyed herself.
Okay. Don’t rush fraternization with the grownups.
Eschewing office wolves when you’re young—even if they are interested in you, which they may not be—makes even more sense than eschewing office drinking. Sometimes it’s hard for you to determine whether somebody is wolfy or not. You think he is, but on the other hand you figure maybe you’re just young and dumb and the way he’s acting is the way men act in offices. Rule: Your natural instincts are usually sound.
In one of the ad agencies where I worked, an art director needed a picture of some pretty legs in a hurry, and one of the younger girls was rushed off to a photographer. (Sometimes photos are just for layout purposes, not for final ads, so they are whipped up with free office models.) The girl told me later that the leg photography took five minutes, but then the photographer told her he was supposed to do some head and shoulder shots. He somehow got her out of her shirt and into a bolt of velvet which he proceeded to drape and re-drape endlessly around her pretty bosom. Could any photographer be that fussy about where the folds fell, she wondered, and what was all that fumbling? Still she didn’t want to seem childish or critical or make anybody mad back at the agency. A few more pets and pats and she followed her intuition and bolted. An older girl would have spotted the phony much sooner.
Another young lady told me of going out to lunch with what seemed like a terribly nice typewriter salesman who often visited her firm. Thirty minutes and twenty miles later she found herself in a boarded-up beach house. Her date said he’d left some papers there and they’d just stop by and look.
Naughty, naughty, silly, silly men do pick on the wrong women sometimes. A grown-up girl might have enjoyed hunting for mythical papers in a beach house. This chap was a genuine creep to have snared a child. (Nothing happened. They tussled, she flew back to the car and demanded lunch.)
Second warning: If your instinct goes “sniff, sniff—peculiar, peculiar,” trust your instinct, even when you’re an older girl.
The same caution and sniff-sniff should prevail in getting employment when you’re young. A wolfish interviewer isn’t necessarily a reason to bolt if you’re old enough to take care of yourself. Nancy told me of an initial chat with a tire tycoon who very smoothly caught her in a hammerlock and pressed his mouth to hers as she was getting up from her chair. She was broke and decided to take the job anyway. Her instincts said this lunatic acted that way with all girls and probably never followed through. She was right.
A young girl hasn’t had enough experience in separating the cobras from the garter snakes, so she should avoid all snakes until she’s older.
Some girls who are all grown up, filled out and not necessarily puritanical believe that all men in offices, no matter how nice or how important, up to and including a J. Paul Getty, are off-limits.
A very hip and man-loving friend of mine says, “An office romance? Never! So far as I’m concerned the men I work with are absolutely neuter. They might as well have ‘eunuch’ written across their Tattersall vests. I can flirt with them a bit, admire them and concern myself with their professional welfare, but they have the same appeal as my desk lamp. Bright, useful, ornamental—but turned off when I leave the office.”
All I can say is that some girls won’t visit Mexico for fear of getting hoof-and-mouth disease; and they’ll just have to miss Mexico’s exotic delights. The office abstainer never knows what might have been for her, either. As for you and me—who will hope to be south of the border often and who wouldn’t pass up a dreamy, creamy man if we found him in quarantine—what men shall we accept from the office sampler?
Picking and choosing must be up to you. Does Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith tell Walston & Company? You know who appeals to you better than I do. You know whether you think married men are poison ivy even for lunch. (If I were a married man I’d kind of resent this. If I’m good enough for somebody to have married, I ought to be good enough to go to lunch with.) Anyway the selection of the delicacies is up to you.
If by any chance there aren’t any delicacies around the place, that’s bad. You may have to change companies or even change fields.
If there are plenty of men in the office but they don’t seem to be responding to you, perhaps they sense some unconscious criticism of themselves on your part. Many girls want the things men give— marriage, a playhouse and babies—without really liking men. I have a little friend who adores children but is secretly investigating the possibility of a virgin birth.
Some women of forty are still man-hating little girls too. They take great pride in their purity and choosiness, but their purity and choosiness have driven every last man away—as they intended. A grown woman should be womanly, warm and wooing, though with finesse. Prostitutes and call girls do get married (and for Pete’s sake nobody is suggesting that you be one) while many child-women do not. Prostitutes are used to being with men, are comfortable with men and know how to make men happy. And they don’t demand that all men have exactly the right credentials.
Some women in offices only go for SNAPUMS (Single Non-Alcoholic Paragons Upright Morally). The trouble is if you wait for SNAPUMS, even to practice on, you may be sitting there just waiting and waiting next to a whole pile of your unused wiles.
Suppose you do like men, you are not a child-woman. Let’s check off the basics and see if you’ve attended to them.
Easy friendliness is a wonderful thing. Do be easy to talk to. The girl whose male associates know everything about her, however, isn’t particularly sexy. (Is a World Almanac sexy?) If you load more than one or two close friends up with too much personal information, it can be used against you at politics time anyway.
It would be silly to try to be mysterious with your mother, your intimate friends or even a husband. You can live in a little pocket of mystery for the men you work with, however. A man likes to speculate about you ... to think you don’t belong to anybody and therefore might be his . . . even if he’s married!
A friend of mine saw one of the secretaries from his office in a restaurant one evening with a man. The next day at work she asked Tony how he liked the cuisine at the place but didn’t say a word about the man she’d been with. Tony decided instantly it must have been her brother or her ballet teacher, definitely not a beau. Dreams unimpaired! You must remember that all office romances which were meant to be do not flower the first moment. Some have to be watered, fertilized and tended through two or more Decembers, and that means staying “romantic” in a man’s eyes.
Men are appalled by harsh, nasal voices, seduced by soft, whispery ones. Try to clean up a bad voice if you have one. It isn’t attractive always to be blabbing on the telephone with a girl friend when a man walks into your office, either. (Lock the door or telephone at lunch.) You’re in a man’s world, remember (and isn’t it heaven?), not a sorority house.
Just pretend some man at the office is going to dump the contents of your purse right out on your desk today. Would he find you toting batde-fatigued Kleenex, eight shades of lipstick, and three shredding cigarettes? Why are you, incidentally?
Leaving a lacy, white hankie with your initials and your fragrance in a man’s office is foxy if not downright sexy. There’s something old-fashioned and feminine about girls who carry hankies, and scent is the most evocative of all senses. That’s another reason to let one special scent be yours. You can also leave scented hankies under a man’s pillow or inside the pillowcase, but that’s for later.
All right, you’ve attended to the basics. You’re enthusiastic about men. You also like yourself, dress yummily, smell delicious, are good at your job, seem eager to make friends and be approached by coworkers, have lots of white hankies—and still Ivan Denisovitch had a better social life in the Ukraine.
I think you’re ready for a pep talk and some new ammunition. Pep talk first.
Perhaps you worry that men in offices always go straight for the beautiful sexpot. Naturally they go for her. What man wants his manhood impugned? But frequently they also go for some little nothingburger who looks to you like something even flu germs wouldn’t care to hang around. Midge Dimsdale was that girl at a place where I worked. Midge didn’t walk, she gangled. Her chest went in instead of out. She did have lovely skin and nice eyes, but that girl looked more like a boy. But the teeth-gnashing that went on over her! Half the men in the place were in love with Midge, and we girls were more depressed than if she’d been pretty. I finally asked one of the men exactly what she had.
“She looks at you with those eyes,” he said, “and you get the feeling nobody ever listened to you before or cared what you said. She kind of drinks you in, then she acts as though what she drank had knocked her out and she’d gone straight to heaven.”
It was a madly disappointing answer. Obviously Midge was a good listener. That’s part of what she had. Aside from that I think she also had the Plain Girl Power, and this man just couldn’t explain it. I’ve come to understand much more about it since then and used it many times. The Power comes to plain—or at least not-ravingbeauty—girls who need men to like them so much they just sort of reach out like spring flowers and drink in the man’s face and voice the way a blossom wolfs down the sunshine. This is how it works:
You want—you need—with every fiber of your being, to make a particular man like you. Perhaps you only have a lunch date in which to make good. Well, to start with, you never let your eyes leave his face. Inside you, you simply go on the make, in a very quiet, private, dedicated, personal, one-track-minded way. You pray and work right through lunch. You let your eagerness for him to like you and find you physically attractive filter through your charm. You accidentally touch his hand or brush his knee once or twice, as we mentioned in Lunchland. Being skittish and jumpy dissipates the Power. You’ve got to try to sit or stand still and seem to relax. (Hah!) But extreme primness and properness and only speaking when spoken to are out too. You’ve got to come on a little . . . say funny, happy things and discuss whatever he’s discussing, but pay attention to his thought waves and talk waves as though you were a surfer trying not to fall off your board.
This kind of charm is actually more lethal than sexiness (not that you aren’t sexy on the inside). The beautiful sexpot expects everything to come her way just because she’s there, but the plain charmer reacts—and what man doesn’t like to be reacted to? She impales a man, puts herself in his blood. This is what author Ernest John Knapton has to say about a famous charmer, anything but pretty, in his book, Empress Josephine (Harvard University Press): “Josephine .. . was mistress of the art of charm. Bonaparte was pale, thin, awkward—presenting anything but the image of a victorious general of the new Republic. His appearance, however, did not prevent him from being invited to call again. ‘One day,’ he long afterwards recalled, when I was sitting next to her at table, she began to pay me all manner of compliments on my military qualities. Her praise intoxicated me. From that moment I confined my conversation to her and never left her side. I was passionately in love with her, and our friends were aware of this long before I ever dared to say a word about it.’“
Your Plain Girl Power won’t work on every man. Napoleon’s brothers hated Josephine. A couple of men thought Midge Dimsdale was a bird. But how many men do you need? The PGP will certainly work on several. Fortunately, men at the office are there where you can get to them and work on them as many days as you need to.
Here’s another Plain Girl technique. It’s hitting just a bit below the belt, but when desperate measures are called for . . .
Over a coffee or cocktail date, or perhaps when you’re alone in his office—you’ll know the time—say to your beloved who doesn’t know you’re alive, “Dick, I’ve finally stamped out my crush. I’ve never told you this, but when you first came to work here I went completely out of my head. I can’t remember in my whole life ever being so impressed with anybody or so taken with a man at first sight. You can ask Maryanne because I told her about it ... I flipped utterly and completely. It seems insane now. We’re such good friends and I know how crazy you are about Adeline (his girl friend, the bird). Somehow I just felt in the mood to tell you about this today.”
Nothing, but nothing, is so unsettling and even inflammatory to a man as knowing a woman no longer wants him—especially when he never knew of her interest in the first place. He’ll worry. He’ll brood. And just let Adeline make a false move . . .
It may just have occurred to you that Plain Girl Power is the same as flirting. How clever of you! I wrote everything I know about flirting, practically, in Sex and the Single Girl (deep-down gazing at him, lots of hair versus skimpy, etc.). I’ll just add a few comments by another first-class flirt, my friend Ann. Ann says: “Flirting isn’t swinging your hips or breathing heavily. It’s being feminine to your quivering core and being totally aware of the man you’re with. It’s fun to love men and see fine and fabulous things in them. Tomorrow they may disappoint you because they are really very ordinary, but for a while they are golden people. And if they are golden people, you want to listen to them. You want to stand just four inches closer to them, to touch them once lovingly on the arm, to discover what they are saying in the depths of their eyes; you want to have them aware of the scent of you, the flicker of your manicure, the gloss of your satin-clean cheek, the quick tenderness of your sympathy, the elegantly ordered way your handbag looks inside, the way you respond to what they’re telling you, the unique and treasured place you and they share in the universe right this minute.
“Whoever you are with is the only person who has any place in your thoughts . . . and the present, current pulsating situation is the first, last and only situation of its kind. It must be a built-in or unconsciously practiced ability to concentrate on The Big Present Moment.”
Gee, I would think such a thing would help any girl get what she wanted out of office maneuvers.
As for being choosy about whom you flirt with, Ann says:
“I have—so help me—never gone out with a man—in fact, I’ve practically never known a man at work—who I didn’t think was absolutely terrific in some way. Heaven knows, that special merit may not have been apparent to his own mother, and often I could not see it a week later, but at the time ... So he was short, balding and sort of oily . . . well, he had an accent that sounded exactly like Yves Montand and he knew how to order wine, both attributes good enough for several evenings while I hung on to every seductive syllable and gazed in utter trancelike fascination over the rim of a wineglass. Or, he was two hundred and ten pounds of struck-dumb awkwardness in the office, but he taught me the most beautiful jackknife and full- and half-gainers you ever saw. If you have this attitude, the rest comes naturally. Your flattering, breathless murmurs have that ring of pure sincerity because you do mean them.”
No, presumably you wouldn’t flirt with office menfolk all the time, but a lot of this attitude of love and listening can prevail when you take dictation, chat with men in conferences, ride with them to meet the client, walk from office to office. Again, I would say, make every man you work with, from the mailroom boy up, just a little bit in love with you. You’ll have a rich, full office life!
Don’t be afraid of a man’s economic or social position. As I’ve said about a dozen times, stalking is easier if you are closer to a man’s own professional level, but affairs cut across all class lines for an attractive girl.
In a fit of pique my friend Polly marched out of the steno pool into the president’s office one day to say, “Mr. Halliburton, we girls have had it... we are getting as blind as owls with all that sunlight streaming in every afternoon. Now when are the draperies going up?” Mr. Halliburton said he’d look into the drapery situation right away but obviously wanted to look into Polly too. “Come in any time, Miss . . . Miss . . . Drury? Drury. The coffee pot’s always boiling back here,” he said. The minute the draperies are up, Polly’s going right back to say thank you and have a cup of coffee. I wouldn’t be surprised if something besides coffee began to boil soon around that office.
Besides watching for opportunities to fraternize with your own brass and other attractive co-workers, you will want to spot and stalk visitors too. Allison had her eye on a New Yorker cartoonist for three weeks before she pounced. “He’d been coming into the office regularly to see one of the editors,” she said. “I knew their business was almost finished, so just before my time ran out I nabbed him at the elevator. I was so scared my teeth were chattering, but I said, ‘Mr. Darrow (it wasn’t Whitney Darrow but somebody just as famous, so I’m borrowing his name), I’m food editor of Homemakers and I just can’t resist telling you that I’ve loved your cartoons ever since I first spotted them. I think you are the finest cartoonist in the world, and I’ve always wanted to know how long you worked on that fantastic mural in the Peekskills.’“
Pretty smart girl. She established herself as an executivess so he wouldn’t think he was talking to a stage-struck errand girl. She also asked him a question about his work so he would be drawn into conversation.
He was enormously pleased. They chatted. He didn’t ask her for a date, but he may. At least she has established contact.
Small Man. Don’t ever forget how rough it must be to be a little man. Think how impotent you feel when men rave about Playboy Bunny breasts and yours are built more like a real bunny’s ... or how infuriating it is that men think cutiepie petite little creatures are more feminine when you are female to the depths of your five-foot-nine Bob Waterfield frame. I’m not saying be nice to small men because it’s philanthropy day . . . I’m saying you might come across something good. Do pick out an especially nice five-foot-five or under man and say to yourself, “Him heap big man inside . . . me bring him coffee, him open doors for me, carry heavy files for me, drag chairs across floor for me. Pretty soon him feel nine feet tall. Me have nice man in my life.”
On your way, Minnie-ha-ha.
Neurotic. Compliment him for what he isn’t ... in a way. Pick a man who periodically turns into a raving, raging beast and tell him during a relatively calm period how much you admire his integrity. “You handle your staff so beautifully, Mr. Bates. I have seen you lose your temper, but we always know we’ll be treated with complete fairness and compassion.”
Tell any man he’s so very “normal” and he’ll love it . . . now that eccentrics are out and conformists are in.
Milquetoast. “It’s so wonderful to know somebody who thinks around here. I always know that while everybody else is fighting and screaming, you’re busy coming up with a solution.”
Wit. If a man tells stories, whether he tells them well or terribly, badger him to tell you his latest. He is the funny man in your life. One of Bob Hope’s gag writers called to tell me stories for years after he was married and I belonged to somebody else. He knew he broke me up and it pleased him.
We could go on and on, but you get the picture . . . tailor your compliment to the man.
Asking for rides home from work is a good way to get things going. Offering rides is even better. Find out exactly what men live in your flight pattern and let it be known you’re available in case of flat tires, dead batteries or other emergencies. If you drive a fair distance, fast friendships can form. If the man is married, you may not be interested in him romantically, but you may be invited to the next party he and his wife give. (Shell want to establish that you really do have pop eyes and wear braces as she’s been told.)
One girl I know needed a ride to work after she dropped her car off at the garage. She knew a delightful office knight who drove to work that way. “Gee, Sandra,” he said, “111 remember if I can, but I’m usually so preoccupied when I go by that corner . . .” Occupied, schmoccupied! When Sandra saw his red Corvette hurtling down Glendale Boulevard, and she was sure there was no other traffic between her and it, she plopped herself down flat in the middle of the road and stayed there until he got to her corner! He had two blocks in which to stop, but let’s face it, she was a brave girl . . . with a lumphead on her hands. She rides in the Corvette anytime she wants to now. And who knows where shell go from there?
Parties outside your firm may be swinging places. I know one girl who has made an art of attending large business and professional cocktail parties and pretending to be part of the management group giving the party. She selects a likely man, finds out from spies that he isn’t part of the host group and tells him she’s been delegated to amuse him for the evening.
There’s a system for you!
I know, I absolutely know that you can have acres of sexy fun at the office if you really care to.
Charming and flirting can, of course, lead to an affair. They don’t necessarily. They may lead only to a busier, happier life more replete with beaux—or they may even get you married, if that’s what you want. An affair, however, could result.
I don’t suppose you need any rules to know how to conduct an office affair. They move right along like guppy schools and may flourish without complications for weeks or months or even years. Most affairs, however—even well-managed, office-based ones—often have wretchedly unhappy moments. So here are a few hints for survival.
Marriages have blotchy moments, too, of course, and are full of problems, but affairs are probably more full of problems because society doesn’t approve of them. Society hasn’t been able to stamp them out and probably never will, but it can and does make everybody feel awfully sticky.
Aside from feeling that what you’re doing may not be exactly right, girls in an affair are often wretched because of the wretches they are mixed up with.
I used to think only a certain kind of girl went for wretches, for the exploiters. I don’t think so any more. There are girls, to be sure, who never pick any other kind of man. Apparently they can’t tolerate a man who really loves them and so they go around hippity-hop collecting one creep after another. Sacher-Masoch can roll over and expire again for all I care—I think there are very few dyed-in-the wool, first-rate masochists. Why go ape over pain? I do think a girl can be comfortable in a situation that’s bad. Again and again she picks the difficult man, because he’s the kind she’s dealt with in the past, and she doesn’t have to learn any new rules.
Some girls pick “impossibles” to avoid getting married, I’m told. They carry on about how much they want to marry while grabbing off the one really confirmed bachelor in the territory, or the most solidly-married philanderer available.
Not all girls having trouble with men are aligned with “impossibles,” of course. Some men just have plain old faults (if the faulty man happens to be married, the same faults are probably driving his nice, normal wife out of her skull too).
Although she may not make a practice of it, I don’t happen to think any girl, no matter how “well-adjusted,” is totally immune to being attracted to a nut at some time in her life. Maybe in her youth she only headed straight for baby SNAPUMS. At age thirty-two, however, she sails blithely spang into the arms of an impossible! I’ve seen it happen to my best friends. They had such nice men in their lives while they commiserated with me about some nut or other who was not cracking satisfactorily. Eight or ten years later I was married to a lovely “possible” (with whom I expect to spend the rest of my life) and some of my friends are now nut-cracking. I’m not smug. I just say that’s the way the “impossibles” crumble.
Very well then, if you’re temporarily involved with a monster and suffering like mad, I see no reason for you to think you’re all that tragic, special and neurotic. You’re really quite run of the mill!
Two men in offices who undoubtedly give girls the most trouble are Don Juans and Married Men. I dealt with both species rather extensively in Sex and the Single Girl and will try not to repeat myself. (You have read that book, haven’t you?) Just for identification purposes, however, let me say that the D.J. is generally characterized by being better than average looking, physically strong, tender, generous and smart. He also does the pursuing, which most girls love. (If you’d be a little more pursuing yourself—with some other kind of man, of course—you wouldn’t be such a standing target for a D.J. maybe.)
The D.J. gives you the impression that you undo him as he has never been undone. “One night Van unbuttoned my blouse just two buttons,” Gerry says, “and saw the mildest cleavage this side of an Indian brave. It was all I had, but it surely wasn’t sensational. Nevertheless he gasped. He foamed. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful in his life. He was so profoundly moved he actually convinced me at that moment, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no other girl in the world had cleavage like that.”
To capsule a bit further, there are always other women in a Don Juan’s life, and you sense it unless you have absolutely no female antennae. Nevertheless, if the panel chairman said, “Will Philip’s real love please stand up,” you’d get up . . . along with the rest of the mob.
After a D.J. experience or two you can get to recognize one. Janice says, “I dropped in to meet our new promotion manager the other day and caught my breath. ‘He’s one!’ I said. The handshake, the straight, warm, steady gaze, the sexy waves coming off him . . . ‘Could we have lunch one day?’ he asked. ‘Of course,’ I said. You pretend he’s moving in like mobile television equipment because you’re so attractive, that he wouldn’t do that with any other girl— but of course you’re a ninny.
“We did have lunch and sure enough, we wound up in the back of a dark little cafe, arms around each other, declaring undying love by the end of lunch. If he’d thrown me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carted me off, I wouldn’t have cared. I got out in time, though. I refused the next lunch date to gain a little time. I’d just been through one D.J. experience and was battle-scarred. Sure enough, in only a few weeks I began to notice up and down the halls the broken bodies of girls he had got to.”
I wont go into why Don Juans do it. I barely know why we’re attracted to them. I do have several dabs of philosophy and advice for dealing with them, however, and here they are.
1. Don’t compare yourself and your affair to a girl who doesn’t have a difficult man on her hands. If you discuss it, she’ll only tell you that all men are a bit eccentric . . . even her dear Jim is panting for a blue-eyed, blonde waitress in Schrafft’s. Listen, you’ve got a different kind of man on your hands from dear Jim. Yours is more eccentric and the two fellows just aren’t comparable. You might try to face up to the fact, however, that while your man is more trouble and won’t fit into an acceptable mold, he may also be more fascinating and you can try to enjoy him while he lasts (or while you last).
2. Don’t suppose you are less attractive a woman than your flaming Don Juan is a man simply because he has so many women after him. If you worked as hard as he does (and weren’t in love with him), you could be quite a little scalp collector too.
3. You can save yourself a great deal of wear and tear if you stop pretending that he’s true to you. You know very well you have a truth mechanism inside you which works as inexorably and flawlessly as an IBM machine. You feed it his version of what he did last night, it digests all these “facts” and pretty soon it shoots you back a card which says, “The son of a bitch is lying.”
The smart thing to do, if you’re up to it, is say, “All right, I’m not the only one, but I’m going to give those others a run for their money.” Some very attractive and persistent women have, as far as outsiders are able to observe anyway, tamed and domesticated some flagrant girl-chasers.
4. If you’ve tried valiantly to tame and domesticate one and things aren’t working out for you, don t blame yourself. While most life situations do respond to hard work, drive and determination, most D.J. tie-ups do not. The more you put in, the more indifference you may get out.
5. Just because you may manage to get a Don Juan to some idyllic vacation hideaway out of the city and away from your competition, don’t suppose you really have him. He will drive you mad writing postcards and buying mementos for the girls he left at home.
6. You may be confused about the turn things have taken. In the beginning he chased you. He had to slay ninety-two dragons (including your indifference) to get to you. Now he’s acting as casual about you as Mr. Clean does about dirt.
Don’t keep asking yo0urself what you’re doing wrong. What you did wrong is done. You succumbed! Certain men can’t bear a conquest. Anybody who likes them couldn’t possibly be worth very much, they figure, because they don’t like themselves much either. (That’s junior-grade parlor psychiatry, but I just thought I’d throw it in.)
7. Trying to intrigue and torment this kind of man by turning down dates will bring only temporary satisfaction. He will be piqued. The moment you go back to him on a steady basis, however, you might as well not have bothered with your litde war games. Their usefulness is as done with as last year’s push-ups. Rather than acting hard-to-get, which is rough on a girl in love, you might just as well accept the parties, picnics and ball games—at least you get them out of him. When you take a stand—marry or else—you are going to have to do it by turning down more than a few dates. You’ll probably have to disappear completely for a while—if not forever.
8. Don’t be surprised if, without meaning to, you find you’ve broken off your affair prematurely and are sitting there with the bits and pieces around you. (You were only talking, one thing led to another and whammo . . . the fight of the century!) An unhappy love affair breeds this kind of fight. You’ll probably be back together again in twenty-four hours. When the time comes to break up, you usually have to do it more deliberately or it won’t work.
9. The pain induced by jealousy and insecurity over a man is much, much worse than anybody lets on, and the symptoms are rarely dealt with realistically. All anybody ever tells you is “don’t be jealous and insecure.” The “don’t be’s” can only say it because they aren’t dealing with the same kind of man you are.
Is there anything worse than the feeling you get when the IBM hands you the card that says he was unfaithful? Or it can be a breathtaking body blow when a girl friend innocently tells you he asked her for a drink. You are not alone! Others too have known the three-o’clock-in-the-mornings that are greenish-white with worry and loneliness, when the room is full of wet, cold, soft, floating amorphous things more frightening than nightmares.
Dawn’s approach helps some. Having a job you must go to helps even more.
10. You can be this worried about another man later—how’s that for consolation! Anyway, don’t think this man is so terribly special and different for causing you such pain, or that you are particularly neurotic and “different” from your girl friends for letting him.
There, that’s enough about pesky old D.J.’s!
That brings us up to the married men at the office. One of them may bring you special and different problems in an affair, but the problems are so boring and commonplace we don’t even need to describe them! I’m not altogether unsympathetic to strayed married men (for all the reasons delineated earlier, and considering the creatures they’re expected to remain faithful to). Having been a single girl working in an office many years, however, I know the wracking problems of a single girl involved with such a man, no matter how deeply he cares for her.
In all fairness—I can run toward either goal post—it is more difficult for most married men to conduct an affair than a single girl ever realizes. She thinks he’s just a little out of breath when he gets to her apartment. Actually he’s been plotting and scheming, lying and conniving, dodging and running for four solid days to get there. Men sacrifice—money, time, energy and integrity. Never mind that nobody twisted their arms. You, a single working girl, have some advantages you never even think about. You never have to sneak. You never have to lie (which most men don’t really enjoy). You never have to feel guilty about hurting someone dear to you. When it’s over, you can suffer in public if you like. He can’t tell anyone, now that he doesn’t have your ear.
You both pay—with different tender—but you pay most. (I’m running for the other goal post now.) He has the practical responsibility of running the affair, the awkwardness of explaining at home. You, however, pay with your insides.
I don’t want to talk you out of any liaison you may be involved in, but here are a few philosophical thoughts and twigs of advice for the girl who is involved with somebody else’s husband.
1. If you’re willing to go through a series of tortures and shocks that would try a fakir’s nervous system, you may get him. One woman I know stuck it out for six years and finally, in exasperation, married another man who’d been in the wings. On receiving her telegram from Greenwich her real love telephoned and said, “Okay. You win. Don’t consummate the marriage. I’ll fly in and get it annulled.” He did, got a divorce himself, and he and she have been happily married seventeen years now.
I think you know in your heart practically from the beginning whether you have a real chance of marrying him. If you do, you’re on your own. I suggest morphine, yoga and a copy of Jane’s Fight-ing Ships to see you through. If you know that marriage is completely out of the question, then you’re an idiot not to keep other men in your life. Perhaps you can’t break off with the man just yet, but you can have lots of other friends. They are the only things—plus your job—that can knit and purl you when you become utterly unraveled.
Janice (a real live girl with another name) goes a step further. “Never, no matter how much in love,” she says, “be faithful to a married man you aren’t married to.” The other night Janice had her two current lovers and one ex—all with wives—for dinner. The men didn’t know about each other. The wives didn’t know about Janice. I watched her charm, feed and captivate everybody that evening, wives included. She would have done well at the court of Louis XIV.
2. When you feel you are giving more than you are getting by practically anybody’s reckoning, you must take a stand. Many married men are grievously thick-headed when it comes to understanding that what you want from a relationship may not be the same thing they want (brief and idyllic dalliance at their convenience).
Gretchen gave an à deux supper party for her lover recently—breast of pheasant under glass, braised endive, iced champagne, perfect crepes, fire in the fireplace and Gretchen herself in a costume that would have unloosed Tristram from Isolde. She didn’t hear from her friend for two weeks, and when he did call he said, “Shall we have supper like that again?”
Gretchen explained the facts of life. She adored having dinner parties for him, but there would be no more until he showed that he could reciprocate with kindness, affection, loyalty and dinner plans of his own. He did.
When a married man behaves selfishly and you know he “isn’t really like that,” chances are he’s become lodged in a gelatin of guilt, fright and remorse. (I’ve got to send this off to Betty Crocker!) That is understandable, but these are his problems, really, not yours. If he continues to see you, he must behave like a big boy, and you must get more out of it than on-again off-again affection. Otherwise, unload that man! (I promised I wouldn’t say it, but it might be a good idea to unload him anyway.)
3. Don’t fret that you are not the cool, practical beauty who can bring off these liaisons with more equanimity. Give a man a girl who enjoys sex for sex’s sake, without guilt feelings or possessive qualities, and who doesn’t care what he does between-times so long as he sees her every other Thursday, and she’ll quickly become a puzzle to him and a problem to herself. In our society that girl would have to be considered a kook. Her being a completely “sensible” biological creature would be no more desirable to him or “good” for her than her being that mythical ideal girl—the nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store. At least that’s how things stand with us twentieth century ladies right now.
4. When you are going to a psychiatrist during an affair, the man in your life is usually horrified, especially if he’s married. He will gingerly say to you, “I’m sure you don’t talk about me to that doctor, do you?” Don’t hit him! Just say, “I’d really prefer not to talk about my analysis until I’m a litde further along, if you don’t mind.”
Girls in love with a Don Juan or married man don’t have all the problems, of course. Paula is going with a guy who is always telling her, “That’s a good light for you” when they are practically sitting in the dark.
Jean is stuck with a nonlicensed magician who puts his arm around girls’ waists at parties but so high up he can tell instantly whether they do or don’t pad.
If your man, whoever he is, is a bit of a terror, and if the affair, as affairs will, is backing and filling and going nowhere, here are a few general words of condolence and advice:
1. The weaker your ego, the more devastating the love affair. Girls who have a pretty healthy opinion of themselves generally don’t suffer so much.
If you’re suffering badly but aren’t ready to end it, off to the psychiatrist with you! Go on . . . shoo . . . scat!
2. Don’t be alarmed if you are inconsistent in behavior . . . one day it’s love and kisses, the next day you’re looking for a blunt instrument. The less you are on equal footing with a man—he’s a chaser, you’re constant; he’s married, you’re single; he’s famous, you’re obscure—the less possibility there is that you can be eternally sweet to him. People who bring the same set of liabilities and assets to an affair—you’re both single, both divorced with children, both married and have to be home before dark—naturally have greater understanding.
3. If a man doesn’t want to marry you, of course you’re in pain. This isn’t a Chagall, a new Simca or a lease on a Swiss villa he’s turning down—it’s you.
If you’ve fought him down to the mat for several months running, I suggest you let him up off the mat for a breath of air. Granted most men have the pick-up of a tortoise when it comes to rushing off to get married, but the man may have a reason. You’re too young for him. He thinks you wouldn’t be faithful. He knows he wouldn’t be faithful. He doesn’t love you enough. (That’s not a bad reason, dear.) He’s contemplative and you’re a swinger. He likes boys.
The man could be trying to save you a rather somber life.
4. Few affairs are severed with dignity. You usually wind up bawling and screeching as you promised yourself you never would when the end came. It doesn’t make a particle of difference whether you play it like Margaret Leighton. The important thing is to get across the idea that it’s over ... if you really mean it to be.
5. The more “desperately” in love you’ve been—the more insistent on marriage, the more clobbered, the more mauled—the more you have to stay away when you break up. A girl who has only toyed with a man might call him up from time to time just for old times’ sake. You have to stay away completely.
6. A man is hurt at the end of an affair too. To the naked eye he may seem as unaffected as spring’s first robin, but don’t you believe it. Someone really close to him—a sister, a mother, a buddy—will tell you he’s actually in shock. He may suffer even more than you because he’s a man and not supposed to show it.
7. When an affair is over, it usually isn’t possible to continue to work in the same office. It will be you who must get the new job, too. That’s protocol. Maybe you were ready for one. I’m sure everything is for the best!
There hasn’t been much talk in these pages about love. So what about love—the true, tender, trusting, everlasting, with-all-your-heart kind? I don’t think I have to tell you about that! You’ll know when it happens and you’ll know what to do about it, and all the “false” feelings you’ve had before (which seemed real at the time) will look like a Christmas tree out in the trash can on the second of January. It could be, you know, that he will be somebody from the office—his office anyway.