Senior spring is a wonderful time, particularly if you're not taking classes. Being at school without actually having to go to school has afforded me (and a handful of my similarly toolish former AP-scholar friends) a whole lot of free time. I find that I have spent a not insignificant portion of this free time engaging in a rather shameful activity -- talking about boys.
Growing up, I was always told that I could do anything a boy could do and that boys and girls were equal. Maybe we are "equal", but we're not the same. We don't think the same way. I'm not talking the whole sciences vs. humanities divide. In our post-feminist era, it may be unfashionable to admit, but by and large girls are happy to spend time sitting around and discussing every detail of their love lives, while most guys just don't. Chalk it up to female bonding, but women's discussions of matters of the heart are perhaps better termed dissections. We devote embarrassing amounts of time and energy attempting to interpret shades of meaning in our sexual or romantic interactions. We read into things more than guys do. In recent years there has been a rash of sex columns popping up in campus newspapers. The authors of these columns are almost exclusively women. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's me standing on this sexual soapbox, and not some guy.
This, I believe, is one of the fundamental differences between the sexes. While I am certainly generalizing, I have never heard a dude say, "Wow, there were two exclamation points in her Blitz. I bet that means she (or he) wants to get it on again, or would perhaps be open to the possibility of entering into a relationship with me in the foreseeable future." Even if a guy might be thinking this, he's unlikely to actually vocalize it. In contrast, I cannot count how often I have heard female friends bemoan the fact that he didn't call (or, in the bizzaro universe that is Dartmouth, he didn't blitz).
I don't mean to paint the fairer sex as a pathetic creature who spends all of her time pining over frat dudes. But, we all have moments of weakness at times. Psychological literature indicates that women are more attentive to details, nuance and body language than men. Why are we more attentive? Probably because we endow these details with greater meaning than our male counterparts.
Given the differing weights placed on everyday interactions by each sex, it seems pretty inevitable that some feelings are going to get hurt, and it's likely to be the lady's. When my friends lament the absence of the happy sound of their BlitzMail ding (particularly post-tryst), they tend to automatically assume that if a guy doesn't blitz them, he is consciously trying to send the message that he's not interested and is therefore obviously an asshole. My response to this tends to be that rather than consciously attempting a blow off, he more likely just wasn't thinking about it. While this certainly could mean that he's not interested, it also could mean that he is into you, only it's slightly less so than he is into Halo/his homework/iron-pumping/guitar-jamming/ESPN-watching/Keystone-binging or some other stereotypically dude-esque activity.
From the female perspective, the guy becomes an inconsiderate douche if he doesn't blitz (call, text or Facebook), and from the male perspective, the girl is being an oversensitive psycho.
Furthermore, the same sequence of events can be (and frequently is) interpreted in diametrically opposing ways by each sex. Let me give you an example. My friend "Julie" was talking with her friend "Jon" about a girl he had been hooking up with, "Jane." He told Julie that he was having an okay time hooking up with Jane, but that he didn't want to date her, and therefore wasn't going to sleep with her because he thought she would take it to mean that he did. Julie then pointed out that if she were a friend of Jane's and Jane had told her that she had been hooking up with a guy for a while but he hadn't tried to sleep with her yet, her response to Jane would probably be something along the lines of, "Wow, that's so nice that he hasn't tried to get in your pants yet. He must really like you."
Oh, the irony. Clearly Jon is trying to be a stand-up guy here, but if Jane's real-life friends are anything like Julie (which I'll bet they are), it seems like his efforts at decency will probably backfire hard, leaving him with a face full of black smoke and maybe some superficial claw wounds. After all, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Maybe the ladyfriends of William Congreve, who coined the phrase, had "supportive" girl friends too. Or maybe he was just an asshole.
Frequently, when a girl really likes a guy she becomes more cautious about moving too fast sexually. It is a common conception that an effective way to tell if a guy truly likes you is to make him wait for sex. Presumably, if he is patient and doesn't bail, then you've got him hooked. However, (as is illustrated by the saga of Jon and Jane) the plan doesn't always fly. A willingness to wait for sex doesn't necessarily equal deep passionate feelings.
So, where does this leave us? Now that I've spent approximately 971 words detailing the conflicts and incompatibilities of men and women, it seems a neat and tidy tie up is in order. I'm not quite ready to throw my arms up in surrender, despite the fact that girls and guys just don't seem to get each other. Short of advocating that we totally forsake the heterosexual model, it seems the only thing we can do is recognize our gender differences, and try to keep them in mind before we freak out and start hurling blunt objects and/or profanities at our clueless/psychotic would-be lovers.
