A college friend of mine sent me an email this afternoon around 5:30, wanting to discuss logistics an arrangement next week. A strange thing happened. Once I noticed that the email had arrived, I replied. Immediately. I wouldn’t have thought to do otherwise. What would I gain by imposing an artificial delay on my response?
This doesn’t mean I’m always available. If I’m writing code or a blog post, I let calls go to voicemail and don’t check my email, not wanting to break my “flow”. I occasionally forget to return a call or write someone, but I always feel bad about it when I do, and it doesn’t happen often. I don’t enjoy flaking, don’t see a point in it, and don’t know why I would. Is it supposed to project status? Could’ve fooled me. I tend to think of flakes as indecisive losers, not “popular” people.
Women who flake do so because it’s part of their “busy game”. A lot of women, bizarrely, equate being unavailable and scarce with their time with a projection status. Sorry I don’t have time for you; I just have such an exciting life. To quote Helen Jordan, the immensely successful, but vapid and presumably untalented, novelist in Happiness, “I hate Saturday nights. Everybody wants me, Joy. You have no idea”. In truth, no man interprets a “packed social calendar”, much less outright flakage, with popularity in any meaningful sense of the word. If a woman is too busy to see a man once a week, and constantly making him apply for time, we assume she’s passive-aggressive, uninterested, or completely out of control of her life. In modern America, who isn’t “busy”? Yet most people still find time to be with their friends, family, and significant others. Most people need that. Regarding the “status” associated with a packed social calendar, I can’t buy it. I’m a person of average social means and skills, and I have no problem filling up my calendar to such a degree that I’m only alone when I want to be.
Men aren’t perfect, obviously. Sometimes we’re late or forget to respond to an email. Yet I think that most of us, those who are running “game” aside, have good intentions. We want to be good friends, good dates, and good boyfriends. We don’t see any point in infuriating other people who value us enough to spend time with us. We want to keep our friendships and relationships, knowing how rare great people can be.
Those men who do flake are poorly regarded, seen as unreliable and not really men. They don’t keep their friends or get promoted. They’re the first people to be let go during a layoff. Invitations to parties stop reaching them. Also, no one would show up 15 minutes late for an interview to project “status”, so why would anyone do this on a date? It makes no sense. If a man wants to show up at 7:15 instead of 7:00 for his date, he should set it for 7:15.
Men value independence of mind, which is why preselection is such a burning issue and a point of disgust. We embrace the eccentric, and when we find a great girl whom other men have underrated, we consider ourselves extremely lucky, as if we’ve “beaten the system”. Women should take the same attitude. In addition to this, we also value decisiveness and expect it in others.
It’s often interpreted as overt rejection when a woman doesn’t return a man’s calls. I don’t think it is, even if it’s functionally equivalent. Sometimes, she has already rejected the man; but at least as often, it’s indecisiveness. She wants to put off the decision as long as she can, as, in her mind, she gains nothing by formally rejecting him. That would give up the option of calling him 2 weeks later, should she so be inclined. In other words, in this case, she technically hasn’t made up her mind about him, but will forget about him after he makes up his. She never says “no”, but puts off indefinitely having to say anything.
It might seem odd that rejection doesn’t anger most men, but the woman who refuses to return calls incites holy indignation. After all, we’re “supposed” to know that dropping calls is the “standard” method of rejection, right? Well, no. By a man’s code, it’s okay to say no. It’s fine to turn down a job, turn someone down for a job, decline a social engagement or a date, or to choose not to give someone one’s phone number. It’s usually not even personal. What’s not okay is to say “yes” and not follow through. Giving a man a phone number carries an implicit promise that one will take or return his calls, and we get angry when this promise turns out to be false. We don’t respect indecisiveness. I don’t know who invented the phrase “shit or get off the pot”, but it was almost certainly a man.
It’s the same in school, the workplace, and all areas of life. Do or don’t. Haul ass or slack, and accept the consequences either way. It’s fine to be a “slacker” occasionally. I found myself in this role three years ago, in a dead-end job that I ended up in shortly after leaving school. Recognizing that opportunities were elsewhere, I chose to “slack”. (Actually, I spent my working hours learning Python and searching for other jobs. True slacking never appealed to me.) I wasn’t in that job for much longer, and would’ve been fired eventually if I hadn’t found another one, but I kept the respect of most of my colleagues.
If women want to be perceived, in the workplace, as having equal capability to that of men– and a good number that I know are far superior to most men– a great place to start would be in dating. When men deal with a slew of women not returning calls, and standing them up for dates, they develop prejudices that do not magically vanish in a wokrplace context. Women will earn the respect of men by cultivating traits that men value: independence of mind, decisiveness, respect for other people as a default, and adherence to promises. Note that none of these are “sexist” values; all represent ideals toward which women have as much capability as men.
