Matchmaker, Matchmaker

Now that I’m in a great relationship myself, I want exactly the same thing for my best friends.

One of my two best friends already has a fabulous boyfriend who gets along great with J. My other best friend—let’s call her Katie—mostly wouldn’t hang out with us because she felt like the “fifth wheel.” So then I felt bad even talking about how much fun we’d had later.

There was an obvious solution to the problem: all I had to do was set Katie up with one of J’s friends so we could all hang out together. Brilliant, right?

There were just a couple of minor glitches.

First, Katie outranks all of J’s close friends. (It’s a simple fact). On the periphery, however, there was this one guy who seemed like he had promise. I could see bits of glitter shining through his dusty exterior and knew that with a little pressure from the right girl, this lump of coal could become a full-fledged diamond.

The second glitch was that J refused to play along. He said that if the set-up didn’t work out, things would get awkward. J tends to a glass-half-empty kind of guy (“A realistic,” he says), whereas I am an optimist (“A romantic,” he says). My theory was that if it did work out, two people could be happy together. Besides, we’re all adults. How bad could it be?

Since J wouldn’t help me throw these two potential soul mates together, I did what any confirmed optimist would do: I staged the accidental encounter. (Well, accidental for J’s friend. Katie would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t given her enough notice to get her hair and nails done.) One Saturday afternoon when the guys were bowling, Katie and I stopped by the alley to say hello. We were basically in the neighborhood anyway.

J was grumpy at first but even he couldn’t deny that Katie and his pal totally hit it off. The pheromones were so thick the bowling pins were falling over.

And so we were six—three happy couples hanging out. It was even more fun than I expected.

For exactly two weeks.

That’s when J’s friend’s glittery bits disappeared. “Coal” criticized Katie’s flamboyant hair, although she’d had a purple streak in it the night they met, and he liked it then. He made fun of her fashion sense, when everyone knows Katie’s cutting edge. The last straw for me came when Coal discouraged Katie from trying out for the Dunfield’s show choir. Now, Katie knows she’s never going to win American Idol, but if the girl wants to perform, her boyfriend should back her 100 per cent.

I can’t even describe how upset I was when I realized that I’d set my best friend up with a jerk. At first, I couldn’t tell if Katie knew it, and I worried she’d succumb to his stupid put-downs. I lay awake imagining her on her wedding day, all mousey and subdued because Coal had snuffed out her spark.

I knew I had to get up the nerve to tell her Coal is unworthy, even though I normally have a policy about not dissing my friends’ boyfriends.

J wasn’t exactly sympathetic: “That’s what you get for messing in someone else’s love life,” he said. Still, he likes Katie and I could tell he felt bad that his friend was treating her like crap.

If I had a friend who behaved like Coal, I’d cut him or her off immediately. But guys are different. They compartmentalize. J likes Coal because the guy’s a good basketball player and fun at a party. He doesn’t have to like every aspect of someone’s personality to be friends.

So it was up to me to have the talk with Katie, and when I did, we were both relieved. It turns out she’d only put up with Coal’s shabby behavior as long as she did because of J. Once she knew I was behind her, she dumped his grimy caboose immediately. Being a class act, Katie broke up with him face to face and graciously. Coal’s less classy response: “You’ll never meet someone else like me again.” Katie and I sincerely hope that is true.

I hoped Coal would run back to the pit he crawled out of. Instead, he started hanging around MORE, all bitter and sullen, dissing Katie whenever he could. And so we came full circle, with Katie refusing to join us again. That’s when J drew the line. Without any prompting from me, he told Coal not to come around until he cooled off.

In the end, it is awkward. J’s mad at me because he had to put Coal in a time out, and because the rest of his crew are giving him grief about putting “the wife” (i.e., me) ahead of his friends.

So I hereby retire as a matchmaker. When friends are involved, it’s just too risky. Instead, I’ll let Katie find her own perfect match and cheer her on from the sidelines, where I belong.

Taming Your Inner Chimp

As promised in my last column, I’m going to share a few pointers on having a human-to-human conversation that leaves both parties feeling okay, not bloody and mauled, as in a chimp attack.

I’ve been practicing this method for weeks now, and I won’t lie: it’s hard work. But we didn’t
spend thousands of years escaping the rain forest to revert now. That two per cent of DNA we don’t share with chimpanzees is what drives us forward.

So, imagine you’re about to confront your boyfriend about a difficult issue. Maybe you saw
him flirting with someone and you are NOT going to put up with that. So you swing down from the trees, ready to attack.

You: “I saw you flirting with that girl.”

Him: “I was not flirting. I was talking. There’s a difference.”

You: “Yeah, the difference is you were groping her. That makes it flirting.”

Him: “I patted her shoulder. In a brotherly way. Why are you always so insecure?”

You: “I wouldn’t be so insecure if you didn’t flirt. You’re an… animal.”

It’s a chimp attack, people. And things will only get worse unless you take the following steps:

Shut up and Listen
You think you know exactly what motivated your guy to behave the way he did. You don’t. And you won’t find out if you’re screeching and gnashing monkey molars.

So dial it back and listen. You can still attack later if you find out that your suspicions were
justified. The chimp inside is always coiled and ready to spring. Just wait before you turn it loose.

Start with Curiosity
Fight the temptation to throw canned messages back and forth: “You were flirting/No I wasn’t.” It’s a circular argument and it will either go nowhere or escalate.

Instead, try an open-ended question, where you might actually learn something. With the situation above, you could say, “What’s new with Amy?” Your guy might say, “She’s bummed about her parents’ splitting.”

Watch your Delivery
So you say, “It’s great that Amy feels she can confide in you.”

Looks nice on paper, right? But if your tone is sarcastic, it says exactly the opposite.

Even if you manage to sound sweet, if your eyebrows have collapsed into your chin, it contradicts your message and comes out meaning, “Why is she whining to my boyfriend?”

Result ≠ Intent
If you see your guy’s hand on a girl’s shoulder, your first thought might be that he’s trying to make you jealous because that’s how you feel. Jealousy probably came in handy in the rain forest but not so much at Dunfield.

Your feelings may be hurt, but that might not have been his intention at all. Maybe his worst
crime was not thinking about how you might see things.

Shift your focus from how you feel to finding out what he intended.

Explain without Blame
You: “Wow, I’m glad you told me about Amy’s family. I have to admit I was worried when I saw your hand on her shoulder.”

Him: “Babe, I could never think about Amy that way.”

And it’s another happy ending in the concrete jungle.

Effective communication isn’t easy and it’s made me realize that despite all that body hair, chimps have it pretty good in some ways. For starters, they don’t have to worry about all this stuff because they don’t mate for life. But no one ever said evolution was easy!

Chimp Attack

Have you ever had a conversation that starts out innocently and turns into a raging battle before you know it?

If you have a brother or sister, I’ll bet you have. They push a couple of buttons and— wham!—you’re screaming so loud the skin peels right off your tongue.

This happens between my sister and me all the time. I never understood the dynamic until today. My mom took this seminar about effective communication at work, and conveniently left the course material on the kitchen table.

Apparently, it all starts with something that resembles the chimpanzee aggression sequence. A chimp sees certain triggers and attacks, and once the sequence has begun, there’s no stopping it until it has run its course.

Keeping in mind that humans share 98 per cent of our DNA with chimps, it’s no big surprise that we might follow similar patterns in a fight. When we feel threatened, we get defensive and strike back. Fast. Speaking from experience, it feels impossible to stop the attack sequence, even if you sort of realize mid-brawl that you misread the cues.

Let me give you an example. My sister, Grace, has been dumping her shifts at Dan’s Diner on me since the first week I started working there. (That’s probably why she got me the job.) I’d plan my whole week around my work schedule and then I’d get stuck with her shift, too, and it would throw everything off. I was forever canceling plans with friends or getting up early to do my homework because of Grace.

So now, if she says something like, “I’ve got plans for tomorrow. I need you to…” I don’t even wait for her to finish the sentence, I explode!

Lu: “Forget it. I have a life too you know. You can’t take always take advantage of me.”

Grace (gearing up for her own attack): “You have it so good. No responsibilities. Always looking out for yourself.”

Lu: “Are you kidding? I’m always covering your butt. Find another sucker to take your shift.”

G: “My shift? What are you talking about? All I wanted was for you to lend me your blue sweater.”

Lu: “Oh.” (The chimp may see the miscue at this point but the adrenalin is pumping and there is no ABORT switch.) “Well, that’s my favorite sweater, so the answer is still no.”

G: “I need it for a meeting. I

want to look boring and conservative like you.”

L: “So you think you can insult me and borrow my clothes?”

G: “I think you should stop being so selfish for a change.”

Cut to half an hour later when it finally sinks in that Grace is paying me a backhanded compliment. She was nervous about the meeting and wanted to look good, and with going to school and having a young kid, even with two part-time jobs, she doesn’t have spare cash for nice clothes. Thanks to working so many of her shifts, I do.

In short, our conversation went so far off the rails that it’s tragic. And it wasn’t an isolated event. Grace and I fight like chimps every couple of weeks.

Hopefully not anymore. Thanks to mom’s seminar material, I plan to have more constructive conversations with my sister.

In my next column, I’ll share some tips on derailing the chimp sequence that will help you keep your discussions from going the way of the apes.

Why Guys Don't Call

A friend of mine met this guy awhile ago and they hit it off so well that he asked for her number and promised to contact her soon. The very next day he texted her, asking if she wanted to hang out. She waited the requisite hour, so as not to look too eager, and then answered, sure, she’d love to hang out.

That was two weeks ago. The guy NEVER responded.

Why? Why contact her in the first place if he’s not interested?

This happened to me a couple of times before J came into my life, so I knew what to expect. Within 24 hours, my friend activated the Myth Machine. “Maybe he was in car accident,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, since I’m a loyal friend. “He might have broken his thumbs and can’t text.”

“Maybe he had to go out of town, and there’s no cell signal,” she said. “Or maybe his grandmother died and he is too sad to call.”

It’s also possible that aliens scooped him up to create
hot-but-cold clones for their distant planet but I doubt it.

On some level, my friend knows that this guy would call if he wanted to. Even if he’d met an untimely end, his last, dying words to his best buddy would have been, “Tell X I’m sorry I couldn’t hang out, will you?” At least, that’s what a gentleman would do. Apparently it’s asking too much of some teenage guys. Notice I say “some.” Rather than attack all guys, as Newshound would have, I now have to dig a little deeper. Why would a guy would ask for someone’s number if he didn’t intend to follow through?

I took the question to my panel of experts, a term I use loosely. These guys are experts on nothing more than being male but I figure they have at least some idea of how the average guy’s mind works.

As full disclaimer, my expert panel is composed of J’s friends. J himself declined to be on the panel. For the sake of our relationship, he can no longer be frank about romantic situations. But he’s often a bystander during the consultation and while he refuses to formally weigh in, I can read the signs. When his pals are deliberately steering me down the wrong path—and they always try—J’s eye-rolling, forehead-rubbing and stifled guffaws give it away. Eventually, with these clues, and the relentless questioning that proves my skill as a journalist, I get to the bottom of the story. Our agreement is that if J lets me interrogate his friends, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt for being more evolved than the average guy. Luckily, he is.

In this instance, the panel’s answer was deceptively simple: guys don’t call because they get distracted.

The Myth Machine has already taken this into account. Of course a hot, smart, funny guy is busy. He’s doing homework, joining clubs and working part-time. On top of that, he’s probably running an animal rescue mission, starting a recycling co-op and volunteering at a senior’s home. No wonder he hasn’t had a second to contact you. But you know he will, and when he does, he’ll prove he’s been thinking of you non-stop, too. (By this point the Myth Machine is working so hard, it’s ready to combust.)

Sadly, my expert panel says the truth is a little less glamorous. The hot, smart, funny guy has met someone else, but it’s equally possible that he got sidelined by play-offs (any sport), a party, or zombie movie-fest.

At the other end of his distraction, he will suddenly remember that he never got back to you. Only now he thinks it’s too late—that it says he’s not interested. He’s afraid you won’t be happy to hear from him, or that you’ll interrogate him about why it’s taken so long to call and obviously, he won’t have a good answer.

So he weighs his options. How likely is he to run into you again? Do you have friends in common? Sometimes the potential future embarrassment is enough to make him call at this point. But if he can get away with disappearing into the void, he probably will.

If Scoop were still writing, he’d tell you what his friends told me: if you made a big enough impression—and that smart, funny, hot guy is truly open for business—he’d follow up fast. He wouldn’t want to risk someone else getting hold of you first. If he doesn’t—and I quote my panel here—“Dude ain’t worth your time.”

So my advice: give the guy a week max and then power down the Myth Machine. Save your kilowatt energy for someone who deserves you.

Lu’s Views

Happy new year!

We’ve only recently emerged from the black hole of revision. While we’re recovering from the ordeal, we’ll turn this space over to Luisa Perez, of Girl v. Boy fame. Although we don’t necessarily endorse all her views, we’re glad Lu has plenty to say so we can kick back… and wait for the next round of revisions.

You'll be able to find her regular columns here, but we will also be publishing them in this blog.

So without further ado, over to you, Lu.

New Beginnings

Welcome to my inaugural column. Okay, it probably doesn’t fully qualify as a column when it’s only posted online, but newspapers are becoming obsolete anyway. An aspiring journalist has to start somewhere.

Make that start over somewhere. As some of you know, I wrote a column for the Bulletin under the pseudonym Newshound for a few months, which turned into a battle of the sexes with a certain male reporter nicknamed Scoop. When the battle got out of hand, Principal Alvarez killed the column and sentenced us to join the staff officially.

Now we have to put our real names, or “bylines,” on our articles. That means accepting peer review from students and other staffers, including one Mr. Joey Carella. J is a smart guy and I appreciate his advice on any subject, which should put to rest those rumors that we’ve broken up. We are definitely still together, romantically speaking. Journalistically, however, we are usually miles apart. J has strong opinions, some seriously misguided. We disagree about fifty per cent of the time. Luckily, the other fifty is what really counts.

Our esteemed editor, Mr. Sparling, made us comment on each other’s columns and we had so many “helpful” suggestions that we kept missing our deadlines. The four columns that made it to print were so boring, I started to get hate mail. (The Luisa Perez Sucks campaign only made me stronger by the way.) It was a quandary: we couldn’t be Scoop and Newshound anymore, yet we couldn’t be ourselves with everyone looking over our shoulders.

Eventually Mr. Sparling gave up on the column idea and assigned us to regular reporting. Now J covers the sports beat, while I cover arts—mainly music, thanks to the free passes I get from my sister.

I like reporting, but I still believe I have views to share that can help Dunfield students. So I met with Mr. Sparling and made a pitch for having my own space. I even quoted the great author, Virginia Woolf, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Obviously I’ll never get a dime for this work so I figured the least Mr. Sparling could do was cough up a figurative “room” of my own. Everyone needs space to be herself and have her own thoughts without someone (especially her boyfriend) second guessing every word. Maybe I appreciate having my own space more than most people because I spent 14 years sharing a room with my extremely opinionated sister.

Anyway, working the Woolf angle did the trick, although Mr. Sparling soon realized I hadn’t actually read her books. I tried, but Woolf is a tough, tough slog. Maybe even she realized that, because she ended up filling her pockets with rocks and walking into a lake to drown. Sad, but true.

I’m not that complicated, and as Mr. Sparling keeps reminding me, I’m not here to write fiction. My mandate is to share reasoned views on topics of interest to all Dunfield students. I have strict orders to Keep it Civil.

To Newshound fans—yes, there are a few—I promise to try to tell it like it is about guys and relationships. Sometimes, I’ll only be able to get the dialogue started, and you’ll have to pick it up in the halls where the Civil Police have restricted jurisdiction.

Let the debate rage on—as long as it doesn’t implicate me in any way. This is my room and I want to keep it!