Last year I was at an engagement party and I got talking to a man with extraordinarily good manners. He was one of the groom-to-be’s friends and he was telling me about the first time the couple had met, at a house party many years earlier, at which he had been present.
“I remember the minute she walked in,” he said. “Well, of course, we all fell in love with her the minute we saw her. I mean look at her!” he gestured over at the bride-to-be. By “we all” he seemed to mean every single man who had been at that first party. She did look very beautiful, as women tend to on their wedding days and at their engagement parties, but I had the feeling he’d have said that regardless of how she looked. He went on to say that her husband-to-be was a very lucky man and so on.
I have thought about that interaction a lot in the year since and decided it is the most polite thing you could say about (or to) a woman at her engagement party. And when I say polite I mean that in the sense of genuine good manners, which I would define as having a warm and charming demeanour which tends to put those around you at ease, rather than, say, a knowledge of, or interest in, arcane social rules which are generally intended primarily to reinforce existing social hierarchies. And so, intended primarily to make most people feel basically uncomfortable and uneasy.
And not even effectively. I mean, which of us has not seen a film wherein a lower class person has to eat dinner in a fancy establishment and, as they stare in confusion at the array of cutlery, someone elbows them and whispers “start at the outside”. It’s not a secret that you start at the outside. Anyone can look that stuff up. It’s whether you think that is a good use of your time or not which is the real question.
But back to real good manners. And the fact that I think what you could basically describe as “flirting with a woman on her wedding day” is an example of impeccable manners. I think it’s a gracious, and actually extraordinarily decent thing to do, because it is seeing someone how they want to be seen. Affirming the presentation of themselves they have attempted to curate, and that’s a really generous thing to do for someone else. Women don’t exist in the world simply to look a certain way, but a woman who has got dressed up for an occasion does want to look beautiful. And I think acknowledging that is a great social courtesy.
So I thought about that interaction a lot because it helped me articulate something to myself, but also because not a lot of young men have manners like that these days. I’m very sorry to sound 97 but there is no other way to say it. They broadly don’t. In fact, young men now often seem oddly cagey about even admitting that they find women attractive in general.
This weekend I went to a few parties and had a lot of conversations about online dating, which I often find myself having these days. The usual points came up. How strange and furtive everyone is. How paranoiac people are about commitment or the idea of rejection (look at this example). How hard it is for women to even organise decent casual sex via the apps and so on. (By decent casual sex I mean sex with someone you find reasonably attractive, who you can have a conversation with and who, although you may not wish to pursue a relationship with, you would expect a basic level of respect and communication from. By a basic level of respect and communication I mean they don’t talk down to you, you don’t get the vague impression they hold you slightly in contempt, and they don’t lie or miscommunicate their intentions. The bar is not high.) It’s a trope that women find sex easy to facilitate (but not relationships) but I’m starting to wonder how true this is. I hear so much about men who message endlessly but ghost real life interactions, or who sleep with someone once, agree to do it again, and then vanish and so on.
Why would you sleep with someone only once if the first time was decent? Does it not take more tries than this to make the most of the experience? Is the idea that doing so more than once might send the woman crazed over the prospect of a relationship? Could this not be determined by asking directly instead of hiding?
One woman I spoke to this weekend said she tried to set a single, eligible and very attractive friend of hers up on a blind date with some men she knew, figuring this was a way to get around the vagaries of the online dating landscape. They all said some version of: “No omg! That’s so weird! Who would go on a blind date!!!” Which I wasn’t surprised by, but I am confused by. I wonder why it is “weird” for a 30 year old man to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend, and when that happened.
There are explanations you could give for this: Andrew Tate, capitalism eroding status and self esteem, men being scared to put a foot wrong post #metoo, and so on. None seem right to me. I think people are more complicated than this generally. My sense is that there is a fear of “putting yourself out there” and rejection, and I would agree that (from asking them) overstepping boundaries is something young men seem very concerned with.
But I wonder if this has more to do with the thing I mentioned earlier of “seeing someone how they want to be seen” and how hard it can be to figure out the “how someone wants to be seen” part. Does someone want to be flirted with or will they consider it inappropriate? Is someone using casual sex to try and ensnare you in a relationship? Does your date want to see you again?
I think, with social media and computers and gamified relationships (I mean friendships too), we’ve all gotten rustier and lazier at working this out because it relates to reading other people, their facial expressions and body language, and having direct and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. A world of screens makes it too easy to avoid this.
I asked one man last week why young men aren’t good at flirting these days. “The last time I flirted, she tweeted about it!” he declared. He found this mortifying of course. He showed me the tweet, it read: “I love England because where else would someone tell me ‘Oh you’re Egyptian? My great uncle was Anthony Eden.’”
Great material for a tweet, in fairness. And absolutely terrible flirting… And (what a small world) I happened to know the girl involved. More mortifying still.
Till next time xxx
Some Things I Liked Recently:
I read this piece from a while back on The Guardian, on the dreaded “ick” and found it very funny.
I re read this brilliant essay by Jessica Au on Yūko Tsushima recently for something I’m writing and was struck again by the below paragraph. There is a modernity to Tsushima’s presentation of women and their internal lives, which Au highlights here, which I think underscores the antiquated sensibility of a lot of ostensibly feminist films of late (thinking of Women Talking, particularly).
Towards the end of the book, at the hospital where Akira finally has his hernia operation, Takiko draws a picture of the girl on the mountainside, together with a woman running. She draws herself surrounded by grapes and quartz and sky, looking down at the people below, knowing that ‘there’s no place for her away from these slopes, no other place where she is herself.’ She runs, faster and faster, something in her body echoing ‘like the howl of an animal among the mountains’ and sweeping ‘down to the vineyards as a gust of wind’. Here are Tsushima’s signature moods: solitude, yearning, the impossibility of being in the world. Each woman has within her an inner self that she won’t let go of and the dream of freedom, if rarely the reality of it.
“Why would you sleep with someone only once if the first time was decent?”
I know!! 🤦🏻♀️
I have a mile-long list of men I slept with and it was great...and who I never heard from again.