Method #6: You Don’t Have to Call

You know what has really bothered me much of my life? The tendency for people to fall into the thinking that there are a set of gender roles that we cannot break away from. For example, who says a guy has to be the one to pay for dinner? Or that he is supposed to pick the girl up and not the other way around? I suppose it has an evolutionary basis and men are naturally supposed to court females. Guys do tend to have more trouble getting women interested in them, so it makes sense that they are expected to pamper a romantic interest.

Those matters don’t bother me so much (perhaps they would if I were more successful in finding a date), but what really gets me is the expectation that men must ask out women. I’ve met a lot of women who felt it wouldn’t be appropriate to ask a guy out. Generally speaking, if they did they would be more successful than if I guy did. Men would love to be asked out. However, a lot of girls say that they would feel uncomfortable doing so. My response is, “Now you know how we feel…”

All jokes aside, I decided to turn this thinking on its head. I read somewhere recently that a good way to find out if a woman is interested in you is if she calls you back. I thought, why not try that from the very beginning? I’m always one to feel extremely awkward asking for a girl’s number after a first meeting, but what if I do the opposite?

I’ve decided that, instead of feeling awkward asking her for the number and then feeling more awkward calling her afterwords, I will give her my number and ask her to call me. That way, I turn everything around.

Instead of feeling uncomfortable and coming off as shy asking for a number, I will exude an air of confidence giving her my number. It sends a message of, “I would like you to call, but if you don’t it wouldn’t bother me.” I also don’t have to worry about calculating the number of days before I’m “supposed” to call or worry about having a plan or any of that stuff that I’m terrible at doing. I don’t even have to worry about whether she is actually interested in me or not. If she is, then she’ll call. If not, then I can move on right then and there.

I feel as though this can be a great strategy, but I’m also worried that I’m slowly becoming more and more of a jerk. I think that, so long as I limit this behavior to getting dates, I can call it a mating dance and leave it out of the rest of my life. I still believe that a nice guy can become romantically involved without giving up his soul. But I have to see it to believe it.

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