Q Dear Miss Abigail:
Recently, my guy and I have done some serious messing around. Last night it got pretty intense, but he still hasn’t asked me out. I don’t get it. What can I do to understand where we are going?
Signed,
Confused
A Dear Confused:
Ah, a familiar tale. I’m afraid the news is not good. I bring you advice from Nina Farewell, goddess of all things pessimistic, from her book The Unfair Sex. Read it and weep, my dear. Literally.
1953: Failure
Not Every Girl Who Gives Herself Is So Fortunate As to Have The Donation Result in an Affair. And it is precisely this fact which produces the most profound despair.
To the beginner, contemplating her maiden voyage, I particularly address the following, though it applies as well to the girl who is making her third, fifth or seventeenth trip.
It is likely that if you have decided to bestow your favors on a man, you have selected someone you like or love. In other words, your emotions are involved, and if they are not at the outset, they will be before the finish ~ of this you can be sure. Women are unable to divorce tender emotions from sex. A man, no matter how well he may conceal his attitude, takes the matter lightly without embarrassing his heart. He attaches no more consideration to it than to eating his dinner, pleased if it is well cooked, disappointed if it is not. You are embarking on what you consider an extraordinary undertaking ~ accompanied by a partner who thinks it is a trivial incident. I also assume that you do not enter into this intimate relationship with the thought that it is to be of a fleeting nature. Rather do you look upon it as the beginning of a wonderful association; you expect that you will mean very much more to him now; that you will have a strong hold on him; and that the future promises all the romantic pleasures an innocent girl imagines she has the right to expect from an affair. In other words, your dreams are hooked into this man.
But alas! It is a man’s way with a maid to give no more thought to the future than a grasshopper. He is perfectly capable of dropping you immediately after he has had his way with you. And this he does, with a frequency that is disheartening. Could anything make you feel more dejected, more devastated, more exasperated?
It is possible the man may invite you to give yourself a second or third time and then drop you. Personally, I have found it less heartbreaking to be dropped after the one tryst, for while that carries the shock of a decapitation, there is some mercy in a quick and sudden ending. Far more anguish is entailed in a finis that comes after several installments, because the expectations of the female grow during even a short period of time, and the wound therefore goes deeper. But in either event it is a setback which shakes the girl’s ego to its very foundations, sometimes leaving a scar that even marriage, or two or three marriages, cannot heal.
Source: Farewell, Nina. The Unfair Sex : An Expose of the Human Male for Young Women of Most Ages. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953.
~ pp. 136-38 ~