MJ
New Member
If a man is into you he will show it, if he wants you, he will show it, no need for a bunch of game playing to get him.
I had my own rules. I called guys for dates, I paid for dates (imo since I asked I pay) I let it all hang out...if I felt like it. If I didn't like a guy he knew it, and if I did, he knew it.
"The Rules" don't work longterm...thats some hellafied game playing right there!
And didn't one of those chicks recently divorce??
Do you Jewell, you'll be fine.
-A
I didn't realized this. So I went and looked it up. It's true
. Damn, it didn't work for her did it. I really like the rules though. They helps me understand the opposite sex better. I became aware of things that I should have known/been taught years ago. So now I see that they are not perfect -- the author's divorce, but they are quite useful. I'll keep them as a guide 
.Why we all want a happy ending
When Ellen Fein wrote The Rules, telling single women how to capture Mr Right, millions rushed to give them a go. Now that their author is facing divorce, it's tempting to mock - but the reasons for the book's success remain as real as ever
Katie Roiphe guardian.co.uk, Tuesday March 27 2001 11.21 BST The Guardian, Tuesday March 27 2001 Article history
One can't help noticing the exquisite irony that Ellen Fein, co-author of The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right, The Rules II and the forthcoming Rules III: Time-tested Secrets for Making your Marriage Work, is getting divorced. And one can't help feeling a certain satisfaction that someone who told millions of women the best way to marital bliss is not to talk much on dates may be reconsidering her position.
Fein made the announcement on the eve of publication of her latest book, which claims that "it is easier to stay married than get married". She and her co-author, Sherrie Schneider, suggest that women should defer to their husbands, and recommend that they grow their hair, as men find long hair more attractive.
The 43-year-old had been married to pharmacist Paul Feingertz for 16 years and, along with Schneider, constantly referred to her own marital success when promoting her books. So what went wrong? Did Fein fail to read between her own lines?
It's too easy to dismiss The Rules, to mock them for their earnestness and deplore them for their sexist, condescending attitude towards women. Because this silly paper-back, with pink ribbons all over its cover, obviously captured the imagination of millions of women all over the world. Five years after it first came out, I have noticed The Rules on all sorts of intelligent people's bookshelves, tucked away between The Brothers Karamazov and Zadie Smith. I have noticed smart women buying it and following its ethos.
More than that, I have noticed the spirit of The Rules entering into people's conversations about relationships in a more diffuse way. I have heard educated, liberal women talking about how long to wait before calling a man back, or whether the date should be in her neighbourhood, or how long to wait until sleeping with him, as if there is some secret formula, some mathematical principle to romantic happiness that she has yet to divine.
I have also heard professionally aggressive, ambitious women worry about seeming too aggressive in their romantic lives if they call a man first. It is strange that the 50s courtship rituals our mothers fought so hard to get away from should come to be so appealing, so necessary, to a new generation. But it seems that The Rules tapped into a larger anxiety in the culture; in their simplistic, jingoistic way, they expressed a need, a yearning, a worry about old-fashioned courtship that is worth taking into account.
One of the reasons The Rules has been so successful is that a whole generation of women is marrying later. It has become socially acceptable and entirely common for a woman to spend her 20s focusing on her career and hanging around with her friends and running around with different men. But then, at a certain point, in her early 30s, comes a fear that she will live her entire life like a character trapped in Sex and the City, sipping cosmopolitans at a bar in Manolo Blahniks when she is in her 50s.
She has established her professional life, she has had lots of relationships with men, but marriage itself has come to seem elusive and alien - and she begins to ask herself, how do you get there again? How did I get off track? All the freedom and feminism and sweet drinks and promotions don't hold the answer. And suddenly the comically old-fashioned way of doing things, with dates and flowers and rings, starts to seem more desirable.
Buried in The Rules is the faintest hint of a Jane Austen plot: the man who pursues and the woman who is pursued, the unspoken, delicate, romantic game that unfolds between them. What The Rules offers, in its clumsy, excruciating way, is a path back to that mystery, that loveliness and ease. It promises women not just that they will get married, but that they will be in the traditional position of being chased.
Why should women who are aggressive and ambitious in every other area of life want that so much? Why should they want the traditional feeling of being sought after? Why should they want to surrender control?
The truth is that all the equality we have and require in the workplace is not necessarily what we want in our romantic lives. The journalist who calls strangers all day long for a living may wait for a man to call her for dinner. The woman who is an aggressive lawyer at the office may not want to feel aggressive in her personal life; she may want to feel feminine, taken care of. She may want to give up control because it is pleasurable; it is fun to play that game for an evening, for a week.
With all of its absurd rigidity, its humourless desperation, The Rules offers women old-fashioned roles to play with. To have your dinner paid for, even though you could pay for it yourself. To let him choose the place. To surrender control in just this one area of your life for just this short period of time, even though you are perfectly capable of taking care of yourself.
The Rules taps into the stories we were told as children, the fairy tales and knights, the Mr Darcys and Heathcliffs. It whispers of happy endings that have begun to seem arduous and complicated and out of reach. It may be that these retrograde fantasies still exist because the women's movement hasn't cleared them away; or it may be that they will always exist.
Is the idea of a man paying for dinner so appealing because we know we can take care of ourselves? Or are we still insecure about our independence?
The truth is that there is something infinitely reassuring to everyone about men pursuing and women being pursued. For women, I think it is not so much about "capturing Mr Right" as about capturing an image of ourselves that we find appealing. Maybe we shouldn't find it appealing, in this new millennium, but we do.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Last edited:
Guys do check me out, especially at work but none are my type 
I call him when I choose, I talk his head off at times. Even when he calls to ask a simple question, I throw in extra sentences to prolonge the conversation. I don't always dress up to impress him and all of that either. He just gave me a foot massage the other day and I had chipped toe nail polish. 
