In my long and much-battered life as a person of the female sex, I have reached a few conclusions in the spirit of “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”. I am setting them out in this blog. I believe they need to reach a wider audience. All of this is aimed at avoiding misunderstandings, as well as clearing up a few that have already cropped up.
Usually it is a matter of crossed wires in the dialogue between the two sexes. Often caused by the fact that the woman, usually led by politeness, thinks she is having some trivial everyday conversation.
Whereas on the other side of exactly the same conversation, the man is convinced she is shamelessly trying to get his pants off. He even somehow casts himself as the victim of an assault by the hussy.
I am publishing the list here, with no claim that it is exhaustive. (No such list could exist, given the infinite number of folds in the male brain.)
Situation number 1 in which you’re “asking for it”: Touching the man you know and are talking to
To my regret, I am extremely expressive, and during a conversation, without even realising it, I touch/squeeze/pat the shoulder or arm of whoever I’m talking to. Regardless of his/her sex.
No woman has ever been left with the impression that I am hinting this way that I want to get her into bed. It’s logical to assume the same applies to the representatives of the stronger sex. Until one day, in the middle of a conversation on an office topic, I was put in my place with the macho:
“Thank you, I’m flattered by the attention, but I want to be honest with you – hmmm… well, ummm, I’m married…” A dramatic pause followed: “… and I love my wife!!!”
At first I felt warm inside, hearing that in today’s debauched, immoral times, somebody loves his wife. And not only that. He isn’t shy about sharing this wonderful fact with close and not-so-close acquaintances (I was one of the not-so-close).
Then, however, the sentence as a whole seeped into my consciousness. The part with “I’m flattered by the attention, but” led me to a different thought. That the man had evidently used his wife as a shield against me. So that I wouldn’t pounce on him, tear his clothes off and gobble him up whole on the spot.
All sorts of absurd scenarios ran through my head. At that moment we were talking about the extremely un-sexy subject of Excel… Could it be that when I said spreadsheets, he thought I wanted to spread him across my sheets, so to speak?
Shame or no shame, I enquired what lustful signal I had sent him, and bit by bit the man shared: I had stroked his shoulder during the conversation.
Situation number 2 in which you’re “asking for it”: Having the nerve to show up green on Facebook after midnight.
As a rule I sleep very deeply. There is almost no force on earth that can interrupt my sweet slumber. That business of waking up in the middle of the night and dramatically pondering the great absurdity called life has happened to me only a handful of times in my entire existence.
There is always an exception, and mine is when I have the flu and my nose gets blocked in the night and I can’t breathe. Then the tossing and turning and fidgeting starts on my part, whereupon Emo sends me off to sleep on the sofa. I mustn’t disturb his royal recovery from his hard day.
Banished to the cold, hard sofa, I decide to tire my eyes out by doing a few laps of Facebook. You’d be amazed to see how many people are online at 2–3 in the morning.
A few times I’ve shown up green myself. The moment I do, I get the same message from at least 4–5 Facebook users. They are my friends on Facebook, but in real life we’d probably walk past each other without saying hello (that’s how close we are). The message is always the same and reads:
“Why aren’t you asleep?” Followed by a few emojis – some blushing, others drooling.
The only way to stop the conversation from developing further towards them asking for a photo of what you’re doing right now, or, God forbid, sending you a photo of what they’re doing right now (believe me, it isn’t pretty), is to tell them the truth about yourself.
Which, for entirely different reasons, is just as un-pretty:
“I’ve got so much snot that my nose is blocked, I can’t breathe and that’s why I can’t get to sleep.”
Situation number 3 in which you’re “asking for it”: Liking a photo of his from 4 years ago. If you’re runners – liking an activity of his on Strava from last year.
The irrefutable male logic here is that you are so obsessed with him that you are digging through his profiles on every social network going back years. You are striving to soak up as much information as possible about the object you adore and whom, of course, above all, you want to get into bed.
Generally speaking, that’s true. It does happen that when a woman fancies someone she digs up everything connected to him. But if that’s the case, she will never leave a trace of the investigation she has carried out, least of all in the form of a “like”. Along those lines, if a woman doesn’t like anything on your profile, there’s a greater chance she has cast a lustful eye on you.
NB!!! It is very important to understand that this does not apply to women who have no idea you exist and therefore don’t like anything on your profiles. In other words, if Angelina Jolie isn’t liking your photos, don’t automatically put her in the “they want me but can’t have me” column.
I haven’t set out these points to make men out to be idiots with big egos, which I by no means think they are.
My wish is simply to provide some sort of guide to the diametrically opposite way in which we women think. I too would love someone to write a helpful article like this about male behaviour. And so that the article doesn’t leave only a negative aftertaste, here are a few indicators that a woman is interested in you:
1. When she writes to you, she stretches out the letters, imitating lightness and playfulness. For example, “Heyyyy how are youuuuu?” instead of “Hey, how are you”. If you see “Heyyyy how are youuuuu”, the “draft” of the message, rewritten dozens of times beforehand, probably looked something like this:
She writes: “Hi, how are you? I can’t stop thinking about you.”
She thinks: No, that’s the truth, I can’t tell him that. Hang on, I’ll come up with something less committal.
She deletes it and writes again: “What are you doing right now? If you’re with someone else… I’ll personally castrate you, and I’ll get my revenge on her by posting an unfiltered photo of her.”
She thinks: Nope, that doesn’t sound particularly light and noncommittal either.
So, if after about 5 hours of thinking, deleting and rewriting, you receive the following jewel in the crown of modern communication, namely: “Heyyyy, how are youuuuuu” – there is a chance she really is interested in you.
2. In a chat, she always finds a way to keep the conversation going, that is, for her to be the one who wrote last. Even (and especially) if she writes something hyper-pointless, such as:
You: Tonight I’m thinking of going home, ordering a pizza and watching Netflix all evening
Her: Reallyyyyyy…..
3. And most importantly!!! This works without fail, and with this advice I have helped more than one or two friends. If she ever asks you the seemingly innocent and pointless question:
WHAT TIME WERE YOU BORN?
And if you say you don’t know and she asks you to ring your mother immediately and ask her – then you can be sure things are serious. Perhaps more serious than you’d like.
Let me decode the mystery.
90% of us women have had a natal chart done. It is our individual horoscope, which applies to us and us alone. It is unique because it is drawn up for a person born at the exact hour and minute in the exact place.
From it we know that we are, say, a Sagittarius with Leo rising and the Moon in Cancer. Logically, we start searching hard for someone whose zodiac characteristics match ours. And whether yours match ours, we can only find out if we know the exact hour, minute and place you were born.
Ask Emo, who back in distant 2006 couldn’t get anywhere with me with any number of bouquets, teddy bears and boxes of chocolates. In his desperation he sank so low as to start watching “Sex and the City”, which was on TV at the time, so that afterwards we could analyse the characters’ behaviour together.
But the impregnable fortress I was for him crumbled to its foundations the second I found out he was born at 10:00 and worked out that he was a Cancer with Sagittarius rising, plus another 2–3 little things.
You’ll say, well, well, this Nia really knows her stuff and is teaching us very nicely what’s what.
I thought so too, until in the last two months I stumbled upon the Holy Grail of disagreement between the two sexes’ understanding of a new term. In my case it turned out to be the abbreviation MILF.
Ever since I racked up two children and then the requisite years, lots of my friends have been teasing me – “little MILF this, little MILF that”.
Which left me with the impression that MILF is a common noun for some oldish but still fit bird who has kids. Otherwise, yes, I’m well aware what each of the words making up the abbreviation means. I also know the term gained popularity after the film “American Pie”.
Knowing all these things, I started thinking about renaming the little Facebook page where I post my stories. At that point the name was lara.book. The name had been generated automatically when my Instagram profile was created and meant nothing to anyone.
Several digital marketing specialists told me I should change it to something that shows the nature of the stories posted there.
Namely – texts dealing with the everyday lives of my target audience. Those are working middle-aged women with kids who’ve grown up a bit, and so on in that vein. And ideally it should be something funny, because, after all, I do lay claim to my stories being funny.
One day, while I was running and mulling it over, the perfect new name for my page came to me – “Nice to Meet You, MILFka”. It would have been even funnier if my name were Milka instead of Nia, but it worked as it was. Since we wanted to pull in a slightly younger audience too (read: 30+), I also made myself a little Instagram page, milf.yotova
I was so proud of my choice of name for my pages. I’d hit the bullseye.
Until I started getting private messages from my well-wishers (I say this without the inverted commas that, for some reason, in our latitudes always accompany the meaning of the word well-wisher). People were writing to me, men who genuinely like me and really enjoy my stories.
What were they writing to me, you ask? They weren’t asking me why I wasn’t asleep, but rather where I’d been sleeping when someone hacked my profile and changed my name. They were also offering to report the “MILFka” profile so that it would be taken down. The conversation went roughly like this:
Me: Excuse me? Do you know how many 5-dollar-per-story campaigns I’ve poured into this page? Why on earth would I take it down?
The well-wishers: ( Seen).
Me again: The page hasn’t been hacked, it’s mine – look, all my stories are sitting right there in it. What exactly gave you the impression it isn’t mine?
The well-wishers: Its name. You’re a clever woman and it doesn’t suit you to use terms from adult films for cheap PR.
Me: A term from an adult film?!?!?!?!?
The well-wishers: Well, all right, a genre of adult film?
Me: A GENRE??? WTF????
I immediately send them the definition of MILF from the Oxford and Cambridge Dictionary of English:
An exchange of links to online sources on what this abbreviation means followed. On the whole, thanks to the “reliability” of all online sources these days, I found plenty of links supporting my argument. The other side found plenty of links supporting theirs.
Which in reality settled nothing. Both sides remained convinced they were right.
For me the word still has the meaning from the Cambridge Dictionary of English. I thought about changing the name of the profile, but to be honest, promoting it is a lot easier with the name “MILFka” in the title.
I’m sharing this to let those who expect to find something spicier than stories about my family life, my travels and my torments as a middle-aged woman know that they will be disappointed.
I’m treating them to this super cool chocolate by way of compensation.
