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Article about rules of dating 2015:
The Rules, 20 years later. Why are men and women still following the same old dating script? Share this story.
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Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter. Share All sharing options for: The Rules, 20 years later. When I was 26, in the late 1990s, I met a very handsome man as he was unloading Danish credenzas from his pickup into a vintage-furniture shop he owned in Brooklyn. I'm from West Virginia: show me a sweaty man with a dangerously overloaded truck, and I'm immediately smitten. This was right after the 1995 publication of The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right . The Rules was a dating guide, a set of instructions on what to do and not do to catch a man. Above all, women were to be passive (Rule No. 2: Don't Talk to a Man First") undemanding (Rule No. 17: "Let Him Take the Lead"), and above all happy and busy, breezy and lighthearted . The paperback version hit the New York Times best-seller list the following year. Rules support groups for women sprang up around the country. The book prompted a screaming match on Oprah's show, she devoted a whole episode to the topic of "do The Rules work or don't they?" The authors, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, built a business offering phone consultations and in-person seminars, spreading the gospel of steely passivity to lovelorn women. I hoped The Rules , however flawed, would offer a scaffold upon which to build a romance. The Rules was roundly denounced by feminists — "I asked my boyfriend out!" hollered a woman on Oprah — by my friends, and by, well, nearly everyone I respected. But the book struck a nerve. "Men do like a challenge!" people would say ruefully. I recently told a friend that it was the 20th anniversary of The Rules, and she whispered, "The crazy thing is, most of that book was right ." The Rules is a rather incoherent mashup of good, practical advice (don't waste your energy on someone who's not interested), retro gender essentialisms (men don't like funny women), and bizarre anecdotes (Bruce and Jill went bed shopping together for her apartment, and to prove she wasn't angling for marriage, Jill bought a single bed instead of the queen-size bed, which worked, because then they got married, and then they had to buy a queen-size bed, hah-hah-hah . What adult buys a single bed?). The cover of The Rules . (Grand Central Publishing) But the overall theme, presented to you as lovingly as your captor might tuck you in at night, is: adjust to men's needs. Be someone different from who you are. Squash your own desires. To wit: In bed, "don't be a drill sergeant, demanding that he do this or that. . Remember, those are your needs you're concerned about filling, and The Rules are a selfless way of living and handling a relationship." The reader is left wondering when she could finally let her — long! only long! — hair down and be her pushy, needy, authentic self. (Answer: Never. A subsequent book was The Rules for Marriage .) But what The Rules offered, more than anything, was a strategy . I was certain, at the age of 26, that my failure to secure a boyfriend meant I was doing something wrong. I was an only child, raised by an eccentric single mother who longed for a more conventional family. I fetishized traditional marriage, and I was sure other women knew something about men I didn't know. Those of us baffled by the opposite sex eagerly reached for the map to happiness that The Rules promised. Four hundred years ago we might have paid a witch for a love potion, in the 1990s we paid Fein and Schneider $6 for what amounted to a personal marketing plan. So I decided to try The Rules on Brian, the vintage-store guy, in the hopes that my three-dates-then-crickets streak could be broken. I hoped The Rules , however flawed, would offer a scaffold upon which to build a romance. My failed experiment with The Rules. Rule No. 7, "Never Accept a Date for a Saturday Night if He Asks After Wednesday," was the first test. Brian called on Friday to ask me out for the next day, which I declined, and so I spent an irritable, lonely Saturday night eating Thai takeout and watching a Blockbuster movie. (It dimly occurred to me that I had deliberately deprived myself of a potentially fun evening in favor of solitary moping, but I pushed that thought aside.) The Rules, if followed correctly, sometimes meant you spent a Saturday night alone, losing the battle to win the war, so to speak. Your full social calendar — even if it was a pack of lies — inflated your value in a potential mate's eyes. We made a date for the following weekend. I spent that week in a fever of anticipation. Per Rule No. 1 ("Be a Creature Unlike Any Other!"), I groomed myself to buffed, plucked perfection. He, when he picked me up (Rule No. 4: "Don't Meet Him Halfway) was in work pants and a stained T-shirt. We went to an improv comedy show, the Upright Citizens Brigade. "I need a word from the audience," said one of the comics. "Vagina!" someone called out. I started. It was Brian, right beside me. He laughed, a Beavis and Butthead heh-heh-heh . "Vagina!" he hollered again. "Va-gin-UH!" he screamed, as the comic lifted his eyebrows and I shrank in my seat. "Refrigerator," said someone in the audience. " Refrigerator it is," said the comic, and the show started. I put it out of my mind — he was probably nervous. The next week, I again waited for him to call (Rule No. 5: Don't Call Him, and Rarely Return His Calls"), and when he did I offered no input about what I wanted to do on our date ("He picks most of the movies, the restaurants and concerts the two of you go to"). He chose a dank, deserted diner along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway with 900 menu items and a clientele straight out of a William S. Burroughs novel. "Another glass of chardonnay, why not!" I said cheerfully to the waitress, per Rule No. 9: "Be Sweet and Light." "I got to AA every day," he said. "Every single day for 13 years." "But — you're only 30," I said. "People can be serious alcoholics by 17, Leigh," he said severely. Then he chuckled. "Plus that's pretty much how I meet women." I still hoped, after three terrible dates, that we were inching toward the kind of intimacy I longed for. I brushed this aside and pressed on with The Rules . I asked about his work, even though he didn't ask about mine. "Where do you get the stuff for your shop?" I asked. He said he paid the Salvation Army drivers to swing by his store before they took their loads back to headquarters. "So —" I said, valiantly hanging on to sweet and light . "Basically, skimming from the Salvation Army?" He chuckled, heh-heh-heh . So, yes, technically, The Rules were working so far, even though I was batting down a niggling feeling that he might be a jerk. I resolved to give it one more chance. On our third date, a potentially important one (Rule No. 15: "Don't Rush Into Sex" and "No More Than Casual Kissing on the First and Second Dates"), he took me to a house he was renovating in Red Hook, a waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. He wanted to tear out the concrete backyard, so he directed me to stay inside the abandoned house, alone, with his dog. I sat on a milk crate on the dusty floor as he spent the evening whacking a sledgehammer against solid pavement. I petted his dog in the dark house and listened to him smash and grunt.
Rules of dating 2015
