Friday is Venus Day

On not going there
One of the many reasons that women are better liars than men (a claim that is now backed by some very solid research so let's not argue the point) is because they lie to avoid having to tell lies. Proust noted this about his character Odette de Crecy and there are no shortage of women who use the same strategy.

Here is how it works. Craig and Lisa met in third year and got married two years after they graduated. Sometimes they reminisce about their school days. Craig was doing just that when he brought up the homecoming weekends. There was always a big outdoor party at homecoming and there are lots of stories to go with it. Except third year when a freak ice storm shut everything down. Craig talks about how boring that was. Lisa says, "I missed homecoming that year because my mother was really sick."

Then Craig goes on to talk about how boring it all was and how he spend the entire weekend indoors with a bunch of boring aged alumni all telling him how much better homecoming was in their day and how a little rain wouldn't have stopped them."

End of conversation.

The truth is that Lisa's mother did get so sick that she had to go home and missed homecoming but it wasn't the year of the ice storm. The year of the ice storm, she and Craig had just met and even though there was magic right from the start they were not actually officially a couple. Even though she wasn't under any obligation to be faithful to him it's still very awkward that she actually spent that entire weekend in bed with a guy they both still know. A guy who is a real jerk actually and the whole thing is kind of embarrassing and, besides, she knows Craig will be very intimidated because this guy had a bit of a reputation, well, actually, he had a lot of a reputation and she couldn't help being curious and, well, she'd rather not talk about it.

Now Lisa knows that if the conversation gets any further, Craig is going to ask her what she did that weekend. And then she is going to have to make up a lie or, worse, say that she doesn't remember. So she tells another lie to avoid having to go there.

It's an effective strategy.

Our lives are full of dangerous intersections.  Suddenly, you find yourself approaching one and you think, "Crap, it's dangerous down here, I'd better be careful." Lisa took evasive measures several blocks before to make sure she wouldn't end up having to improvise in the middle of a dangerous intersection.

And it's easier to lie about not being at homecoming, an issue she has no serious emotional investment in, than it is to lie about having sex with a guy she'd even feel guilty telling her best girlfriend about. It's like the difference between telling a child that the present is really from Santa as compared to telling the officer how many drinks you've had tonight.

The problem is that it works on her too
I've used this example before but there was a nice instance of the avoidance strategy in a science column in the local paper here a few years ago. A woman wrote in to ask about fruit flies: Where do the fruit flies that infest fruit left on the counter in February come from? They can't come from outside and there is nowhere for them to have been inside without her noticing.



The bug expert from the local university supplied the answer. His opening was classic, "I think you've already figured out the answer to your question and you're hoping you're wrong." And then he went on to explain that the flies hatch from larvae that are already in the fruit. In the normal course of events, they get eaten along with the fruit but when we leave fruit too long on the counter they hatch as fruit flies.


That's the thing about the do-these-pants-make-my-thighs-look-fat question. She already suspects that they do but the deeper issue, the one she doesn't want to face, is that maybe her thighs don't just look fat. She is hoping that you will do the moral equivalent of telling her that her thighs don't have to go to school today.
 As a man, the thing you really want to avoid is getting co-opted into this because when women lie to you this way they inevitably end up lying to themselves. When Lisa lies about the homecoming weekend, she creates a new dangerous intersection. Now she has to tell a lie to avoid going anywhere near that subject. The next time he starts reminiscing, she tells Craig that she isn't interested in that conversation anymore. Nostalgia about schooldays has lost its charm for her. She says. Pretty soon there are whole sections of her life that are walled off by detour signs. To maintain the detour signs, she has to tell herself that she really doesn't like this stuff anymore.

Which is why Robert VerBruggen is quite correct to mock studies that say women would rather date nice guys because women say they'd rather date "nice" guys:

In that study, the researchers simply asked women what they wanted in a man. The problem with this is obvious to any guy who’s ever taken dating advice from a woman: When faced with such a question, women tend to say what they think they should like, not what they actually respond to.

Where VerBruggen doesn't go is to ask whether the women in these studies really believe the steaming piles of crap they serve up to researchers. At the risk of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, the honest answer is that they will come to believe it if we let them get away with it. That is why so many women are vulnerable to seduction techniques. They keep telling themselves that certain kinds of guys have no appeal for them and that allows exactly that sort of guy to move in on them. Pretty soon she is giving the sort of guy she claims to hate the kind of fantasy sex she denies her regular boyfriend because she told him she doesn't like that kind of thing. Of course, she will later figure out the guy is a jerk but it doesn't matter to him because he isn't planning on staying around anyway.

As a man, there is no point in dwelling on this. Just face it, you are Craig. At some point she spent a weekend or maybe even six months of weekends giving it to a guy you both agree is a jerk. And you don't really want to know about that do you? The practical lessons for you are,

1. Don't let her talk you into being some meek wimp because she tells you that she really likes "nice guys". Be the sort of man you admire not the sort she tells you she admires. That was the sort of man you were trying to be when you met her and she didn't object then.
2. If she tells you she really doesn't like the kind of sex you do really like, why exactly are you still dating this woman?