Until I Get Married

My ex and I had one solution for a lot of our more petty disagreements: Mancala.

Every once in a while it was Dominoes, but mostly, it was Mancala. For those who aren’t familiar with the game, a breakdown courtesy of Wikipedia:

Mancala games share a common general game play. Players begin by placing a certain number of seeds, prescribed by the variation in use, in each of the pits on the game board. A player may count their stones to plot the game. A turn consists of removing all seeds from a pit, sowing the seeds (placing one in each of the following pits in sequence), and capturing based on the state of board. This leads to the English phrase “Count and Capture” sometimes used to describe the game play. Although the details differ greatly, this general sequence applies to all games.

In the movie, Disappearing Acts Zora and Frank share a bond over a love for Scrabble. Another girl I used to date enjoyed beating me at Uno and my brother and his girlfriend are the first to get busy on a wide assortment of video games. Together.

So what am I talking about?

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This is one of those posts that I have to tell my mom not to read, and my sister, and any other members of my family. So please, uncles, aunts, grandparents, sis, cousins, if you’ve gotten this far, go to another window please? Please?

As for the rest of you, who aren’t my family, this is a post I’ve wanted to write since the weekend, but been hesitant to do so. The reason: it’s basically something only I would come up with. Well, not only I, most other men might feel a similar way. Matter of fact, when I called up a couple of my boys to bounce the idea off of them, they understood my logic completely. A couple of my female friends also said the thought, though fairly typical of the mind of a man, wasn’t the most absurd thing they’ve ever heard.

So now I’m comfortable enough to break down why I don’t trust women who don’t own toys, and when I say toys, I mean the type only allowed for women 18 and older.

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They call me a smart ass. Of all the names I’ve been called throughout my life, “smart ass” has been the one most often used. But I never pay it any mind as a knock on me because usually it is said after I made the point I was trying to make and the point was usually correct.

Although, these days, I will admit, the whole “smart ass” tag and whether or not it’s an actual diss or a backhanded compliment has made me evaluate what it is about me that often provokes people to say such things. And over the last few months of taking the time to really get to the source of this whole “smart ass” thing I have finally come to one conclusion…

My problem is I always know exactly what to say.

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I’m superficial. There is no use in even lying about it. I care about how a girl looks, how she talks, what kind of place she lives in; the list is endless. I know none of it really matters at all, has no connection to what’s truly important, but first impressions are also important to me. They’re important to everybody, so it is why we remain sticklers for the surface level stuff.

Outside of personal interaction, no place helps us gauge the superficial qualities of a person more than Facebook. We get to see photos, their favorite quotes, television shows, and maybe, if they’re frequent status updaters, their wit. Facebook, for me, has kind of become the Cliff Notes to a woman and I’m not even going to lie, sometimes, these Cliff Notes are so good, I want to read more. But sometimes, every once in a while, I come up on a woman’s profile that makes me want to pass on getting to know her beyond her page. These are the five reasons why:

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I’ve spoken about compliments before. Receiving them, giving them out, the ultimate compliment, and so on and so forth. Compliments are important, not because they help raise self-esteem, but because when we receive just the right one, they make our day. I know how good it feels to receive a compliment, but I know the greater joy is in giving one to a woman who upon hearing it, smiles so deeply I can tell her face is going to stay like that for the rest of the day.

But the question remains, how do we give them out? There is an art in compliment giving, as I’ve said before, as Esquire once wrote an entire article about. One specific rule of thumb I apply is to be specific when giving out a compliment. I don’t like the umbrella types of compliments where I’m acknowledging everything about a woman. I mean, she could be fine with ashy elbows. Who knows? So, instead, if I see she’s wearing some flashy accessory, I acknowledge that accessory. If I like the way she’s walking, I might say something about her walk. Fly hat? “Fly hat.”

But as a lady friend of mine recently pointed out, sometimes specifics can do more harm than good. If a woman just got her hair done, and I’m complimenting her shirt, what’s that say?

With this logic applied, sometimes the umbrella compliments, ones like “Hey beautiful,” or “You’re pretty,” are our best bet. What’s left to figure out is what umbrella compliment do I apply? I’ve thought about this for a couple of weeks, and I finally have what I like to call  the compliment translator.

Below, a break down of the most general compliments men give and what they might mean.

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Most men (and some women!) have had to clean up their place after having over some company they know damn well they shouldn’t have had over. Or, in some cases, the company of the opposite sex is perfectly appropriate, but still, to avoid an awkward situation, one in which the present casual friend notices something left behind by the previous casual friend, we have to make sure our area is spotless.

Now I can’t speak for the women, but I know as a man, cleaning up after a woman has come over is not like cleaning up on a regular day. If I was smart enough, I’d invent a female detector. It would be sort of like a metal detector, except it detects all female stuff. But unfortunately, I’m not smart enough, and apparently no one else is either because I have yet to see a female detector on the market.

So until then, men like myself must rely on our eyes to spot out any damning evidence, which takes years of training. Most men are programmed to look out for the big stuff like panties, and even strands of hair that’s not hers. But as some would say, where the devil truly lies, is in the details. Thus, we have to develop an eye for the smaller, less obvious things that may call attention to our “lifestyle.” Here’s five of those things.

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They say an idle mind is the devil’s playground. Well, I say an idle mind is where genius happens because the other day, as I was taking a shower, I came up with an idea that I not only find brilliant, but worthy of application.

When a man asks a woman’s hand in marriage, she gets a ring and he gets a what? A “yes” one would hope, but after that, what else does he get? What kind of symbolism does he get to show he is engaged? Traditionally, none. While a woman gets to go around and flaunt a ring, an engaged man does not receive anything to show he is engaged.

Will someone tell me how this is fair? Then will someone tell me why women for so long have allowed their fiancés to go walking around looking no different than the man who isn’t engaged at all?

These questions are rhetorical. Instead of attempting to answer them, I aim to implement an alternative tradition, one that I hope other men put into practice and women will be accepting of.

As reciprocity for asking my woman’s hand in marriage, I too would like a symbol of our engagement. Something specifically for me. Here it is:

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“I got Alize at my house. I don’t drink Alize, but b*tches do.”– Katt Williams

All men have something at their place to help set the mood with the female company they entertain. Maybe it’s a bottle of Alize, like Katt Williams, or maybe it’s a copy of Clueless. Incense and candles are also common. The whole point of these things is to get a woman to feel comfortable enough to sleep with us.

Duh.

Women, on the other hand, never seem to have the comforts for men to enjoy.This is not to say I need certain things to get me in the mood. Trust me, the mere sight of the woman is going to be enough. But what a woman does need to provide for me is comfortable distractions.

Every time I want to leave a woman’s house, she wants to know why. Well, it’s not because I don’t like her. It’s because her place is boring as hell or it’s missing certain things I need.

Comfortable distractions can serve one of two purposes. For the women who invite me over for some platonic company, who don’t want to sleep with me, comfortable distractions are a great way to keep me focused on something other than her body. For the women who do invite me over to sleep with them, but would like me to stay for a while afterward, comfortable distractions will help me stay put. They won’t distract me from her, but they will distract me from what’s going on outside of her four walls.

Women, I’m sorry to say, are not enough sometimes. They, like me and my brethren, need to have the comforts too.

So ladies, consider this my Valentine’s Day gift to all of you. Five things you should have in your place to get a man to come over and stay a little while longer. Happy

Valentine’s Day.

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I can’t recall if it was a man or a woman who said it. Maybe it was both. But I do remember the first time I heard someone say being somebody’s girlfriend doesn’t really matter. And I do remember thinking, Wow, that’s wrong.

I don’t have a girlfriend right now. Haven’t for a while now, and to be honest, sometimes that matters. Sometimes it makes me think of the girls who I could have made my girlfriend, but because I knew I wouldn’t be a good boyfriend, I didn’t ask them. It sounds like a cop out, I know, but trust me it isn’t. I was a professional boyfriend for a long time, but I was so bad at it, I’ve been demoted to professional bachelor until further notice.

Still, my time spent with girlfriends past mattered then and it matters now.

Girlfriends, all of them, matter.

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Men, when’s the last time you slow danced with a woman?

I’m trying to remember myself. Maybe it was at my friend’s New Year’s wedding. But before then, I have no recollection of the last time I took a woman’s right hand, put it in mine; took my left arm, wrapped it around her waist, and together, we shuffled our feet in a slow clockwise circle.

The first time I slow danced was in 6th grade, and it was definitely a big deal. I had no idea what I was doing, and the entire Boyz II Men song the girl and I danced to sounded like mush to my ears. All I cared about was not stepping on the girls feet, and to prevent such a catastrophe, I put both my hands around her waist, and kept her arms length away from me. The way I danced with her it was as though she had cooties.

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