Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (3 page)

I did it. So have many of my friends.

Perhaps this all sounds like bragging. I do not mean to suggest for a moment that being single is not often hell. But I do mean to suggest that it can also be quite heavenly, whether you choose
it
or it chooses
you.

There is a catch to achieving single bliss. You have to work like a son of a bitch.

But show me the married woman who can loll about and eat cherry bonbons! Hourly she is told by every magazine she reads what she must do to keep her marriage from bursting at the seams. There
is
no peace for anybody married
or
single unless you do your chores. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to make the choice between a married hell or a single hell. They’re both hell.

However, serving time as a single woman can give you the foundation for a better marriage if you finally go that route. Funnily enough it also gives you the choice.

What then does it take for a single woman to lead the rich, full life?

Here is what it
doesn’t
take.

Great beauty. A man seems not so much attracted to overwhelming beauty as he is just overwhelmed by it—at first. Then he grows accustomed to the face, fabulous as it is, and starts to explore the personality. Now the hidden assets of an
attractive
girl can be as fascinating as the dark side of the moon. Plumbing the depths of a raving beauty may be like plumbing the depths of Saran Wrap.

What it also doesn’t take to collect men is money. Have you ever noticed the birds who circle around rich girls? Strictly for the aviary.

You also don’t have to be Auntie Mame and electrify everybody with your high-voltage personality. Do
you
like the girl who always grabs the floor to tell what happened to
her
in the elevator? Well neither does anybody else.

And you don’t have to be the fireball who organizes bowling teams, gets out the chain letters and makes certain
somebody
gives a shower for the latest bride.

What you do have to do is work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up.

If you would like the good single life—since the married life is not just now forthcoming—you can’t afford to leave any facet of you unpolished.

You don’t have to do anything brassy or show-offy or against your nature. Your most prodigious work will be on
you—
at home. (When I got married, I moved in with six-pound dumbbells, slant board, an electronic device for erasing wrinkles, several pounds of soy lecithin, powdered calcium and yeast-liver concentrate for Serenity Cocktails and enough high-powered vitamins to generate life in a statue.)

Unlike Madame Bovary you don’t chase the glittering life, you lay a trap for it. You tunnel up from the bottom.

You
do
need a quiet, private, personal aggression … a refusal to take singleness lying down. A sweetly smiling drop-dead attitude for the marrying Sams, and that means
you too.

You must develop style. Every girl has one … it’s just a case of getting it out in the open, caring for it and feeding it like an orchid until it leafs out. (One girl is a long-legged, tennis-playing whiz by day, a serene pool at night for friends to drown their tensions in. Wholesomeness is her trademark. A petite brunette is gamine but serious-minded. A knockout in black jersey, she is forever promoting discussions on Stendhal or diminishing colonialism. An intellectual charmer.)

Brains are an asset but it doesn’t take brainy brains like a nuclear physicist’s. Whatever it is that keeps you from saying anything unkind and keeps you asking bright questions even when you don’t quite understand the answers will do nicely. A lively interest in people and things (even if you aren’t
that
interested) is why bosses trust you with new assignments, why men talk to you at parties … and sometimes ask you on to dinner.

Fashion is your powerful ally. Let the “secure” married girls eschew shortening their skirts (or lengthening them) and wear their classic cashmeres and tweeds until everybody could throw up. You be the girl other girls look at to see what America has copied from Paris.

Roommates are for sorority girls. You need an apartment alone even if it’s over a garage.

Your figure can’t harbor an ounce of baby fat. It never looked good on anybody but babies.

You must cook well. It will serve you faithfully.

You must have a job that interests you, at which you work hard.

I say “must” about all these things as though you were under orders. You don’t have to do anything. I’m just telling you what worked for me.

I’m sure of this. You’re not too fat, too thin, too tall, too small too dumb, or too myopic to have married women gazing at you wistfully.

This then is not a study on how to get married but how to stay single—in superlative style.

D
URING YOUR YEARS AS
a single woman you will find, through no effort on your part, that you have become “The Girl” in a man’s life, often a married man.

Being The Girl doesn’t necessarily mean you are sleeping with him, although you may be. You could be the love of his life whom he didn’t marry fifteen years ago or a girl he sees but barely knows. He can have other flesh-and-blood girls at the same time. You are simply the girl he dreams of when his mind takes flight from his real-life situation. You are his Girl.

Why doesn’t he dream of Marilyn Monroe or Natalie Wood? Do
you
dream of Kirk Douglas or Rock Hudson? Like you, he’d rather dream of someone Possible who might conceivably be, or perhaps already has been, his.

To be The Girl imposes very few obligations. You may not have to do anything but just exist. Flirting may start his imagination boiling. More often he makes his choice independently of you.

During the past seventeen years I believe I was The Girl of at least twelve eminently successful men. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m not beautiful or even pretty. No man, to my knowledge, has ever looked at me across a crowded room and said, “Her. Could you get me a date?” Yet I managed to sink into the consciousness and subconsciousness of an advertising tycoon, a motivational research wizard, two generals, a brewer, a publisher, a millionaire real estate developer and two extremely attractive men who were younger than I.

Being The Girl is a wonderful way to feel loved and appreciated when you are without a husband. Men who put you in that category, if they
do
decide to tell you about it, write lovely letters, say ego-building things and send gifts they cannot afford.

Marguerite Clarke (I’ll use fictitious names from now on to protect the guilty) is pretty but naïve for a girl of thirty-one who has been married and divorced. One of the men in our office is so nuts about her he is simply beside himself. Contradictory as it sounds he is also happily married. Marguerite is a friend of his wife’s and has never led him on. Yet he leaves love offerings of flowers on her desk, gets her raises before they are due and arranges for her to buy everything from electric blankets to hi-fi records wholesale. He also advises her on taxes, insurance and stocks. He even introduces attractive male visitors to her. A kook? Not at all. He is enjoying himself in a way that is harmless to his wife. He is making Marguerite feel beautiful, wanted, important and protected. That’s what being The Girl is.

Another girl I know works for the telephone company. She has an older admirer in the same company. She is twenty-three. He is fifty-nine. Every Christmas, birthday and in-between holiday like Valentine’s Day and Easter he presents her with a modest piece of jewelry or cash gift. His first offering came though they had hardly spoken. She, aghast, tried to give it back. He said, “Mary Jane, you are a beautiful young woman. I am not after your body though I might be if I were younger. As you may or may not know I am absolutely alone in this world. I don’t make very much money, but I have no one to spend it on but me. It would give me the greatest pleasure to give you things. You need never tell anyone about it. I certainly never will. But please do me this favor.”

Mary Jane decided she would. She has always been kind to him but their friendship never became carnal. Mary Jane is getting married next month and leaving the telephone company. One of the things she will miss is Mr. A.—her devoted and undemanding admirer.

An advertising agency art director calls up Betsy Alexander one Friday each month and has for six years … after his art directors’ club dinner, his one night of stag freedom. If she’s home, Betsy has a drink with him at a neighborhood bar. In six years he has kissed her twice, tried other times but seems not to have been too disappointed at being refused. Betsy feels if she had responded to his passes with cries of passion he would have fled like Rumpelstiltskin. He simply wanted A Girl to check in with. Betsy finds being considered divine by a nice man who calls every month for six years not too hard to take. So it doesn’t get her anywhere—it keeps her ego burnished. Another case of being The Girl.

Enough To Go Around?

What if you aren’t The Girl in anybody’s life or what if you are? Where are the other men coming from … the out-in-the-open admirers? According to statistics there isn’t even
one
man for every girl (over four million more single women than men at the last count). Actually, the statistics merely state there are not enough
marriageable
men to go around. Nobody said a word about a shortage of
men.

You probably have quite a collection yourself right now if you will just count them.

Besides bona fide beaux, pals and lovers, whom we will come to in a minute, there are the men you work with whom you may never see away from the office but with whom you gossip, drink coffee and solve problems. It’s fair to count everybody from the mailroom boy up to the chairman of the board as being among your men if your paths cross frequently.

There’s your boss, surely among the most important men you’ll ever know if you’re lucky enough to have a nice one.

I think maybe a girl should never work for a stinker. Life is too short, and as long as we are in more or less of a boom economy, it’s possible to change jobs easily. I’m thinking of secretaries who have a particularly personal relationship with a boss.

I worked for years in three Beverly Hills talent agencies which represent movie stars, writers and singers. Sounds glamorous, and maybe I was young and sensitive, but I always felt those places treated secretaries like three-toed sloths to be kept sequestered from the public. At one of these establishments, particularly posh, we girls had to use the back stairs while clients and executives were free to scamper up the elegant, antique-lined front stairway.

After I left there (it seems to me I was
asked
to leave) I got a job as secretary to an advertising agency head (not the tycoon I mentioned a few pages back). Well I had no idea bosses could
be
like that … kind, warm, generous. Mr. B. was a civic and industrial leader as well, and through our offices strode some of the most important people in America. (That’s how I met a number of the men to whom I became The Girl.) I worked for him five years and he was responsible for my getting a chance to write advertising copy. His wife is one of my best friends, and through the years they have introduced me to hundreds of exciting people.

It sounds as though I’m sidetracked, but this is just by way of saying you might as well work for a good guy. Count him a blessing and put him on your list.

So Make a List

Other men to tote up as yours are your father, uncles, brothers, cousins, family friends, clergyman, doctor and dentist. All perfectly good entries.

Add to the collection the shoe salesman who remembers your size, the milkman, the Fuller Brush man (they’re usually darlings), the high school boy who collects for the paper, your landlord, the butcher who pounds veal thin for your scaloppine, the freckled child who boxes your groceries, whoever services your car, plus your insurance man, tax man, broker (and anyone who buys a single share of anything can have one of them) and your hairdresser.

Oh yes, include the husbands of your friends. They smoke pipes, wear tweeds, watch football. No matter how platonic your relationship—and it probably better be—they’re part of your world of men.

What about husbands of women who aren’t your friends? Married men are a weighty subject and we’ll discuss them at length in a moment. For the time being, yes, put your favorites on the list.

As I see it, about the only men you can’t include are bus drivers (who seem singularly impervious to female charms, probably because they see us clawing each other to pieces getting to a seat) and bartenders. I consider bartenders untouchables though other girls tell me they can be warm and friendly.

There, you ought to have about thirty men to keep you from feeling that you live in a manless world.

Now let’s classify the men with whom you actually go out. Though they all have a great deal of each other in them, I think they fall into the following categories.

The Eligibles

These are the men you
could
marry, maybe. They are single, reasonably attractive and introduceable to your friends. Among them is the dreamboat you meet on the ski train and would be happy to meet at City Hall the next day, but he isn’t ready to take himself off the market. Or the serious chap who falls hard but you don’t quite share his enthusiasm for the Civil War. (I know a girl who married one of these Civil War buffs and he insisted on taking his entire set of Lee’s Generals on their honeymoon. And they went to
Gettysburg
yet!) Whether your chemistry is compatible or not, these men are Possible and their numbers are lean. I’d say you meet two in a good year.

The Eligibles-But-Who-Needs-Them

They aren’t married, okay, but you couldn’t care less. They are the weirdies, the creepies, the dullies, the snobs, the hopeless neurotics and mamas’ darlings. They seem to have been hiding under logs most of their lives until some well-meaning friend uncovers one and says, “Pauline, I’ve got just the man for you!”