The Animal Instinct

Just what is it with women, how is it that the less a man shows a woman he likes her, the more she wants them?

This question came to a rolling boil just recently. Last night Jess and I were watching the Real World (still my to this day the only reality show I have ever been able to watch, and since I’ve been watching since San Fransisco I believe I am now a full-blown addict) and we were talking about her current issue with Tim. Jess met Tim at a bar in Portland when Tim’s friend, Ryan #2 (he is also Jess’ boring ex-boyfriend) came out to hang with us. Tim and Jess go out for a date, and everything goes so startlingly perfect that Jess can’t believe it. Later in the bedroom things go less perfect – he starts using a lot of these statements like “this is so amazingly perfect” over and over. Suddenly it dawns on her, he’s a compulsive realtionshiper, and is already onto the path to coupledom. Things get even worse when in the sack.

Flash forward a few days later, and Jess has continued to give him a few chances to redeem himself, but so far he has failled. On Sunday night Jess invites me over and Tim is there. We decide to go out to John Henry’s for the burlesque night show. The whole time Tim is making out with Jess, kissing her neck, touching her, and generally being incredibly possesive. The whole made me incredibly uncomfortable, but when I hastily ushered Jess out to grab a pita with me in between sets, what surprised me was not that Jess was enjoying it, or even disliking, but was completely neutral on the guy. He was so utterly blah that his negatives had drowned out his relatively muted and pastel positives? She didn’t like him, the sex wasn’t good, and he was both actively and passively possesive – I couldn’t figure out why she was keeping him around.

“Why don’t you just stop calling him,” I said. “Let him go slowly.”

So Jess she polled her friends, and they all told her the same thing: why are you seeing someone you don’t like? All of them said what I said – to phase him out.

So Jess made a decision – she would phase Tim out. That night when he called she brushed him off but asked what he was doing the next day, not so much out of curioiusity but out of sympathetic brush off pitty. So she was surprised when he refused to tell her and found herself strangley interested in seeing him again.

At this point in the story I nearly fell off my bed.