Guy pals just can’t seem to take the hint
ALL women have ‘em. They’re as ubiquitous as slugs on petunias. They’re the pervy guy friends.
These are the insidious guys who use friendship as a Trojan horse to gain access to a woman’s bed. Or so they hope. And hope. And hope.
They are rarely successful.
Their women friends are onto them. And not interested. These men were put into the “never gonna happen” category immediately upon acquaintance.
The guy friend recognizes this disinterest but perseveres. For a long time, years maybe, he cultivates a friendship. At some point he starts dropping hints about his attraction.
It doesn’t matter to the guy friend if the object of his lust is married or in a relationship. In fact, the guy friend himself often has a wife or long-term girlfriend.
What does the woman get out of this friendship? He may be entertaining company. He may ask her to awards shows or buy her the occasional sandwich. He may show interest in her dreams and concerns. The price she pays is deflecting the come-ons. At some point, she often comes to the conclusion that it’s not worth the discomfiture.
Beware, women: There is no free custom compilation CD.
There are a few ways of dealing with the delusions of the guy friend. You can shoot down his overtures every time, which leads to a rather confrontational relationship with hostile undertones. You can ignore them and change the subject. Or you can start avoiding him. Any way you go, you’re playing a constant game of chicken. Whatever you do, you’re going to offend him.
My friend Eve has a guy friend who tells people they’re going out. She laughs it off, until his delusions irritate her; then she mocks him mercilessly: “Dude, there is no way anyone would believe I would ever go out with you. Not even if I got Lindsay Lohan-wasted.”
I had an older married male friend whom I occasionally used to meet for lunch. We had a lot of interests in common and I enjoyed talking with him. I never got the “my wife doesn’t understand me” speech, but I did get compliments on my attractiveness, flattering at first, but eventually creepy. Finally, during one lunch I caught him blatantly staring at my chest. He had to say, “Oh, what does your pendant say?” by way of a save. (For the record, it said: “Curiouser and curiouser.”) That was our last lunch.
I’ve got another pal who always tries to bring the conversation around to my sex life with my boyfriend -- in the guise of “advising” me. He is fooling no one. He also went ballistic once when I told him I thought of him as a brother and chastised me for “completely emasculating” him. He said: “That completely closes the door.” Funny, that was precisely my message.
My friend Jennifer once was befriended by a professional old enough to be her father. They hung out for a while. When he let her know he was attracted to her, she balked and told him flatly where he stood. He got angry and their friendship ended.
This is the way she describes the situation:
“He knows you don’t want him. He knows. Our problem is that if we don’t like a guy, but he seems nice enough or harmless, we have pity on him and will talk to him on occasion or we’ll hang out with him. We’ll always do something to let them know that we’re not interested, but they think that if they hang around long enough, maybe, just maybe we’ll let something happen.
“These suckers seem innocent enough, but they’re not. They never are. Never. And they run the same game over and over again.”
Often there are things about these guys that are genuinely likable, and it’s disappointing that they can’t be genuine friends. It often comes down to the icky realization that someone motivated by sexual self-interest is perhaps not truly a friend. The insightful author Anton Chekhov broke it down this way more than a century ago: “A woman can become a man’s friend only in the following stages -- first an acquaintance, next a mistress, and only then a friend.”
Guess Victorian women had pervy friends too, besides Jack the Ripper.