If I was a girl, I wouldn’t sleep with guys so soon. This advice cockblocks me, but the best defense — to a man whose main goal is to sleep with girls as fast as possible — is to wait, especially since most guys are only willing to have sex with you once and never again. You don’t want to put out until a guy shows time investment.

But how much time investment?

Enough so that if the sex is bad, his first instinct is not to dump you. While I don’t believe in time invested, almost all other guys do. If he spent a lot of time getting you in bed, he will be less willing to “throw it all away” just because you didn’t give enthusiastic oral sex.

Waiting will only work if you are a quality woman. The amount of quality you need to have depends on the kind of guy you are going after: the higher status male, the more you must have your shit together. If you want to land him, and you think he wants to be landed by you, then you need a better strategy than answering the phone on the third ring and relying on advice from girlfriends who have watched too many movies.

I asked myself, “What would work on me?” What could a girl say to me on date two, three, or — doubtfully — four that would still keep me hanging on even though we weren’t having sex? I embraced my feminine side and came up with something that, if said to me by a girl I liked, may keep me in the game:

I want to be intimate as much as you do, but sex is something that is very important to me. It takes a lot of trust and time for me to do that. I don’t date multiple guys and I don’t care about where you take me out, but sex is one thing that we should wait for. I don’t know how long it will take and I can’t promise that anything that will happen, but you are the only guy that I’m seeing right now. If you can be patient and we can spend some time together, I want to see where this goes.

There are five things that were communicated there:

1. She is not a whore.
2. She is not a spinster or serial dater.
3. She is not trying to spend my money.
4. She is probably not playing games.
5. She is not needy.

If I was a girl, I would maybe say that to guys. Most would walk away, but I’m sure some wouldn’t. It doesn’t completely solve the problem of getting pumped and dumped, but is sure does a good job screening out guys like me, who find it unnecessary to wait for sex past date two.

On the face of it Craigslist “Missed Connections” seem like a really good idea and I’ll admit to a passing fascination with reading them. But if you think about the darker side of missed connections, it’s actually just a dating tool for wimps. It’s the adult equivalent of middle-school dating where you ask your friend to ask his friend if he likes you.

Every human being on this planet fears rejection and has a certain amount of shyness. But SO WHAT if they shoot you down? Life is full of rejection - jobs, friends, credit cards. So someone ignores you and you feel like a dummy. But I feel like a complete idiot on a regular basis and it hasn’t ruined my life yet. In fact, I’m basically awesome all the time.

What’s not acceptable is when you so much fear just TALKING to another person to the point that you later obsess about the interaction enough to actually post on an online forum about it.

I get to say this because I actually was the recipient of a missed connection about a month after I moved to DC. I had gone to the still-cool Tapatini’s and started talking to a cute guy who could have been my brother (I love looking in mirrors, so I’m attracted to people who look like me). Having taken advantage of the gratuitous martini special, I went to the bathroom and when I came back he was gone. I chalked it up to “not interested” and left a few minutes later to go to dinner with my friends.

Monday morning, a friend of mine forwarded me a missed connection that was definitely me. So I e-mailed the guy back, and we went out for two months. Unfortunately in the end he was exactly what a missed connection poster is: a whiny titty baby.

Until recently, I’d never gone out with a man who didn’t trust me (or who lived in a different city). Sure, I have a million friends and a hundred parties, but just because said friends/parties are usually at a bar doesn’t mean I’m tarted up and out trying to get with other dudes. If Europe has cafe society, the U.S. - and especially DC - has bar society where the primary goal is to unwind and meet your friends. I mean, the people on “Cheers” weren’t there to get laid.

There are some women who are okay with possessive and jealous guys, and there are some women who are equally if not more possessive and jealous. But I’m not either of those women. And I don’t like being pushed around and told how to act in a “serious relationship”, especially when I’m not doing anything to warrant it. I can be a really shitty person, but I’m loyal through and through - I’ve never cheated on a boyfriend or anything close to it.

If you have a problem trusting someone - like for example you ever call back a number on their “received calls” list or read their texts when they’re not around - and you have no legitimate reason not to trust that person, then you have a problem. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a personal issue, but maybe representative of a lack of confidence in the nature of the relationship. But not trusting someone isn’t a thing that can be easily reversed, if at all. Like V said, if you don’t have trust, you don’t have anything.

A few years ago in Baltimore I met an FOB Russian girl who could really dance. I wasn’t interested enough to try but I would have definitely banged it out under the right circumstances. A few months later I run into her at a DC club. This time she is with her new boyfriend, and he was gigantic; at least 100 pounds overweight. Any interest I had in her disappeared instantly.

What does it say about me if a girl that likes me also likes a grotesque specimen of a man? It’s nice that she can see through his physical flaws to search deep for the human being inside, but it still makes me wonder about what she thinks is quality. Dating her would put me on the same level as the monster man, and I feel uneasy about that.

Girls are less shallow in this regard. They don’t seem to care if you’ve been with a fat or ugly girl. Still, if you’re a girl who has dated ugly, please don’t let me know.

Recently a man I’m dating asked me to please be more careful of what I say and to stop word-vomiting because I sometimes vomit up things that he takes the wrong way and hurt his feelings. People who know me know that they can disregard about 50% of everything I say because it’s not actually meant to be heard by other people. I keep forgetting that other people aren’t like this and need to be warned in advance because they are big fat babies.

I say mean things all the time and I don’t feel badly about it. If I think something is funny, I’m going to say it before I consider who may get offended by it. And that’s a problem. Not just for me, but what happens when you’re acting out a behavior that is second-nature to you, and which is probably annoying or rude or whatever to others? And nobody bothers to call you on it, so you just never conduct a self-examination? And then you just turn into this monster that other people hate but love at the same time? People are rewarding your blunt behavior and it just sort of takes over. You leave a trail of butt-hurt people who cry to others about how “mean” or “inconsiderate” you are. Aren’t we all adults?

I don’t think it’s so wrong to receive honesty from people, especially the ones you date. Even if you don’t like what they tell you, you should be open to the possibility of trying to look at yourself objectively and figure out what the problem might be on your end. It’s also nice to deliver honesty once in awhile. If someone drives you crazy with a particular behavior (especially one that appears to be make-or-break), politely telling them about this problem may well end it, saving you both some major hassle. They might tell you to go to hell, but if it’s a rare wise person, they’ll thank you eventually. Otherwise, if you do nothing to help yourself, you really have no room to carp about others.

Seth Godin writes about whether or not it is time to quit your job:

If he leaves and joins another company, he gets to reinvent himself. No one in the new company will remember young Doug from 10 years ago. No, they’ll treat Doug as the new Doug, the Doug with endless upside and little past.

Let’s look at it from the perspective of evolution: Species that evolve the fastest are the ones that don’t mate for life. By switching mates, swapping genes with someone new, you continually reshuffle the gene pool, making it more likely you’ll create something new and neat and novel and useful.

You can read the whole thing here.

I thought about how this relates to women (of course) and was reminded of college. In my sophomore year I had a crush on a girl who only liked me as a friend. I accepted that and didn’t really push it, so we’d study together and she’d talk about guys she wanted to bang.

Four years later…

My game changed a lot. I was on the right path to figuring out how this dating thing works, and how to get what I want. Then my former crush invited me on a night out with her friends. As tight as I think my game had gotten, she simply could not accept that I changed, and tried to treat me like she did back in college. I refused to be pegged to this old version of me, so we got into a fight and haven’t talked since. Nothing would shake the strong impression of me she had in her mind, and I wasn’t willing to build a new relationship based on our old one. It’s so much easier to start anew than work on someone who already made up their mind. Less hassle, less work.

Sounds like a kicky little Miramax movie, doesn’t it? It’s not. The finicky climax is the bane of womankind’s existence.

Any woman who tells you they climax every time they have sex is lying. If you are one of these women who makes such an outrageous claim, then please bottle your mojo, sell it, and put it on a shelf, because I want some of that.

I only experience a success rate of about 50 percent. Now, before you go spouting off your machismo about what you could do to me, or how I’ve never been with a real man, or how I just need to relax, or some other such BS, I will give you a pre-emptive HA! YEAH RIGHT!

Just like every meal I eat is not going to be INCREDIBLY AWESOME, every sexing I have is not going to produce the best result. Men, I’m telling you, if your woman isn’t getting off every time, unless there appears to be a significant hang-up, just let it go. It should come as no surprise to you that women and men have different needs, and often a woman can enjoy having sex without climaxing. So quit hassling them about it!

I’ve had one guy accuse me of having some sort of sexual dysfunction because I couldn’t come with him. The reason I couldn’t come with him was because he was very small, but that’s beside the point. He put so much pressure on me to climax, probably to fulfill his own hyper-inflated ego, that it completely turned me off and I thought he was a total weirdo. Additionally, there’s been the problem of coitus interruptus where I’ve had to “have a talk” about why I hadn’t climaxed the previous few times. Well, I don’t fucking know, and I was really enjoying myself before we stopped, so thanks a lot for annoying the hell out of me. If I say that I can’t come every time, then that means please accept it as fact and deal with it. Nothing is going to change the situation (which I am perfectly comfortable with) so if it’s that much of a problem for you, then you can, well, go fuck yourself!