Holly's Uncomfortable Dating Lessons for Women Part #1: Be Nurturing. Period.

Here's an attempt to boil down something I've learned from dating for women as told though the lens of me being a pretty honest pro-humanist, down-to-earth heterosexual female. The reason I've refrained from doing this, despite the requests, in the past is that the things I've learned about dating-as-female are uncomfortable, unsettling and troubling for someone like me. A lot of the things I've learned have hurt. If you've figured out anything from reading my blog, it's that I'm pretty perceptive and sometimes the things you perceive are wholly unfair. To this end, I'm going to dedicate Holly's Unfair Dating Tips for Women to throwing out my thoughts on subjects, reflecting on how they make me feel and opening them up for discussion. As a male friend of mine suggested, one thing I should do is open this blog up to the male point of view and let them get their voice in. Maybe this will be a way for that to happen, who knows. You let me know how it goes, Will.

Anyway, so one of the things you get out of an Apatow movie if you're a female is the message that men fucking love schoolteachers. In fact, surveys show over and over again that men think schoolteachers to be the #1 most preferable occupation a date can have. Do you think they really mean like a 12th grade AP Calculus teacher? No, probably not. When men think schoolteacher, I think, given the prevalence in movies (Bruce Almighty; Billy Madison), they mean kindergarten teacher.

The reasons are probably because early education schoolteachers, as a stereotype, are seen as women who wear soft white cotton sweaters and don't raise their voice when kids stick glue in each other's hair. In a word, they are nurturing. Or at least, they're perceived to be nurturing. There are other things contained in the stereotype: intellectually nonthreatening, noncompetitive, etc. In another way, they are seen to be excellent mothers and women who, since they put up with it for eight hours a day at school, can put up with taking care of a manbaby at home, too.

I'm not trying to dump on schoolteachers as a profession. Not at all. I have lots of friends who are now schoolteachers, especially through programs like Teach for America. But it's something I've never given a whole lot of thought to until I found myself single post-college.

Rationally, it's difficult for anyone to accept the idea that in 2010 that women need to be caregivers in order to be attractive to men, especially men who profess to be liberal and espouse views on equal rights. But you watch these same men "rank" women on scales of 1 to 10 and talk about unattractive women as if they've no right to breathe air. And on top of having to be super attractive, she need also be free of any "masculine" behavior. She need to be "nice," which is not "nice" in the considerate, generous and thoughtful kind of way. By nice, most guys I know mean quiet, soft-spoken and non-combative. Women I know who are described to be as nice by guy friends are often women who refrain from dominating conversations and answer shyly, "I don't know," when asked for an opinion. She can't be loud. She can't crack jokes. She most certainly cannot engage in a debate. These are, I am told, masculine and therefore unattractive behaviors. Though many men say they love this in women, it's rare I've ever seen a man pick the loud, center-of-attention girl over the quiet, doting one.

The early education schoolteacher stereotype often contains many of these desirable traits men want women to have. She spends her days taking care of children. Her mastery is in a subject area most men, having graduated kindergarten themselves, feel themselves unthreatened by. There's no competition she can engage in. There's no ladder she can climb. In many ways, as far as her career goes, once she gets a position, she remains in relative stasis in his eyes.

For me, being a PhD student at Harvard, I'm never going to be able to fit this stereotype in the eyes of a date, and I'm well aware of that fact. My job will never have me work with cute little children, instead, I actively engage with other intellectuals who, you know, sometimes end up on CNN and change social policy. In my professional life, I'm expected to always be growing, learning new things, and getting better at presenting my ideas and arguments to a public audience. By virtue of even being at a place like Harvard, I've already been labeled as, well, objectively, one of those east-coast ivory tower smarty-heads. There's a lot of social weight that comes with what I am. And when I talk to professors, when I discuss things in class, I am that. I expect that of *all* my peers. I expect a kind of intellectual rigor here from everyone. It should be an intense place. I'm actually sorta disappointed when it isn't.

But outside of my professional career, I'm not always like that. I'm actually, despite myself, one of those nurturing schoolteacher types who likes to bake brownies and talk about feelings. I like to wear soft cotton dresses and walk barefoot through dewy grass. I'm actually awesome with children and teenagers. But these are all hypothetical realities now. Because when the hell do I, as a single 24-year old PhD student at Harvard, have opportunities to demonstrate how nurturing, cute and adorable I am.

But none of that matters, really, because despite my occupation often being confused as that of a social worker, I'm basically masculine all over. I'm loud. I crack jokes. I like beer. I love debate. It also probably doesn't help that I'm square-jawed and broad-shouldered. I'm sure that doesn't help. But on the surface, I'm not a schoolteacher type.

So on dates, I have to make an effort to "tell, not show" which totally inverts one of my cardinal rules of life. If I like a guy on a date, I have to push all the things I do most of the time to the backburner and bring out the things I maybe only get to do sometimes, to demonstrate that "Hey, I'm actually adorable." It actually sucks, because it's not natural. Most guys on a date ask you what you do. What I do is universally seen as unfeminine and un-nuturing. It's cold. It's hard. It's, well, threatening. So I can't talk about what I do, or he won't like me enough to ask me out on a second date to learn that I'm such a horribly bad mini-golf player that it's hilarious. Instead, I'm stuck sitting across a dinner table with a guy who is trained to ask me questions which would greatly advantage a schoolteacher and disadvantage any high power woman.

In sociology, we call this impression management. The idea is that I have to bracket what constitutes 90% of my life to highlight the 10% of my life that men will find attractive. Even if he's a fellow PhD student at Harvard, I still have to be seen as caring, sensitive and feminine. It's actually pretty hard. While I am, in actuality, these things in real life, I do spend most of my days not being these things because I spend most of my days sitting in front of PDF articles and digging through interview transcripts. I don't get to coo over puppies and give hugs to adorable children. I have many a day where I don't talk to a single person.

So this is actually something I've learned I have to do on dates. When I first started, I was so excited to talk about what I do. All of the men I date are smart men. I figured they, of all people, would understand what it's like to be excited about one's intellectual pursuits. But no. The faces, oh the faces they made. I always felt I was failing an interview, on these dates. And so, in the course of the two years I've been dating, I've found myself toning down any talk about what I think about all day, what I do all day, what I hope for my future. Basically, I evade every question most guys ask on dates. Instead, I redirect conversations to him. I ask about him. I ask about the temperature of his food. I don't lie, but man, I'm now in a position where I'm absolutely uncomfortable talking about almost anything. And fuck if I don't always get asked out again, which tells me this is working. It's mindblowingly frustrating.

The lesson here isn't very good. It's uncomfortable, especially for me since what I think what most men find attractive will never be me. And since what I am outwardly doesn't even wholly match up with what I actually am, I have to face the uncomfortable reality that dating is designed to fail me. But the uncomfortable, unfair truth is that no matter how far you as a sex advance in your professional life, no matter how many ceilings you smash through, men still in 2010 want the schoolteacher. If you happen to be nurturing but employed in something seemingly unfeminine, you have the burden of demonstrating your femininity on a date, which can be difficult if you work all day being nongendered.

It's something I'm still working at. It's something that sorta makes my gut ache on dates. It's something that is hard to reconcile. But it's my unfair lesson from dating #1.