Because men think a woman is chasing them when she isn’t

We’ve talked before about men not being able to flirt and thinking women are always hitting on them. These things combined come back to one basic premise – men think a woman is chasing them, when she isn’t.

If a woman thinks a man is attractive and approaches him to find out more about him, she steps into an emotional minefield of games, innuendo, and psychic stalking all of which she will be blamed for.

It doesn’t matter if her approach is casual, it doesn’t matter if she was a little tipsy and looked his way once too often, it doesn’t matter if she’s going through a bad patch and for a few days entertained the possibility of dating him, a man will assume she’s a stalker. he will assume she is besotted with him, he will assume she can’t resist his charms and he will ignore all evidence to the contrary that she may actually be at the birthday party for the person having the birthday, rather than just trying to bump into him.

In fact, the length and breadth of evidence that men are willing to ignore in favour of their assumptions is nothing short of astonishing. If she’s out with friends and she accidently bumps into him, he will assume it was deliberate, even though he had told no one where he was going that night. If she’s polite, she’s coming on strong; if she’s rude, she’s angry and frustrated that he won’t sleep with her; and if she ignores him she’s obviously burying her real feelings and anyone can see through it.

This is really the key to the point here. If a woman is partially attracted to a man, sometimes she will go out of her way to ‘bump’ into him. However all that is required on his part is to be a little cool and a woman’s carefully built lack of self-esteem will take over and do the rest for him. Those truly mad women who really follow you around (totally without encouragement of any kind) are very rare, despite the fact that every single man believes he has had one.

Put a group of men around beers at a pub and casually introduce the topic, and I guarantee at least half of them will have a long-winded story about the mad woman who wouldn’t leave them alone, that they couldn’t get rid of no matter what. You will have to pretend to be convinced by the shaking of heads, the sorrowful look and the protestations of “No no… It’s really scary when it happens. It isn’t flattering at all.”  But it’s the sparkle in the eye, the keen way the story is told and the flush of the cheek that I’ve away how much he loves that he had a stalker.  Of course, one of the main offender s in the perpetrating of these stories are the women who really do want to sleep with the man who is bragging about it, and therefore are keen to put down any other woman in a ten-mile radius that may be a competitor.

In romance novels a man is only interested in his own opinion. If he likes a girl, he will go for it. Everything else is incidental and gets handled appropriately as you g along. There is no need for a self-esteem shot from some poor woman who happened to catch your eye as she walked past.