How to Alienate a Girl in Ten Minutes or Less

You may notice that the following post is not actually about the library. This is mostly due to thefact that since I moved to days, nothing very exciting has happened at the library. I mostly sit at my desk and hammer our the student workers' schedule for the millionth time and print out timecards. That being the case, I've decided to just write in my blog about stuff. Enjoy!

I have met many people in my travails through this existence. Some of them were cool. Some of them were weird. Some of them were Kevin Murphy.

One of these is Kevin Murphy. Chose wisely.

But as I meet people, I'm always amazed by the strangeness in the interaction between men and women, especially within the first few minutes. Making a first impression is important. In a social setting, it can mean the difference between being boon companions which you would venture into the Fires of Mount Doom and being Facebook friends that you put at the bottom of your notification list.

Disclaimer: This is mostly addressed to men. This is not to be an all-encompassing guide. I mostly focus on first interactions between men and women. I can only write from my experiences as a late-twentysomething woman living in a college town. Some of the men I've met, actually behave like polite, normal human beings interacting with a polite, semi-normal human being (me).

Talk Down to Her

Maybe you're an expert in cooking. Maybe you know all the names of the background characters in Star Wars. That's great! Talking to an expert can be a lot of fun and a learning experience; however, just because you happen to know all of the words to every Queen song ever and I only know about half of them does not mean I'm stupid and you're somehow superior. Nice people, in general conversation, don't belittle people, especially people they've just met, because they don't know something. From personal experience, I know that it's a little hard to hide contempt when someone doesn't know something very basic to being a human being like when my freshman roommate told me she didn't know who Peter Pan was. I'll let that sink in for a moment. But Peter Pan and a supporting character from a steampunk novel I've never heard of are two entirely different beasts. This is part of the reason I hate your typical hipster, as if knowing something really obscure makes you a more worthwhile person to talk to and know.

The second part that irritates me about a person talking down to me is the assumption I don't know as much or more about the subject as you. This happens occasionally when people start talking about video games, assuming that, as a female, if I play video games at all, it is mostly likely something fluffy like Diner Dash (though that game is fun to play, from time to time). In reality, girl gamers are as varied as male gamers, with some of us enjoying first-person shooters like Modern Warfare and others enjoying adventure like Skyrim while other's of us enjoy, inexplicably I might add, Duke Nukem Forever. My irritation stems from the stupid assumption, even when confronted with the fact that I am playing Assassin's Creed III or something similar, that I'm not really a gamer because girls can only really be casual gamers.

How to do it wrong:

Talk just about your interests, inserting lots of "but you probably don't know about that" or "I'm pretty much an expert at this". For bonus points, add "no one really understands how important this is". Additional points if this statement is attached to a conversation about manga, anime, TV, movies, video games, and/or comics.

How to do it right:

Find something you both enjoy talking about, like you are talking to any other normal person (or abnormal as the case may be). Maybe you'll both like long boarding or tap dancing or have borderline unhealthy obsessions with the TV series Game of Thrones. Whatever it is you talk about, talk about it as equals. If she asks you to tell her more about something she's not overly familiar with, inform without condescending and keep it brief. One-sided conversations are only fun for the person speaking. You wouldn't enjoy a girl talking your ear off about an original character in a Harry Potter/True Blood crossover fan fiction she had written, would you? Maybe you would, but that's besides the point.

Talk About Bodily Functions

There's a time and a place for everything. The first ten minutes of meeting someone is not the time to discuss this subject, especially with girls. I do not enjoy bodily humor, for the most part, though I did have some choice fart jokes in my repertoire when I was a kid. I am not exaggerating when I say five minutes after I met a friend's roommate he announced "I have to fart". Wonderful. Were you assuming I was some sort of flatulence connoisseur and that I needed an announcement to prepare myself? I might add that I had not mentioned anything that would have suggested this or that I wanted to hear that.

How to do it wrong:

Tell anyone you've just met about anything related to your body that you wouldn't bring up if you were talking to your grandmother (unless she's your primary physician, for some reason, then you probably would anyways). Extra points for using locker room slang.

How to do it right:

Keep it to yourself. Maybe your roommates will be fascinated by your new foot wart after company has left your domicile.

Treat Her Like a Piece of Meat

I'd like to think that I get along with people pretty well, though that's only from my perspective. Anyways, I am friends with girls and guys in equal measure. When I meet a new guy, unless he is ridiculously good looking, I'm not thinking "I hope he asks me out" or "I wonder if he's my future husband". I base my friendships off of mutual likes and dislikes. I cannot stand when I meet someone and they immediately judge whether or not I'm date-able and then ignore me if I'm not their cup of tea (which I hold no grudge as not every guy I meet is my cup of tea either). I'm not saying that it is wrong, neccessarily, to put people in categories like that, in your head. I am saying that it's not a particularly nice thing to vocalize or show in your actions. Perhaps you are attempting to avoid an awkward situation of having a girl you don't want to date mooning after you, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be polite. We, as a species, are slowly losing the ablility to interact with each other without a screen in front of us and some of us mistake manners for flirting. That doesn't mean give the cold shoulder to a girl who bothered to stop playing Minecraft and show up to a party to meet a bunch of people she doesn't know.

How to do it wrong:

Ignore her, especially when she directly addresses you. Bonus points if you talk across her to a different girl, pretending she is invisible.

How to do it right: 

Talk to the girl as if she was a human being. Just because you talk to a girl, doesn't mean she thinks you're going to ask her out (unless she's unbalanced, then you're on your own). If you don't really even want to be friends with her, perhaps because of her affinity for all things Miley Cyrus related or something equalling disturbing, politely get out of the conversation without looking like a jerk.

Tell Her What She Thinks

I have never declared that I understand the male brain at all, though I have been told it has something to do with a "nothing box". I get incredibly irritated by people who presume to know how I feel or think based on their interactions with other girls. Sometimes this is due to very bad experiences with women that left them with skewed views of the female brain. A bad breakup can ruin a guy for a long time, which I have witnessed on many occasions. If this isn't the case, some guys seem to think that all girls are the same. We all love shoes and shopping. We all love Justin Bieber and Twilight. We all dislike working with our hands or getting dirty or driving sports cars/trucks. Wouldn't the world be a boring place if that was actually true?

Let me give you a scenerio I've been in that illustrates my point more fully:

Me: I think a guy can get out of the friendzone. I've thought of a guy as a friend and then thought of him as something more later on.

Guy: No. Girls don't change their minds. Once they've put you in the friendzone, that's it!

Me: But that's not true in every case.

Guy: It is. I've dated long enough to know.

In this case, I have voiced my opinion and then immediately been shot down, because he's known some girl who wouldn't take him out of the friendzone. Maybe she didn't feel that way about you. Or maybe it's because you tell her what she thinks even when she has said otherwise.

How to do it wrong:

Start sentences with "all you girls are like this". For bonus points, throw in a heap of mysogny.

How to do it right:

Speak from your own experience as a man. Talk to the girl about how you perseve the world and let her voice her views without correcting her.

In conclusion, you might want to try to go the extra mile when you meet people. Or at the very least, keep your fart jokes and your condesending tone to yourself.

Thanks for reading and remember: don't fold down the pages of your library books.