How Not to Get the Digits

During the summer, I do a lot of things I don’t do during the academic year.  I work, but I do a lot of writing and research (for me, a lot of said research involves watching movies).  I also catch up on the sleep I lost during the months of August through May.

This past week, I felt compelled to watch the NBA championships.  I don’t follow basketball, but the Knicks were in the finals and could possibly win for the first time since 1973.  When I visited my Mom the week prior, we watched Game 1, during which the Knicks played chaotically, but emerged with the “W.”

At that point, I’d caught the basketball fever.  I don’t have cable, so I went to a sports bar called the Dog Haus.  My plan was to order a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke and cheer for the Knicks.
I was met by a blond, bespectacled woman named Katie, who was waiting on a friend celebrating her birthday.  She mentioned this to a bartender, who also proudly proclaimed himself a Gemini.  I jumped in, “Me too!” 

“When’s your birthday?” Katie asked.

“This Saturday!”

She offered to buy me a shot along with the bartender, but I mentioned that I no longer imbibe. She did invite me to sit at her table when her friend arrived; I said, “Yeah, that sounds cool.”
When her friend Stacey arrived, they started chatting in relatively low voices.  At one point, I offered to buy her a drink for her birthday, which she politely declined.  I read the situation as “These two women are out for a ladies’ night, no need for me to disrupt.”  When Katie came over to the bar, we started chatting naturally, and Stacey joined us.  But she also had to fly out of town early the next morning, so she took off.

My thought, Should I get her number?  This is what I’m supposed to do, right?

But it just didn’t feel necessary.  The conversation wasn’t that deep.  We talked about what we did for work, but that was about it.  I did invite them to join my Childfree Singles of the DMV Meetup group (I could just tell they were one of our tribe).  As I went home, I thought, yeah, I did the right thing.

And that leads me to some thoughts regarding how men are socialized into the behavior of being “the pursuer.”  When I was in my 20s, I spent a lot of time in bars and clubs trying to “get the digits”.  When I did that at the age of thirty-one, it led to a relationship that I just didn’t belong in.  Seventeen years later, I’m a happy singleton.  I’m not necessarily closed off to the idea of “something” that falls outside the realm of the relationship escalator, but I don’t seek it out.  I believe a hetero man should be aware of himself and can just talk to women without it having to go somewhere.  That said, it takes work to mentally get to that place.

I have a lot of platonic women friends who add a great deal to my life, many of whom I met on CoSP.  There’s no sex involved.  There’s no romance.  And it works for me.  And whether a man partners up or not, he should learn how to have a friendship with a woman.  And he should be able to talk to a woman and “read the room” as to whether he actually should try to go beyond the conversation.

​There’s a lot of hype on social media about “Why aren’t men approaching women anymore?”  That conversation is way too complex and nuanced for this post and will likely inform another post in the future.  But when I posted about this on CoSP, many women applauded and said, “Thank you!” 
I’m aware some men reading this might say, “What the hell!  You just lost your man card!”  Those are the kinds of guys I used to associate with in my 20s, but they’re not part of my world now.