It wasn’t as if I’d be leaving behind a world of journalistic integrity or a future with a man who would rather do ten in Sing Sing than march his chicken ass to the altar.
It was time to pack up and bolt from this town that had dried up on me like a pond without rain, leaving everything hard and cracked and without a base from which to flourish. Hard to make a living on $10,500 a year typing in obits and lying about fish bites and weather reports while watching one’s boyfriend cheat every weekend.
Young girls need to know when to slice the line and swim fast. Those who linger on an empty hook could very well end up old and bitter and still waiting. If a man hasn’t shown his cards after a year or two of willy-nilly, he’s not in the game for keeps.
My precious and ultrarich Thurston may have owned every building and half the hotels on the Georgia coast, in addition to the five towns and six highways that bore his name, but I knew he’d never go down the aisle without a good fight and years of bribing along with countless sessions of psychotherapy. The second week I was dating him, he had us in a therapist’s office for couple’s counseling and I hadn’t even slept with him. I should have run then and there.
Girls, let me tell you something. If you are dating or living with an Altar Chicken, listen up. There is hope and one or two surefire ways to get him to commit if he is even remotely heterosexual. The first, which I’ve tried on two occasions and both of which have produced fast proposals, involves moving or pretending to do so.
If you pack your bags and leave, a mechanism clicks within the stubborn psyches of these creatures and all of a sudden they are buying diamonds. There is something about telling these fellows you’re moving away—even if it’s just a town or two over—that triggers their instinctive competitiveness. This is why ugly girls with thick ankles and front fannies can snag cutie-pies. Men, no matter what the game or stakes, don’t like losing. They hate the thought you may live somewhere else, and God forbid, find joy and another joystick. It drives them into buying precious stones and bands of gold.
I discovered this method purely by accident when I’d had enough of Thurston’s going home with vodka’d-up Realtors and nineteen-year-old strippers. I decided to not only leave town, but to also leave the country. I hopped a $79 one-way flight to Miami, caught another cheap flight to paradise, rented a tent in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and sailed right out of his life. Men can’t abide the fact they’ve not only lost their girlfriend, but she’s moved to a remote island and is running about in a bikini giving heart attacks to eighty-year-old leathered men motoring about in yachts. They don’t like being back home and wondering why you’re not answering any of their calls or messages. They want to know exactly where you’ve been.
“I’m on a yacht,” I said one afternoon from the deck of an eighty-five-year-old hottie’s fine boat.
“A yacht? Whose yacht? Who are you with?”
“Oh, you don’t know him. You may recognize his last name. Does Rockefeller ring any bells?”
“Come on, seriously. Whose boat are you on? You know I love you. You can’t just get on a plane and leave. Nobody does that, my Little Hurricane at Sea.”
“I did.”
“I’m about to have a heart attack. You come home right away, you hear me?”
“Come home? To your house where I don’t even have a drawer in your dresser? I’m in the withered lap of luxury here. Several available men with the two Ts are after me. And you know how I feel about the two Ts.”
“This isn’t funny. My chest hurts. What are the two Ts? You aren’t making sense at all, my Darling Tsunami. You’ve lost your mind. Finally gone crazy. What’s this thing with the two Ts?”
“Well, since you’ve decided to fraternize with ho bags and floozies, I’ve decided to live on St. John and date only men who boat about and possess the qualities I love most—the two Ts, which I’ll remind you, are, one, a trust fund, and, two, a terminal illness.”
Within two days he was on St. John searching for me, a three-carat emerald-cut ring in his pocket.
The point is simple: You can read all the self-help books you want, but if a man is an Altar Chicken you have to scare the feathers off his carcass before he’s ever going to drop down on one knee. You have to, first of all, act as if you have an entire fabulous and glorious life awaiting should they choose to remain on pause, like their remote controls during the parts in a movie where Nicole Kidman gets naked, which she loves to do more than any other actress who’s not in porn, God love her.
There are various ways of frying an Altar Chicken, but as I’ve noted, the quickest way to pluck the fear from one is to move. If you really love the man, you’ll pack it up, get a great job elsewhere, and show him what you’re made of.
Before you do this let me bust a myth or two. My double-virgin mama always said a man wouldn’t marry a girl he’s slept with, but that’s a load of bull when put to the test of a new century. Although most of the warnings she laid on my sister and me were correct, this virgin business was not, unless the man was Prince Charles in need of an unsullied maiden.
I’ve amended her rule to fit well into the modern world, and that is if you do sleep with them, you’d better be sheet-scorchingly good in bed. If you can’t control your urges like our dog Putt-Putt and just have to hump something, then put on the Oscar-winning performance of a lifetime, making them think there’s magic in their wands and that their precious weapons of male destruction aren’t to be topped. Then walk out to lead the rest of your glorious and fabulous (even if fictitious) life and leave them hungering for more.
In other words, be the wild vixen one night and the next night tell him you just want a movie and a snuggle or better yet, that you’ve made other plans but will be thinking of him fondly. He won’t know what hit him. Also, it’s important to give him oral sex, which my mother pretends she’d never heard of until Clinton’s great fall.
From sound research involving friends both male and female, the conclusion is that if you ignore his most beloved appendage and never explore this area as you do your favorite desserts, he won’t be as eager to marry you. What man in his right mind wants to spend the rest of his life with a wife who won’t bob for his apple?
Now, backing up a bit to that old expression, “Why buy the cow if the milk is free?” Well, here’s why. If the milk’s good, he’ll buy the cow. If you’ve yelled his name in ecstasy and bragged on his manly parts, he’ll crave you as one does water and need you like his very breath. You’ll see. Just always walk away with him thirsting for more and remember my two rules for hooking a man for life.
First, act as if you have lots of options besides putting all your eggs underneath one Altar Chicken. Men can’t abide a woman with options. Drives them crazy and directly into a blinding path paved with diamonds. Options can vary from moves to other locales, to hobbies and vacations that don’t include him, as well as nights out with others.
And second, if you sleep with him, make sure it’s after dating him so long he’s about to die from his need for you. Then, once you do sleep with him, make it so unbelievably hot and memorable he’ll never forget it.
I know, I know. Women have needs, too. One man’s deprivation is another woman’s starvation. One of my dearest friends is always telling me about men she dates who make her “mist” her panties.
“Jennifer,” I say as nicely as possible, “if you’ve got the hots for him that bad, you’ve got to take action so you won’t run him off.”
“What can I do? I want him so much I can’t stand it.”
“Well, it’s best to make him wait, but if you absolutely can’t, go ahead and slam-dunk him once, give it your all, and then hold off for a good long while. He’ll go crazy with desire.”
“What about me? What about my needs? I mean, how am I going to control myself?”
“There are two ways for this besides taking