A certain hotelier

Some two weeks into our affair, the hotelier said “I am waiting for you to say something”. I was genuinely puzzled and said so but she refused to elaborate. Only later, after she had put an end to the affair, I realized that what she had expected was a proposal – of cohabitation if not marriage outright. I must be extraordinarily thick: everyone whom I tell this story, everyone else but me, understands the hotelier’s hint in a thrice.

My thickness is puzzling because the hotelier was only following the normal pattern. Girls sneak into my bed with (apparently) no preconditions, only because they want to (I am such a handsome fellow), but then they all end up making accusations when I do not volunteer to offer them my freedom in payback. Their accusation is that I am playing games – that appears to be the usual term for sleeping around; apparently there are men who keep the score and work incessantly to improve it; but the truth is that I am not sleeping around; and that it is they – the women – who are playing games because they fraudulently offer a supposedly free product only to submit an invoice for it in the end anyway.

An interesting aspect of this whole thing is that the strategy is so generally practiced by women all over the world. Hence it must be instinctively encoded: over millennia of practice the women-folk have evolved a hardwired technique that works. This means, in turn, that by and large men can be expected to fall for it, which is to say that men are prepared to propose the bargain: hitching up in return for free sex. Perhaps they too are hard-wired that way, since, surely, the sex can’t really be worth the settling? But perhaps it is: perhaps most men won’t get any unless they do; and perhaps they can’t live without the any. (Why it should be so puzzles me, but is perhaps explained by the general drudgery of men’s lives outside of sex).

I continue to choose to be naïve. The result is a succession of girlfriends who come hopefully and depart in a huff, but both come and go of their own volition: several months of plenty followed by several months of draught. This too makes me think of evolutionary psychology: it is very much living like our evolutionary ancestors in the African savannah, they lived the same cycle of feast and famine. (In their case it was according to the seasons).