Adventures Of A Female Loner

The Concept of Courting Part 2 (End)

Observation 1: If a girl likes a boy she will ask him lots of questions.

When we started the surf session, Surfer Boy did not have any particular interest in any of us as potential mates and was merely helping himself get closer to his goal of becoming an official surf instructor. Em, on the other hand, may have had ulterior motives. She really enjoyed surfing. She loved surfing so much, she asked Surfer Boy many surfing-related questions and by doing so she was able to hold his attention for longer and thus had an increased frequency of opportunities for her board to be pushed at the same timing as the waves. In short, she didn't really ask him a lot of questions because she particularly liked him. She asked him a lot of questions so he'd push her board more often. Sneaky, right? This lead to my next observation.

Observation 2: If a girl likes a boy, she doesn't really like him. She just wants something from him.

We finally decided it was time for brunch. The sun graced its presence and we sat at this beachside cafe. At this point, I thought Em would have given up on the twenty questions, but the complete opposite happened. Twenty questions became thirty questions. And her reactions to his answers became more animated. She would smile and laugh a lot even when he wasn't funny. When I later confronted her on this, she admitted it was a tactic to win his heart. And by winning his heart, she would have a free surf instructor for the duration of her stay. This. Was. Completely. Brilliant!

It really gets a person thinking. There I was sitting grumpily. We had finished brunch but I was still in the sun getting sunburnt while Em was working her magic to ensure that she'd get exactly what she wanted. I realised courtship initiated by a female is often a game of manipulation, and most often than not what she wants from the game, is not the guy, but what the guy can offer. Case in point Surfer Boy.

Observation 3: If a girl likes a boy, she has to keep the conversation going after meeting.

Em had Surfer Boy 60% in the bag. When he talked to us, he held eye contact with Em. He sat next to Em, and he turned his body towards Em. When Em talked he'd respond to her almost always like an eager doggo waiting for his owner to give him a pet. Surfer Boy was hooked. These symptoms, I've been told by the internet and by people, were signs that someone was romantically interested. But, like I said, that was only 60% of the work done.

Em decided to chill at my place and watch a movie. However, the minute we got home, she was glued to her phone. Did we watch the movie? I did. She was still glued to the phone. Eventually, I realised she was chatting with Surfer Boy. Correction, she was flirting with Surfer Boy. She had laid the foundation at the beach, and now she was making sure that he'd know she was interested in him by fanning his ego. She had asked him if he had a girlfriend and he would respond with a "no". She would ask 'Why not?" And he would write something cheesy that went along the lines of "None of the past girls were anything like you" (He really did say something as cheesy as this. This is not an exaggeration). And she would lap all of this up, and they'd label these conversations as deep conversations. They became an item in the span of the day. I still could not comprehend this at all.

I mean, they had just seen and talked to each other for hours earlier? Why chat even more afterwards? What was so great about this guy that Em was expending so much social energy on him? The relationship went from work colleagues to 'just friends' to potential GF and BF, in the span of a day! It was crazy to me. I had never gotten to potential GF and BF in any time limit. Ever! So seeing it happen all in one day was shocking. Could this be true love? Did true love exist and was it unfolding in front of my very eyes?

After a few messages into the evening he offered to give another surf lesson the next morning, and I remembered Observation 2.

Observation 4: If a girl likes a boy, she'll get upset with you if you say something bad about him.

Are women vain and fickle by nature? I'd like to think not, but with all my previous observations, I was starting to think that way: Women could be vain and fickle in love. At the start of this courtship, I confronted Em about her feelings towards Surfer Boy, she held no romantic attraction towards him. In the late afternoon of that day, I had confronted her again on my observations, and she was still denying any romantic interest in Surfer Boy. By the time the sun set and it was the evening, I was irritated at the lack of attention she was giving to hang out with me in favour of chatting with Surfer Boy on her phone (To my defence, she wanted to hang out at my place. If she didn't want to talk then she could've gone home and I would've enjoyed watching Netflix instead of playing hostess) so I told her she was way better than him and that she was out of his league. She stopped and looked up with disappointment, and said that I was too harsh and being mean. I was shocked.

Didn't she say she didn't like him? Why was she so upset with me? Remember, Em could turn straight girls into lesbians, but Surfer Boy was a generic white guy. He was on the shorter plumper side, had no apparent abs, no shiny eyes, and was just average... That's when it hit me. Right then and there I realised that Em liked this guy a little bit more than just for his surfing. She had denied feeling any attraction throughout the day, but she was defending him against a somewhat-not-so-harsh matter-of-fact statement he would never know about and one would only do that if they liked the person.

I resigned myself to the last observation that girls will eventually really like the guy if she does all the observations above of her own volition before she, herself, even realises it.

*****

Time has passed since then. You might be wondering if Em and Surfer Boy are still together? No, they are not. They mutually broke up with each other without explicitly saying so a few weeks later when Em moved back to the inner city and wasn't deeply saddened by seal pups being hurt as much as Surfer Boy was. That concludes the chapters on the Concept of Courting.