At the end of 2019, before the pandemic, I was in the middle of a crowd of more than a thousand people in a big hall in Brooklyn. We came to hear Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg speak. Halfway through the event, I met Judith Newman, author and New York Times columnist. We talked about why we thought Mayor Pete was the best candidate for President, then talked about raising kids.
Newman has written several books. Her most well-known is To Siri with Love about raising her autistic son Gus. Goodreads lists 22 editions of Siri including editions in Dutch, French and Spanish.
But my favorite of her books is her first. In 1994 she published Tell Me Another One: A Woman's Guide to Men's Classic Lines. Before the first of my four daughters was born, I had a goal for all of their lives. I wanted to convince each of my girls that women cannot change men. To me, the saddest and most pervasive American myth for girls that kissing a frog would create a prince. Or that loving a woman would lead a man to change.
More specifically, I never wanted one of my daughters to say of a furtive, sneaky, loser with his uncombed hair in his eyes, "No one understands him but me." The truth is, everyone understands that worthless little shit except the foolish girl who is smitten with him.
All of my life I have known unhappy women who married that guy. They never changed him. Decades of unhappiness followed.
In the middle of Tell Me Another One is a brief taxonomy of guys by type. "I'm the Kinda Guy Who...." (How he describes himself)
- The Loner
- The Legend in His Own Mind
- The Rebel
- The Bum
- SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys)
- The Woefully Misunderstood
The last section has lovely quotes that describe the guy I warned my girls away from:
"Oh, I'm eternally right. But what good does it do me?" --Robert Sherwood, The Petrified Forest
"If I loved you less, I'd be happier now." --Man whose martyr complex is annoyingly larger than yours.
"This long disease, my life." --Alexander Pope, prologue to The Imitations of Horace
This is a book of lines. The classic trio is on page 39:
- "You'd do it if you really love me." --Men, from the day they turn 14.
- "Nothing's going to happen that you really don't want to happen." --The same men after they turn 30.
- "Of course, I'll still respect you." --All men, all ages.
"Who knows but the world may end to-night?" --Robert Browning, "The Last Ride Together"
Military version: "I leave tomorrow. I might not be coming back." --Said any soldier or sailor in any army or navy who thought it would get him laid.
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My daughters are in relationships with good men who are the opposite of the "misunderstood" guy I worried about. I could take credit, but it turns out an important part of their education in what men are really like came from playing teams sports at a small school. For away games in middle and high school, they sometimes rode the same bus as the boys teams. One or two seasons and all of their illusions about boys and men were gone.
