XLIX
FORGET IT
Every day some girl writes me that she is young, quite as pretty as the other girls about her, that she dresses as well, and makes as good an appearance as they do, and strives to please, but that no man ever pays her the slightest attention, or asks her to step out with him of an evening. Then this girl goes on to say that she is a business girl, but she doesn’t make a very good salary, and she is discouraged, and blue, and wants to know what to do.
My advice to a girl in this situation—and there are millions of her—is to forget men. Give up the struggle to attract them. Quit trying to catch one. Renounce romance. Throw away all thoughts of marriage. Just accept the fact that nature did not put you in the vamp class, and play your game of life from that angle.
This counsel will be a bitter pill for the girl to swallow, but she will find it good medicine that will work a speedy and permanent cure, if she will try it on herself. Why certain women are magnets that draw every man they meet to them, and why nothing in trousers except upon compulsion ever goes near other women just as good looking, just as charming in every way, is one of the mysteries nobody has ever solved. Nor has anyone ever been able to suggest a remedy for this state of affairs.
The fast steamship, the lightning express, the aeroplane, have annihilated distance, but human ingenuity has failed to invent any device to make a boy go to see the girl next door if he doesn’t want to go. Science has torn its secrets from the earth, but it cannot find out what quality it is in woman that attracts men. It has invented chemicals that work magic in the physical world, but it has never discovered a reliable love philter.
So that’s that. And it is a wise girl who has the courage to look herself in the face, and see whether she has the “come hither” look in her eye, and if she hasn’t, to recognize the fact, and devote herself to a more promising occupation than chasing men, who, in the end, always make their getaway, unless they desire to be caught.
Therefore, I would urge the girl who does not make a spontaneous hit with men, to quit wasting her time and her energies in the vain attempt to decoy them into noticing her, and to put all that lost motion and force into her work, where she will get better results.
Believe me, if the girl who does not attract men, tried as hard to sell herself to her job as she does to sell herself socially, she would not have to complain long of holding a small position. She would be a highly paid secretary, or buyer, or department manager.
If the girl who does not attract men, studied her employer’s moods and tenses as earnestly as she does those of some little jellybean, and if she was as anxious to please her employer as she is to please the jazz hounds and cakeaters she meets, she would find herself one of the valued employees who are always spoken of reverentially as “our Miss So-and so.”
If the girl who never has a date would put in one hundredth part of the intensive study on her work that she gives to the technique of the popular girl, and to trying to find out something about the psychology of customers or the history of the goods she handles, or the details of the business she is employed in, she would have employers fighting over her.
In a word, if the girl who is not popular with men would concentrate her thoughts, her interests, and her ambitions, on getting ahead in the occupation she has chosen, instead of wasting her time and energies in a fruitless attempt to charm men, she would be a success instead of a failure; she would be happy instead of miserable.
As it is now she falls between the stools. She is a poor makeshift in her job, who gets nowhere, because her one desire, her one ambition, her one aim in life is to attract men and catch a husband, and she is miserable, and discouraged, and bitter, and disgruntled, because she is balked in that attempt. And she is a siren without allure who never arrives at the altar, so she fails both as a business woman, and in her effort to catch a husband.
This is a great pity, because while love and marriage are highly desirable blessings to come into a woman’s life, they are not the whole of life. The world is full of such a lot of things besides sentiment. There is independence, the freedom to come and go as one pleases. There is the exhilarating sport of climbing up the ladder of success, which has a million thrills for every round. There is the solid satisfaction of achievement. There is the good job that keeps one on one’s tiptoes so that one never has a dull moment. There is the happiness that comes of being employed in constructive work. There is one’s own home, with one’s own pots, and pans, and doilies, if one wants them.
Take it from me, girls, the woman who espouses a career does not get the worst husband there is. She has a life companion from whom she never has to wheedle the pennies. She never has to listen to any back talk or criticisms. She is never afraid of this companion getting tired and running off after flappers. It is only the lucky women, who make exceptional marriages, who are as well off as the business girls who do not marry.
Furthermore, there is this comfort to be given the girl who quits trying to attract men, and gets busy with her job. Men are contrary creatures. Pursue them, and they flee from you. Lay traps, and they walk wide of them. But let them alone, indicate that you are indifferent to them; that you are concerned with your own affairs in which they have no part; let them realize that you can get on quite well without them, and it piques their interest. They come flocking around of their own accord to see what manner of woman you are.
Also the girl who makes something of herself, and who rises high in her profession is thrown with the men at the top, the men of brains, and they are often attracted to her while the silly little boys with whom she used to play about were not.
So I say again to the girls who are not attractive to men, stop wasting your time in the useless attempt to vamp men. Put your heart and your soul into your job. Work is the consolation prize God gives us when we miss getting the thing we wanted most.