Men and Supermen

bill in his name. When taxed, the husband told her it was his partner’s bill. “The swine always uses my name when he gets up to any of his tricks.” The wife believed him, and went round saying what a louse her husband’s partner was.

If a girl goes on one of the latter dirty weekends when the man is trying to make her and has promised there are no strings attached, he usually invites her to stay with married friends who immediately steer her into a room with a large double bed, which they claim is their only spare room. Or he will take her on a boat, and not until it’s at sea, does she realise it only sleeps one.

Love

LOVE

“If you believe in me, I’ll believe in you”

ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

“I am melancholy when thou art absent, look like an ass when thou art present, wake for thee when I should be asleep, and even dream of thee, when I am awake; sigh much, drink little, eat less, court solitude, am grown very entertaining to my self, and (as I am informed) very troublesome to everybody else. If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable.” The Old Bachelor.

A GREAT DEAL of time is spent kidding oneself a man is keen on one when he isn’t. Once a man is hooked he will:

find every one of your idiosyncrasies endearing

roar with laughter at your most inane jokes. (People in love sound like hyenas)

write you letters, when he’s going to see you the next day, which he tears up

bore all his friends talking about you in the tones of gross hyperbole

lose interest in everyone else

telephone all the time

make heroic efforts to spend every moment he possibly can with you to the extent of driving you 30 miles home after a date, picking you up from the office to take you to the station, or crossing London in the rush hour for the sake of being with you for two minutes.

Men quite often behave like this to a girl before they get her into bed. If they act like this afterwards, she’s on to a good thing and should stay on.

NORMAN’S SEXUAL CONQUEST

Being susceptible, Norm falls in love about three times a year. At present he is hooked on a well stacked typist in the office called Dental Floss.

His wife Honor can always detect the signs. She hears Norm yelling for clean underpants in the morning. She then watches him putting deodorant between his toes, cutting himself shaving because his hand is shaking with excitement, shrieking with agony when his new French Aftershave gets into the cuts, leaving a snowfall of talcum powder on the bathroom floor, and cutting his toe nails surreptitiously into the waste-paper basket instead of in bed as usual.

He then polishes his shoes, changes his mind five times about what tie he’s going to wear, picks the only rose in the garden for his buttonhole, spends hours combing his hair over his bald patch, and can be seen slipping a toothbrush into his briefcase. Sometimes he cleans his teeth.

Honor notices he has also taken to carrying cigarettes and a lighter although he doesn’t smoke, and spending a lot of evenings at regimental dinners or out with the boys and returning completely sober. When she rides in the car she finds her seat belt has been let out to accommodate a vast bust.

FOR EVER AMBER

Some men are so filled with caution, they can never bring themselves to propose. I’ve seen so many girls go out for years with a man in the hope that they might hook him in the end. They spend their time looking for signs: “He’s talked about our going on holiday together, he’s going to get a house when the lease of his flat runs out, he’s taken me to meet his mother, he’s got my photograph in his wallet, I’ve looked in his diary and he’s got nothing but squash with Geoffrey and cricket fixtures for the next six months.” But the man still won’t say he loves her or ask her to marry him.

The girl becomes more and more bitchy and resentful, even though she knows she’s not furthering her cause. Men like to come home to someone restful and neutral who doesn’t make scenes.

Or she resorts to the awful boredom of playing games, flirting with other men to keep her man on his toes, or rather on his elbows.

If only she had the courage to break it off. But it’s rather like trying to get out of a tepid bath, the water is getting colder and colder, but it’s still warmer than the cold outside.

Some girls try and shove a man Gretna Green-wards by showing him what a grand little home-maker she is, mucking out his flat, washing his shirts and rugger shorts, being fantastically good with all his married friends’ children, currying favour and chicken leftovers. But I don’t think it works.

“Well, I just thought we could go out after all …”

I’m against Women’s Lib because I think women come unstuck when they do the chasing. They can’t keep the beseeching or the stammer out of their voices when they ring men up. Then there is the expense of giving a whole cocktail party, in order to extend a casual invitation to one man, who probably doesn’t come anyway, or asking a man to dinner and filling the place with so many flowers and candles it looks like a funeral parlour.

Now most young men are far more house proud and domesticated than girls. They live in bachelor flats with all mod cons. They shop at the late-night supermarket, and their washing is done for them by the dragon in the launderette who has a soft spot for men. Their shirts drip dry over the bath They have no difficulty in getting a char.

In the kitchen in the evening they know all about basil and tarragon as they whisk around in their butcher- boy aprons, blinding you with domestic science. They are even marvellous at washing up. Gone are the good old days, when indulgent wives used to say: “Norm’s a wonderfully imaginative cook, but it takes me three days to clear up the pots and pans after him.”

As they listen to the Women’s Lib screeching, men must wonder why they should bother to marry at all, and get terrible complexes about enslaving a suffering female, or turning a graduate into a cabbage. They don’t need wives to darn their socks or the holes in their arguments.

THE COOLING-OFF PERIOD

Nothing is sadder than to feel a man going off, it’s like trying to hold water in cupped hands.

The coward usually does it with a kiss, and then stops ringing up. If he starts saying things like: “I’m awfully fond of you, Jennifer,” or “I love you but I’m not in love with you,” or “We don’t have much in common except the obvious thing, do we?” Or if he’s married: “I think Honor suspects something, so perhaps we’d better cool it for a month or two”—you know the end is very near.