What Speaks Louder?

Being a single girl in the big city isn’t an easy task. You’re constantly wondering if that guy you met last night is the one – not the one as in the guy you’ll spend the rest of your life with, that would be intense! But the guy who will call the next day, the guy who will impress your friends, the guy who will surprise you with flowers – hell, even just the guy who keeps you company for a couple of weeks…

But there’s a trick to understanding men and it’s this: With men, words speak infinitely louder than their actions. I know what you’re thinking, this goes against everything we’ve ever been told – and I’m not suggesting that you pretend his actions mean nothing. If he says, “Baby, I love you,” and proceeds to sleep with half your friends and hit on your sister, he’s obviously a waste of skin. But if he is all over you, going to events with you, hanging off your arm like sugar-coated man-candy, yet he’s asking for a little space and he’s telling you that he likes you but he needs to figure himself out first, he isn’t lying.

Men are driven by their desires. When he’s with you and you’re looking like something out of the ‘Hot’ issue of Cosmo, he’s going to want to take you home and he’s sure as hell not going to screw it up by saying the wrong thing. If the next day you get a text saying he needs a little time to himself, a little space to breathe and figure out his own life – do not chalk it up to fear of commitment. He’s being honest with you and that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be with you, it means that he wants you to listen.

I have a manfriend, one I can’t get enough of, the kind of guy who’s so close to perfect that the idea of screwing it up with him makes me want to sew my big mouth shut and just pray it’s going to work out. (Don’t we all have those guys?) I like to call it highschool syndrome. There are the boys that make me revert to the far less confident and infinitely less sexy version of myself. He does this.

So when manfriend tells me that he adores spending time with me, that he thinks I’m lovely, and when he frequently wakes up next to me it becomes really difficult for me to tone down the excitement, to accept that while this girl has her career and life pretty much together he may not – he may in fact need space to do that.

But ladies, we need to accept it. We need to understand that when a guy says he needs time it doesn’t mean that he’s blowing us off, it doesn’t even mean he’s not interested, it means he needs time. We spend so much time trying to decode manspeak that we forget to listen to what they are saying. Men do not say one thing and mean another, they say exactly what they are thinking…or they don’t say anything at all. 

So the next time you’re falling fast and hard, the next time you’re dying for him to just tell you what he wants…listen, because he probably is. In fact he’s probably telling you everything you need to know and you’re so busy using Cosmo and Glamour to decode his comments that you’re missing the message. And if you miss the message you may just miss out on him. 

Image courtesy stock.xchng.