Review: He-lationships and She-lationships
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 17, 2012
It never fails. Romance is perennially alive and well, and lurks within everyone. All that it seemingly takes to blossom forth is a soupcon of attraction between two individuals at any given time, and voila! The May-to-December cliche survives.However, in the real world, such immediate mutual affinity, while certainly very real, fizzles out more often than not. And so the search for that compatible partner continues.But what defines "compatible"? Does it refer to both partners being diehard Cleveland Browns fans? Does it mean that both enjoy post-Impressionist works of art at a gallery showing, followed by a trip to Starbucks for a mocha latte? Might it allude to either one enjoying the company of the other one's parents and siblings?Granted, such examples comprise a very narrow segment of the American population. As a divorced forty-two-year-old male who has experienced his fair share of the dating scene, I certainly have no monopoly on the perfect date, much less defining the subjective concept of "perfect." However, I can assure you that dating is a numbers game---nothing more, nothing less. It's a crap shoot, and most of the time we fall short---either we don't like something about ourselves or our dates, or our date expresses similar reservations about us.That's where Stephen Williams gets into the act. His book "How to Get a Boyfriend: Unleash the Secret and Become a Happy Girlfriend" asks the question: how does a male author write about the intricate world of dating and all its experiences from a female perspective?Williams seems to arrive at a fairly reasonable, logical approach---since most dating experiences involve the acts of social intercourse on both sexes' parts, following basic dating protocol should be relatively straightforward: be yourself; don't compare past dating experiences to the present ones; make your date feel as if (s)he is the most important person in the world; meet in a public setting for the first few dates; be aware of your surroundings; let others know of your plans for that day/evening; and have fun.In "Boyfriend," the author makes numerous valiant attempts to view the dating process by putting himself in another woman's two-inch heeled pumps. He does express empathy for a woman's collective dating plights; he uses his usual comforting words to reassure women that by following the protocol mentioned in the book and in the previous paragraph, finding a suitable long-term partner with compatible interests, goals, desires, and fears will occur.About the only distraction I observed within "Boyfriend" was a fairly typical male perspective being applied by the author to women: Williams asserts that a woman should fight for the man she wants to date, so that she won't feel "robbed" by other potential female rivals. My admittedly limited understanding of how women communicate and work with other women is that most of them accomplish these goals via communal effort and cooperation. Women are raised in our society to work together and to emphasize communication, whereas most men are encouraged to be competitive in society and strive for individual glory and achievement. The author's basic premise being presented to his female readers in this particular situation seems to encourage confrontation and conflict, and I was a bit uncomfortable with this approach. (Maybe I am in the minority here.)"How to Get a Boyfriend" is a decent attempt by Williams to apply his dating-world perspective to the other half of the human race. His approach is well-meaning by any reasonable standard. While he may not be a universal source of female inspiration, his natural empathy for the human plight in most social situations does resonate well."Boyfriend" is a quick read, but is worth the time taken to do so.