Enough beating up on Mark. On this very same weekend, my friend, we will call Erica, was approached by her on-again, off-again teenage girl boyfriend, we’ll call John, about doing something on Saturday night. When Erica told him to call her on Saturday afternoon and they’d figure something out, John literally stomped his foot, looked up and closed his eyes as he said, “I just can’t take this lifestyle Erica,” and walked away.
This lifestyle? What the hell is he talking about? And what’s with the foot stomping? I told her we’d have to chalk it up to him being on the rag.
Probably most disconcerting about this epidemic is when I learned that this transcends Generation Y. A baby boomer in my office asked me “hypothetically” if after two unreturned voicemails, three unreturned emails, and three unreturned text messages, if it would still be unclear as to whether or not she was interested to the man she went out with last week. I was astonished, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been.
The other day when she told me she had “taken care of it,” I inquired as to how. I just had this intuitive feeling that unless she had it “taken care of” mafia style, nothing had been taken care of. She told me she bit the bullet and replied to one of his emails to let him know she wasn’t interested. I couldn’t help but chuckle. “He’ll be back,” I told her. A man who can’t grasp the message of unreturned calls, emails, and texts isn’t going to grasp direct confrontation either.
Any guesses on how many times she heard from him this weekend?
So I’m left with the same Paula Cole pondering: Where have all the cowboys gone? Perhaps it’s not their fault. Maybe in these times if you’re not presented with a rose, backstage pass, key, or oversized clock necklace in a public elimination ceremony, you simply don’t know where you stand.
