The call came into the station half-way through a show in late August of 2011. Outside, the two-lane highway that fronted the building was dark and deserted. A Harvest moon hung in the sky, full, bright, sharp-edged, and looking painted on the plate glass windows of the studio.
I had been talking for about an hour about “respect” in a relationship and how it (or the lack of it) shows up in the narrative that people tell you about their spouse or love interest.
The caller was male. And young. I could tell that from his voice. And he didn’t seem to have much experience with women. He called the show because he had recently become infatuated with a girl on his company’s softball team.
In his eyes, she was pretty, smart, and he loved the way she looked in a baseball cap. There was only one problem, she worked in the office; he worked in the warehouse. In his mind, they were worlds apart.
He was a newbie at the relationship game. And he had a manifest bill of lading with all kinds of fear written on it: fear of rejection, fear of being awkward in front of the girl, fear of embarrassing himself in front of his friends, etc. The list went on and on.
My problem was to convince him of a simple truth: all of this fear stuff was “in his head.” Not that I wasn’t sympathetic. I could tell he was like an infant sticking its toe in bath water for the first time; this fear stuff surrounded him like a tub full of Mr. Bubble.
I know we’ve all been “newbies” at something, but my prospects as a young man were very different from this caller’s.
The reality that women in earlier decades accounted for only a tiny fraction of the college graduates and occupants of corporate boardrooms is today a completely moot point. In present-day America women are the majority of college graduates. Many have better job prospects than their male counterparts and my research even showed that, in the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania Tri-State area, women are earning more money on average than men and are taking up positions of greater responsibility in corporate America; something that is slowly spreading to the rest of the country.
But as Shakespeare once wrote “ere’s the rub.” It solved one problem for women and then created another. A study published in part in Time Magazine showed that women were now having difficulty finding an equally educated boyfriend or spouse, and consequentially their satisfaction with life in general was plummeting.
I think I realized right away the magnitude of this subject, not just with this caller, but to my greater listening audience. And as I saw it then, there were two subjects that had to be handled with one answer, first, the caller’s “virgin – itis” and two, the “new reality” for both men and women. In part II of this post, what I discussed with a stranger on a dark, quiet, moonlit night in late August about how best to lose his virginity.