To Tell the Truth

There are eternal truths about women that men are well aware of and women find it essential to deny all the while simultaneously indubitably embodying these self-same traits. The truth about men is that although men and women do speak different languages: men have a translator, a guide, and an archaeologist trained in all facts about women: they know just enough about us to get what they want from us, but not enough to give us what we really need.
I have a [good] friend who I’ve known for quite a while and he has a reputation of being something of a player. When I say “something” of a player, I mean a straight up dog. He’s a cool person, and he will tell you with a charming smile exactly who he is and what he does. For a while I was content just to know that about him. I, of course, in a self-righteous fervour held him in stiff reproach and, although we were ‘cool’, I chose not to associate myself with him out of the context of our purely coincidental acquaintanceship at work, but he fascinated me—as he does most women he meets—and, eventually, we became friends.

A fundamental fact about women is that we don’t know how to accept things at face value. Tyrell literally walks up to women and says, “Hi, I’m living with a woman who takes care of me and has one of my kids, I have another baby’s momma but she still lives in South Central Los Angeles and, by the way, I haven’t paid child-support in four years—my daughter is five. I’m a hustler (i.e., I have no real job). I have 2 strikes in California which is why I moved out here, but can we kick it?” That’s his pickup line.

And it works. It’s a foolproof method for getting women. Why you may ask?

I asked myself that self-same question when I met him, but to be honest when he said that to me I just had to sit down and pick his brain. I had to know what possessed him to think that to say that to me or any woman for that matter would do anything other than make them look at him for what he is: crazy and deranged. But, he convinced me to stick around for a minute, watch him ‘work his magic’ if you will, and the strangest thing happened…this balding, paunchy, middle-aged, washed-up, no account, restaurant managing, no career having, wanna-be pimp was –both literally and figuratively—rolling in women. At the time Tyrell managed the restaurant where I served part time, and I’m telling you on every shift I worked—which was pretty much every day—he had a different woman coming up to the restaurant bringing him home cooked meals, his dry-cleaning, taking his car to be detailed, just sitting at the bar in the restaurant looking at pictures of his kids—knowing he still lived with their mother—it was nauseating.

The irony is that he never lied to any of them, not one. He never insinuated to his baby’s momma that he was going to marry her or even be faithful to her and therefore felt that it was not necessary for him to ever do so. He is a self-professed “hustler” (God only knows what that means), and these women run money for him all over town, putting themselves in harm’s way to do him ‘favours’ that make him thousands of dollars. Once in a while he might break them off some chump change to get their nails done. At first I was livid with him, but the more I saw he situation (and he forced me to listen in on conversations with these women in which he called them everything but their names), the more I realised that it wasn’t him at all, it was the women.

In his disingenuous guise of honesty, he had perfected the game. Women always want to believe that a man will lie to them which allows them to keep their guards up, a man who doesn’t lie is an anomaly and one to be had—even if the truths he tells are worse than the lies of others. These women flocked to him in droves hoping against hope that they would be the one to change him, to save him from his life of dereliction and petty crime.

Although he is an extreme case, I’ll have to wonder if these women weren’t playing the game themselves, without him at all. I mean, in truth, he said very little to them—outside of his opening spiel—and the less he said, the more they filled in the blanks with their own baseless fantasies. It was a source of deep consternation to me. Everyday watching him, I wondered do all women have a Tyrell in their lives? A guy that convinces us by no merit of their own that they are worthy of our love and attention. Showering them with affection, gifts, and time while they sit back and accept our postulations with nothing more than a nod of appreciation—if that. Why is it that we are preposterously fascinated with men who give us absolutely no play?

I’m utterly convinced that the more we analyse it, the more appeal this particular breed of man will hold, this simply due to the fact that the vast majority of women have no idea what they want. The air of mystery, suspense, drama, and intrigue that surrounds a relationship with what by all accounts is unmistakably a lunatic just brings a level of satisfaction that a stable, loving relationship with a man who has all his marbles just can’t match. But isn’t that what we all want? To be loved, respected, appreciated, admired, adored? I think not. For if that were the case there would not be such a heavily saturated market for men like Tyrell who disrespect, degrade, dishonour, and devastate us, our children, our self-respect, our values, and our futures.

In actuality there is nothing that can be done. To tell these women that they are sacrificing themselves at the altar of self-destruction would be suicide, and to tell yourself that you haven’t done the same perjurous.

These women were simply too afraid of what he would think if they told him what they wanted. Too proud to admit that all they really wanted was love, and too foolish to see through his bravado to the manipulative coward that he really was. In truth the Tyrells of this world can be stopped dead in their tracks by the one thing that we as women are most afraid of, the one thing that we value above all but refuse to acknowledge, even from ourselves—the truth.

Pocahantas is a 23 year old fiesty female with loads of common sense and yet an unstintingly healthy dose of cynicism when it comes to men and relationships. She’s currently single and living in the great metropolis of Atlanta, where half the men have lots of drama and the other half are gay. Tune in weekly for her reality check on single living in the great US of A.