All it takes to impress a woman

Last week, I read a newspaper report with the headline, ‘Men become hopeless show-offs in front of attractive women’. It informed me that a scientific study in Australia had demonstrated that men become pompous asses in the company of attractive women. All I could think of while reading the study, was the restaurant and the kitchen.

My mind travelled back to that day two years ago, when I was sitting alone in a south Mumbai restaurant, feeling rather fidgety while I waited for my date. On the wall in front was a poster of Sylvester Stallone pointing a gun at me. I remember wondering if that was a sign that I should walk out.

After all, I had met her only twice. And it had been a while since I went on a date with a person I hardly knew. Heck, I had gone an entire year without a single date while my ex had managed two ‘serious’ relationships in the same period. I was about to leave when a chair was pulled aside and she sat down next to me. All I could think was, “She wasn’t really bad-looking.”

In that ensuing hour, I’d told her what a fiery temper I had, how smart I was, what a workaholic I was, so on and so forth. So, when a group of boys at the other table remarked aloud, “Chicken Chili”, when it was clearly not a Chinese restaurant, I was certain they were describing my mongoloid features.

Now I am not the kind of guy who picks fights, and most certainly not when he’s outnumbered. But I had told her of my ‘fiery’ temper. So knowing full well it was suicidal, I walked up to them and, unable to summon the gall to register a stronger mark of protest, picked up some ketchup, closed my eyes, and poured it into their soup. All I saw next, as my head landed on the floor, was the poster of Stallone taking aim at me.       

Still, she gave me another chance. My second date with her was at a safer place: her house. I had every reason to think it was proceeding smoothly. I was making passably witty and intelligent remarks and she hadn’t noticed that I was bleeding from my hand — I had cut myself while unscrewing the cork. But it wasn’t long before I was dripping blood all over the white-tiled floor.

In order to sound attractively intelligent, I steer the conversation towards Free Will. “In A Clockwork Orange, when the protagonist,” I am saying, “is put through aversion therapy to stay away from crime, it is a comment on Free Will.”

“You seem to be bleeding”, she says.
“Oh really,” I say, registering the fact with a strange blend of calmness and mild surprise, as though some unusually sharp air must have caused this totally painless cut. An all-knowing, masculine voice in my head urges me not to acknowledge the pain and carry on with my arguments on Free Will.

I tie my hand with a handkerchief and continue talking, now about Rousseau. “But Rousseau didn’t think too highly of Free Will. He thought it secondary to the General Will, where people have to restrict some of their Free Will for the greater good.”

“Don’t you have some band-aid,” she asks, still staring at my hand. “I’m not carrying them today,” I say, trying again to shift the focus off my hand. 

“I might have some,” she says, and before I say anything more, reaches for her bag.

There’s a sudden air of excitement and flirtatiousness, as she fixes the band aid on my hand. She smiles and says, “Idiot”. I didn’t mention Rousseau again.

The Australian study, of course, wasn’t conducted in a kitchen or a restaurant. Here, male skateboarders were found to take more risks when they were observed by an attractive female than when observed by a male. Saliva tests had confirmed “elevated testosterone levels” when good-looking women were around.

According to Professor Bill von Hippel, the head of the study, there was an evolutionary reason for the behaviour — it was a “sexual display strategy” aimed at impressing a potential mate. He had this to say: “Historically, men have competed with each other for access to fertile women and the winners of those competitions are the ones who pass on their genes to future generations. Risk-taking would have been inherent in such a competitive mating strategy.”

In the study, these risks led to more successes but also to more crash landings. So did I succeed or crash? I met her two weeks back, at a party in her house. She is soon getting engaged. She introduced me to a pretty friend of hers and added, “He has a fiery temper.” I smiled, sweetly.