Recently I had a conversation with my girl Haynes, one of my few friends in a happy, committed, long-distance relationship. We got to talking about the Girlfriend's Code of Conduct, you know, that unwritten list of things that girls just did not do to other girls. I swear, by the third grade, I knew its primary principles: return things in better condition than you borrow it in, don't tell secrets, and jump in a fight if someone attacks your girl. As we got older, the rules matured: don't snitch, return money within a month of borrowing it, and oh, by the way, do not take your girl's man! Back then, the girl did not even have to be your best friend. You just had to know of her relatively well to decline advances. Boy, those were the days.
Today it is finder's keeps, baby, finder's keepers. The man in question could belong to your literal sister and in the eyes of the jury, he would be up for grabs. Maybe I spent too many nights watching the old black and whites with grandma, but I have to say, there is no dignity in dating today ( for reasons mentioned in Dating in the Jungle: The Situation).
All the women are desperate. They have a tightly stitched career and educational plans that only allow a certain amount of time for dating before they have to get married and have babies. You no longer look at your friend and her beau and hope that the same will soon happen to you, you look at you friend and her man and think that the same thing is going to happen to you when you take him-a complete disregard for and disrespect of The Code.
Sad to say, I feel that I am slowly falling into this horrid way of jungle thinking. There are a few girls that I am just waiting to have a tiff with their men so I can swoop in like a crane and snatch them by their necks. Quite a few.
It has just become easier to take someone else's somebody than take your chances on finding your own and he be a loser. And since men have no code of behavior, it is usually easy to lure him away from your pal with promises of sex before you have him on your arm.
As hard as it is out there being single and finding Mr. Right, I have made a decision to follow the code. That is, unless my girl dumps her man. Everyone knows that if she dumps him, he is fair game.
No comments:
Post a Comment