By staff writer Nathan DeGraaf
March 21, 2007
Nathan: Dude, what are you doing tonight?
Kris: Going out to get a few beers. You?
Nathan: The same. Mind if I tag along?
Kris: Yeah that’s cool. Oh, by the way, I was checking out the news the other day and you know what happened?
Nathan: What?
Kris: I fucking hate you.
Nathan: Dude, just let it go.
Well, it’s happening again. That crazy rule of life that I just can’t get my brain around. It’s one of those things. One of those little quirks that gets written off under the tautology “it is what it is” or the expressions “that’s life” and “what can you do?” It’s one of those aspects of life that manages to be both inevitable and inexplicable: the sports lull ends and women come out of the woodwork to hit on me.
For those of you who don’t know, the sports lull is that period of time between the end of the Super Bowl and the few days before Selection Sunday (for March Madness). During this time, there are literally no sports for me to watch. I mean, pretty much nothing is on. Not one interesting game (I’m not too big on the NBA). During this time, I go out of my way to hit on women. After all, it’s typically cold during the sports lull, and I have no outside work to be doing (like officiating little league baseball games—more on that in a minute), so I devote actual time to actually finding women and asking them out.
But this never works during the sports lull. During the lull, I either get shot down, stood up, or (worse yet) take the chick on a date only to learn that she’d rather not return my phone calls afterwards (though most of them will blame this lack of interest not on the date, per se, but on the resulting Google search).
“I’m Stephanie. If my boyfriend doesn’t get his shit together soon, I’ll give you a call.”
I think women have some kind of sensor in their brains that lets them know how badly you want them. And for some reason, the more you want them, the less they want you. I believe this very much.
Allow me a story or two to illustrate my point.
A few weeks ago, shortly after position players reported to spring training (that’s baseball, in case you were wondering) and I fell in love with the basketball stylings of Kevin Durant (side note: you know you’re a kickass athlete when writers refer to your stylings instead of your ability or even your style—trust me on that), I umpired a little league game with my friend, Kris.
At this game was one of the hottest moms I had ever seen. Kris and I spent our time between innings eyeing her up and down while watching the line of men trying to hit on her (I swear to Christ, she may as well have been a Subway sandwich artist as quickly as she moved those middle-age men through that line). It was funny, but I wasn’t all that interested. I was too busy trying to complete discussions with Kris on three different topics: whether or not my acquaintance, James, owned hunting property and if he would take Kris on said property, whether or not Florida would get a number one seed, and who, exactly will be in the starting rotation for the St. Louis Cardinals this season.
The game ended and I walked off the field to sign us out while Kris stayed behind to bullshit with some old friend of his. After I signed us out and returned to get Kris (my ride home), I said to him, “Hey man, you ready?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Oh, and did I tell you what’s up?”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I fucking hate you,” he replied.
He proceeded to cuss me out for the entire walk back to the car until I finally kicked him behind his knee and asked him exactly what the fuck his problem was.
And then he gave me that hot mom’s number.
She and I went out a few days later. We had a great time that night.
And we’ve had a great time since.
Not two days after she gave Kris her phone number to give to me, I was sitting in the Local Pub when a cute girl walked by.
“Hi,” I said. “Good to see you again.”
(I hadn’t ever seen this chick before; I was being coy.)
“Hey,” she said. “What’s your phone number?”
So I told her.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
So I told her.
“Well Nate,” she said, “I’m Stephanie. If my boyfriend doesn’t get his shit together soon, I’ll give you a call.”
The exact words of the guy sitting next to me at the bar stool after seeing this happen: “Just like that, huh?”
“Dude, it’s not me. It’s them. It’s spring and I’m not horny so they’re all over me. It happens almost every year.”
“Whatever,” he said. Then he added, “I hate you.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “There’s a lot of that going around.”
Now, I’ve discussed this topic with many different men and women over the years and most of them seem to think that the sports lull has nothing to do with why women get so aggressive every March. Most men and women just chalk it up to the virtues of spring (the old “love is in the air” adage) and that’s cool, I guess.
Except I live in Tampa. We don’t really have spring and fall. We have two seasons: hot and wet, and not so hot and not so wet.
So I’m sticking with my original theory: the less you want women in your life, the more they want to be there. This is because they are happiness thieves who can smell desperation. They don’t want desperate men; they want men that all the other girls want. They don’t want bored men with time on their hands; they want ridiculously happy men who are willing to spread said happiness into their lives.
(Oh, and they also like big dicks and money, but that kind of goes without saying.)
And so, men, if you really want to get laid a lot, the secret is to have something you’d rather be doing. Because if you’re perfectly happy to drink a beer and watch the game, some girl is gonna want to steal that happiness. The downside: you won’t get to watch the game. The upside: you will get laid.
It’s give and it’s take and all that.