Screenland (Nov 1949-Oct 1950)

How Far Should A Girl Go? Continued from page 22 "I suppose the girls want to know about your personal experience. Why don't you answer them in the way you would talk to a daughter of your own. Suppose our twin boys were girls, how would you advise them when the time came?" That made my problem easy to solve. Before I go into the girls' side of it, however, I want to say that I'm bringing up my boys to be the sort of people who will understand the hopes and the reservations, the alternate boldnesses and tfmidity of other human beings I am trying to teach them goodness, not only surface good manners, which impel a man to show a woman the usual courtesies, but consideration from the heart, which is also called integrity. It seems to me that one of the discouraging situations between boys and girls, and between men and women, is the too-frequent absence of kindly honesty. A lot of confusion would be avoided if people, in a nice way, said what they thought. But this isn't answering, specifically, the letters the girls have written to me, and that I want to do. Let's take the queries up one at a time. Suppose a girl sees a boy at school and she wants him to notice her. There are a number of things she can do. She can find out what his hobbies are. If he plays tennis, she can learn to play tennis; in that way she will meet him at the school courts sooner or later. If he dotes on music, chances are he will sjiend a good deal of time at the local platter counter. If he's a stamp collector and the girl has been writing to an overseas friend (which all high school people should be doing right now to advance international understanding) there is no reason why she shouldn't stop the boy in the school halls at some convenient time and say, "I understand you collect stamps. I have quite a few foreign specimens to which you are welcome if they would be of interest to you. How about it?" The boy may not be interested in the stamps, but he may be impressed by your thoughtfulness. The key to meeting a person in the first place, and the key to the inner room of retained friendship is always INTEREST IN THE OTHER PERSON. What does he do? What does he like? What does he think? Too many girls go at this business of attracting someone in exactly the wrong way. I know I made a mistake of that sort. When I was a freshman, I took admiring note of a senior who was captain of the football team, and I made up my mind I was going to make him notice me. Whenever he was around I made it a p)oint to pass him swiftly, my head in the air, humming as if I had swallowed a little juke box. I would toss my head and flirt my skirts, and be busier than a flag in a breeze. One day he caught my arm and said, "Honey'child, why don't you try out for the .school band? Bet they could use you." Nowadays I think he was as rude as I was silly, but both of us were at fault. I was embarrassed then, but in later years I was exasperated with myself because I knew all the time that he collected the cartoons which are published in magazines. Our family had old copies of The New Yorker stacked in the attic; if I had been using my head, I would have told him about them, politely, and I would have asked if hfe would like to see them. If he had said "Yes" I could have delivered the periodicals, one at a time, for weeks. We could have become friends that way. If a business girl sees a man in an elevator whom she likes, she should assume from the first that he is decent. On that basis she should merely smile after she has seen him a number of times. Eventually, she may say "Good morning." If the man wishes to avail himself of this casual acknowledgement and start an occasional conversation, that is good, but the girl should still think of him as just "someone" until his conversation indicates that he is interested. Too many sad situations have developed as the result of a girl assuming that a man was single, and the man's allowing her to be mistaken until emotional interest had developed. The old rule still stands. "Be wary of a stranger." Be wary also of confiding your romantic thoughts to your girl friends. If you are intrigued by the tall senior with the dark eyes and tell your best friend, she will tell her best friend, and she will happen to be the sister of the senior's best friend. The news of your interest will get back to the boy, and he will avoid you like the plague ... or misunderstand your attentions and make life difiicult for you. Let us say that a girl has been wise, and has interested a boy to the point of his asking for a date. Perhaps they go to a movie or to a school party, and the girl has a dee-vine time. But, to her consternation, the boy doesn't ask for a second date. How far can she go in finding out what went wrong? Personally, I don't think she can do a thing except continue to be casual and friendly when she sees him. Certainly she can't telephone; certainly she can't — unless she wants to look foolish — ask around among her friends to learn whether he has let some indicative remark fall. Everyone has to face this fact sometime in life: there are some people with whom we, naturally, click. There are some people with whom we don't. Chili is good with beans; it would be horrible on chocolate cake. Some combinations don't work out. A girl simply MUST accept this fact. She will only make a spectacle of herself if she tries to fight a law of nature and insists upon pursuing the boy. The situation is slightly different if a boy and a girl have been dating for 55