Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

dates or by taking a chance on a Charles Boyer voice that dialed your telephone number by mistake and persuaded you to rendezvous.
    The numbers in this crowd are legion. You could meet three a week.
    The Don Juans
    We might include them with the creepies, but I think they deserve a category of their own and a special rundown.
    No girl is really ready for marriage, I believe, until she has weathered the rigors of a romance with a Don Juan. It’s part of her training. A married girl doesn’t appeal to him—she has someone to run home to and that spoils his fun … reveling in the thought that she is alone, miserable and missing him after he has gone.
    The two Don Juans I have known I would stack up against anybody’s for pure D.J. talent. They had two things in common—the unrequited need to make girls fall in love with them and an all-consuming vanity which kept them chained to their haberdashers. Allen was a kind of sartorial genius who practically opened up Brooks Brothers on the West Coast. He wore their narrow shoulders and skinny pants when everybody else was padded to the gills. He even gave all his girls Brooks Brothers shirts for Christmas—a different color each year. Paul, whose fantastic looks could have popularized gunny sacks, if he had favored them, was the helpless prey of an expensive tailor in Beverly Hills.
    Paul flashed his snow-white-chopper smile at me for all of three weeks before deserting for a minor night club singer from San Francisco. Allen, who came along the same year (how could one girl be so lucky?), was far deadlier, smarter, and a more consummate operator. He lasted, or I lasted, incredibly for five years, off and on, though there were long periods when we didn’t see each other.
    One of the great sadnesses of a relationship with a Don Juan is that you lose so much self-respect. It’s not only that he doesn’t want to get married. It’s that you know all the time he is unworthy of you—ruthless and sadistic in his boyish way—but you are too hooked to do anything about it.
    You find yourself stooping to things like looking for alien lipstick on glasses in his apartment. I remember plowing through a bunch of love letters from one of Allen’s Other Girls as unabashedly as I would have scanned my own bankbook. He had conveniently left the collection on top of his desk. I read every line and cried for three days … mission accomplished!
    A Don Juan is the only man who doesn’t squirm when you have hysterics. He considers it a vote of confidence.
    A Don Juan may sleep with only one girl at a time but he has a dozen fringe associations that keep you in purgatory. And while making impassioned avowals of his fidelity, he manages never to let you forget how irresistible he is to other women.
    When he’s late for a date he explains it’s because Daphne telephoned and he couldn’t get her off the phone. Daphne was all upset because of a fight with her mother. Who is Daphne? One of his ex-girl-friends of course (so may Daphne’s mother be for all you know) but somehow she doesn’t sound very ex.
    Allen was the vortex of a storm of girls who hovered about him with their career and emotional problems. Models he would send to photographers. Secretaries he would get placed in friends’ offices. Actresses he would introduce to agents. His own ex-wife was part of the job. Jocelyn would call from Portland, Miami or Spain to say she was having a problem with her teeth, her passport, her poodle, and Allen would comfort her. Her real problem was Allen. To the girl Allen was going with he explained this sort of thing as lending a helping hand to those in trouble—just like the Community Chest. How could anyone be so uncharitable as to construe this as lust? Well, I’ll tell you who could. I could and did. Finally !,
    I remember our last date … preceded by any number of “last dates.” It was for lunch on a Tuesday, and that morning he called to see if we could make it Friday. It seems he was