Put Down GQ and Read This Instead

Lately I’ve been fed up with how early twenty-something boys act towards women. I understand that most are in college or have recently graduated and maybe they just haven’t matured past their 13 year-old selves, but it’s time to leave the good ol’ days behind and start acting like a gentleman.

1. Stop making jokes about the kind of workplace that women belong in. Jokes that involve a woman only needing to know how to make a sandwich are never, and were never, funny.

2. Don’t keep women waiting around for you to text or call. Be straightforward with her and don’t leave her in dating limbo. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

3. Own your personal style and look appropriate every place you go. I cannot tell you how much it sucks to be sitting with a guy when you look fabulous and he looks like he just rolled out of bed.

4. Stop it with the talk about the expensive things you own and the awesomeness of your big-boy salary. If you’re successful and good at what you do, that’s great, but keep your personal net worth to yourself. **Sidenote: If you’re in college, don’t act like you’re rich. Chances are, you aren’t rich, your parents are.**

5. Never talk down to women from your all-knowing man pedestal. Whether it’s a personal or professional matter, there is a fine line between talking through problems that a woman is facing and telling her exactly what she needs to do and how to do it.

6. Enough with the locker-room talk about the number of past hook-ups you’ve had when trying to prove how awesome you are with women. We don’t think you sound experienced, we think you sound like a player and we’ll run far, far away from wherever you are.

7. You will never convince a woman that a cat call is a compliment. Just accept it and move on.

8. Do not refer to things or situations as “gay” if they are not actually homosexual beings. It is never, EVER, synonymous with something being stupid.

9. Be nice to your mother. It’s definitely true that women think you’ll treat them the same way you treat your mother.

10. Learn how to cook something or anything, really. It is not attractive when a guy assumes that a woman will do all the cooking in a relationship.

11. You do not have to pay for everything. While, I admit, it’s kind of nice when a guy pays for the first date, let the woman pay for dates too. It really should be about a 50/50 split with who pays each time you go out.

12. Hold doors open for everyone. It’s just a nice thing to do.

13. Be willing to express your feelings and know that you have every right to let the person you’re with know how you’re feeling. Being masculine doesn’t mean that you can never let people know what your emotions are, it actually means you’re grown up enough to know you don’t have to keep everything bottled up inside.

These 13 things aren’t very hard to do, but everyone knows it’s all the little things that make a big difference.

Until next time,

C. Brooks