When A Man Loves A Woman

www.paulcoia.com

A study published this week showed that women prefer old fashioned wooing to smart, modern day chat up lines. And in similar examinations of the bleeding obvious a different report proved bears like to wander through the trees looking for toilet paper whilst another showed the Pope may go to Mass now and again.

These statistical reports seem to come out daily, and if you look up any dictionary in 2009 the phrase “academic study” would have a definition along the lines of “the act of desperately grabbing a handful of people and asking them a silly question to back up any publicity campaign your sponsors may be involved in”. But, I must confess, the reports are a lot of fun, especially when it comes to the battle of the sexes.

Since Eve first told Adam that Eden’s grass needed cutting, men and women have always battled to get hold of any information that will give them the upper hand, and today there is no shortage of people willing to supply that info for a quick bit of publicity. A new survey this weekend, for example, from a chain of garden centres, told us that a bit of gardening helps men increase their sex drive. Quite how spreading manure and pulling up weeds increases the male’s libido was not explained but, if it’s true, then no wonder that bloke Alan Titchmarsh always looks happy. Perhaps we’ll find an Anne Summers garden at Chelsea this year with rappers singing about men and their hoes.

I asked listeners on Smooth Radio to reflect the battle of the sexes this week and text me their favourite chat up lines, which showed that the oldies are still the best. “Would you like twenty pence to phone your mum and say you won’t be home till morning?”, was one, kind of creepy, one. Or how about “when they arranged the alphabet they should have put U and I together,” or “my eyes must be hurting cause you’re a sight for sore eyes.” There was even a modern day twist with “there’s something wrong with my mobile phone. It doesn’t have your number stored on it”.

My favourite came from a listener who used this line to a girl a few years ago and they are now, he says, very happily married. “Would you like to dance?”, he asked her. “You would? Great. Can I have your seat?”.

I’ve always found the opposite sex to be a mystery wrapped in a puzzle inside an enigma that’s written in Mandarin and then encrypted using technology from the future, so the thought of chat up lines was always redundant to me as, in order to use them, you have to be able to unfreeze your mouth first. I’m convinced every girl I’ve ever met, even today, assumes I’ve just returned from a bad dental visit where the tooth doctor used animal strength anaesthetic.

I first came across a chat up line, although I didn’t know what it was at the time, at a university party when a guy I knew from my karate class, who was a year older and therefore to be held in awe, said to a girl something like “you may not be the prettiest here but beauty is only a light switch away”. Today he’d probably get his head smacked but, back then, it made the girl laugh and the ice was broken.

And don’t girls always say a sense of humour is much better than good looks? I used to try telling jokes, which didn’t work. I‘d pull funny faces and they didn’t notice, and if I tried acting the clown I may as well have been centre stage at a cremation. I found that it was only when I asked for a kiss that they laughed.

So I do look forward to these statistics and surveys because I know that somewhere there’s a poor unlucky individual like I was who will believe in them and use their findings to try and improve his luck with the chat up lines.

Another set of statistics which was released this week tells us that, due to the recession, men are paying ten per cent less than ten years ago on a first date. But it also stated that when women pay they spend, typically, half of what men spend. Now, even though I’ve said that these statistics are nonsense, I want to believe this as it panders to my male sense of being brow beaten and subjugated by the fair sex. So perhaps I’ll simply cherry pick the surveys that work for me, and bin the rest.

I encountered one guy this week who was trying out a modern day chat up. I was walking down Oxford Street in London and saw several of those student charity collectors who wear a different, luminous coloured nylon jacket each day depending on which good cause they’re collecting for. These guys, with their blond dreadlocks and woollen tea cosy hats, must have been told to go in to charm overload to make the ladies part with their money in these tough financial times as the one in front of me held out his arm to a girl and said, as the ice breaker, “so I hear you’re taking me to lunch”. Quick as a flash the girl replied “What? Dressed like that? I don’t think so” and kept on walking without losing a step. Magnificent!

And that’s the problem with chat up lines that no amount of surveys prepares you for. They’re only useful if the other person doesn’t have a ready comeback. “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” works fine until you meet the girl who replies “Yes. Sorry for causing the deformity when I landed on you.”