Dating : Why Won’t Men Take a Goddamn Hint?

He asked, “What are you reading?” and I told him it was No Logo by Naomi Klein. It’s anti-capitalist, I said simply, and I’ve got a lot of work to do! I gestured at the thick stack of pages I had yet to read. I looked again at the page I was reading, and he kept on at it. “Where did you go to school?” and “Where are you from?” and “Where are you staying?” I answered most of his questions, but at that last one I gave the vague answer of “just up the road” and quickly changed the subject by asking him something.

I don’t know how men (yes, some men, but many — if not most — in my experience) are so oblivious to signals that they are making a woman uncomfortable when they ask dozens of prying questions. Particularly at night, and particularly when the woman is alone. Are they truly unable to put themselves in that woman’s shoes and realize that being asked where you are staying and did you walk here will likely be interpreted as threatening, not friendly, before any kind of rapport has been mutually entered into?

The alarm bells were getting louder. He told me he was staying with his sister, who lives here. He is from Seattle. “We should go and hang out after this,” he said. “Let me buy your drink for you,” he said. I said no, thank you. “Do you have Facebook?” he asked. I hesitated, then nodded. I pulled out my phone and added him. I’ve always been bad at saying no to questions and requests which seem harmless, until they begin to stack up into something unwanted and I realize I need to stop being so accommodating to people I don’t even know and don’t want to know.

He looked at my Facebook page on his phone and said my name aloud, seemingly satisfied for the moment, then asked how long I would be in town. I told him I was checking out Saturday, and he got excited, saying he was here until Monday and insisting again that we get together to hang out.

He got up to use the bathroom and in a panic I realized there was no one behind the bar to close me out so I could make a quick exit. I flagged someone down and managed to get the bill signed just as I saw him coming back. My to-go box arrived a few seconds later and as he sat down, he repeated a prior question. “So where are you staying?” I’d had enough.

I was very clearly flustered now and told him his questions were making me uncomfortable. I told him he was asking me too many questions, and he threw his hands up as if this was news to him and apologized. That was a good start, since he might have just called me a bitch, but I still felt unsafe and sure that he would follow me if he got the chance, since we had established we’d both come here on foot.

I suddenly grew angry at myself when I noticed I felt sympathetic toward him and wanted to also apologize and reiterate that I just wanted to have a quiet night alone (yes, I’d already told him that) and that it was nothing personal. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to assume that this wasn’t a pattern and that it hadn’t led to other girls being put in situations that they weren’t equipped as I was to extricate themselves from. I managed to simply say, “Have a good night,” to both him and the bartenders as I got up and left.

Although I clearly need to work on shutting down this type of conversation before it gets past a few sentences, I still don’t know how to reconcile that desire to be blunt about my lack of interest with my stronger desire to be polite. It doesn’t feel like it should be my job to explain to a man that when my face is buried in a book, or stuffed with food, I’m clearly not there to chat. But it seems that even if I do say, more or less, “I’m not really here to chat,” or “I’m just here to read,” or “No, thanks, I’m doing my own thing tonight,” the message doesn’t get through anyway.

I could chalk this up to being sat a bar seat, which again, I didn’t choose, but maybe he interpreted as a sign that I was there to be social. Or maybe he was a bit more drunk and blind to my discomfort than I gave him credit for.

But maybe men should ask their female friends what horror stories they have from nights they tried to do something on their own, only to be met by persistent and aggressive men.

Maybe men need a reality check, because I felt the need to literally run back to my hotel and was so livid that this is how my nice, quiet night turned out that I was practically growling as I shook my head and opened the door to my room. It shouldn’t be like this. It isn’t fair to the women whose nights are cut short and made tense.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, as I alluded to at the start of this. A man at a bar on Catalina Island once asked me where I was staying and I ran back to my room that night as well. The next morning, I was still feeling circumspect and had the same terrible feeling in my stomach. He just-so-happened to show up at the one store I entered as I waited to get on my boat back to the mainland.

There was no one else in the store but me and the clerk before he walked in. He waited at the entrance, making small talk with the clerk for more than twenty minutes as I hid in the back, until I finally could wait no longer and needed to get past him. Of course he saw me and tried to make this out to be some kind of cosmic coincidence. I had to get myself away from that particular man twice. It was very scary and I wonder about the long-term physical effects of this kind of encounter with men, of being made to feel that you cannot easily escape and aren’t safe from men who want something from you.

Anyway, that’s just two examples, but I don’t doubt most women have experienced similar discomforts, if not worse. Personally, I only have a couple of stories that are worse than those two, but isn’t it crazy that one woman should have any instances of otherwise uneventful evenings ending in them feeling or actually being unsafe, nevermind several?

I blocked the guy ten minutes after he accepted the request and now have to hope I don’t run into him over the next several days. Nothing happened, and I’m safe, that’s true. I even got to vent by writing about it, which has made me feel a little better, so there’s a silver lining. But what if he had followed me, or hurt me? What if he tried and we’ll thankfully never know? Obviously I’m not lying dead somewhere, but some women do end up that way simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ran into the wrong man.

Just take the damn hint, guys. Don’t ask women where we’re staying, how we got to the bar, or how we’re getting home. Maybe take the Bumble approach and wait for us to initiate things with you (when we don’t, it’s most likely because we didn’t want to). If you want to be super-sure that you’re not overstepping boundaries, just leave us alone when we are alone.