If there is one thing that I have learned so far in my brief few years as a serial dater it is “Never ever call him first.” This is a law of dating that should apply to single women everywhere. You call him first, you are dead in the water.

I know it sounds really old fashioned and not too feminist but unfortunately it is true. From what I can tell, relationships that start off with the woman calling the man always lead to some kind of disaster or humiliation.

This is the typical scenario. A woman meets a cute guy an in a bar. They talk for two hours straight. The woman starts thinking, “Oh, he really likes me.” Before she knows it the hours have flown by, it is Last Call and it is time to go home. He is putting on his coat, and she has either one of two options –

1. To never see him again in her life.

2. To get his number.

This is exactly how these catastrophic affairs start. You should never ask the man for his number. This is because if unless he volunteers it, you will probably always get an answering machine or even a female voice that says “Just a minute. I’ll get him.”

It is also pretty humiliating when you leave that one message and the guy never calls you back, even after weeks have passed when at the bar he was more than willing to tell you almost too much about himself.

Most of the time you get an answering machine. The worst thing you can do is leave one of those “burned” sounding messages after he hasn’t returned your message after about three weeks. The point here is that if he wanted to call, he would and that if he wanted to call he would have asked for your number in the first place.

This begs the question – why do men go on and on about themselves to complete strangers in the first place? It is because most men don’t see women as anything but soft places to lay their heads in the first place. You are a nurturer, just like his mom, and of course there is nothing you would be more grateful for then to listen to his life story.

Still most women don’t seem to realize that most men like to just ramble on about themselves with no interest in you. Like some types of alpha dogs they like the sound of their voice.

There is also the slight danger that the guy that you were talking to is one of the old-fashioned control freak types who were raised by a Michael Douglas type Dad. This type believes that the minute you ask for the number, never mind phone, that you are automatically a stalker.

If you simply make it one of your Golden Rules that you will never ask for his number then you will never be put through this kind of pain. There is a lot of peace in knowing that the guy who is calling you really does want to call and and you know this is so because he asked for YOUR number. Not the other way around.