Scheming to score a man nets zero

On a recent afternoon, my friend Michelle, a slim, foxy young woman with dark hair and soft brown eyes, made a pass at an older man at the local library.

“You look like you’re doing a lot of work there,” she said, tilting her chin at the pile of books stacked on the table they shared.

The man nodded. “I’m in law school,” he said. Then, throwing his hands up in a helpless gesture and rolling his eyes toward the ceiling, “Exams.”

Michelle laughed. They whispered back and forth for several minutes, then the man asked for Michelle’s phone number. She handed over her digits and marked the meeting a success.

In fact, Michelle had been on a mission for months to track down just the sort of man sitting across from her at the library worktable. Inspired by a married friend who extolled the virtues of wedlock, Michelle had decided to move her relationships away from casual flings and toward a path that would lead to marriage. She deemed her 22-year-old contemporaries not ready for the relationship longhaul and set out to find an older man with solid job prospects and the potential for romantic stability.

Over the next two weeks, the soonto be-lawyer wooed Michelle with skim lattes and tofu chow mien. He picked up the tab every time the two stepped out, and Michelle counted this a good sign. A man who invests cash in a relationship is in it for keeps, she reasoned. True, she imagined herself better looking than her beau and, also true, she thought herself a worthier catch, but surely compromises pave the road to matrimony.

What a shock then, when she discovered her suitor sipping lattes with another woman at their favorite coffee shop. He looked up in time to see Michelle before she hurried away and then sent her a smiley face text message a few minutes later.

“Not a winky face?” I asked when Michelle told me the story.

“Definitely a smiley face,” she said. “He was mocking me.”

What hurt the most, to hear her tell it, was not the deception itself but the promise she imagined he’d broken. His age, his nascent law career: These things pointed to a stable man, a man willing to embark on the journey to matrimonial commitment.

“I don’t think guys are ever ready,” Michelle moaned.

Not so, says Gregory Gilderman in his fantastically entertaining new book, “She’s the One.” A one-time television personality and Cosmopolitan magazine relationship guru, Mr. Gilderman says all men — like women — are searching for the One.

“What makes a guy view a girl as marriage or serious girlfriend material is her character,” Gilderman writes. “Deep down, guys want decent, generous, affectionate women.”

In the chapter titled “In His Own Words,” Mr. Gilderman quotes a man named Jimmy who puts it this way, “When a woman acts with true selflessness, I think it makes men think about her in a different way. That’s the moment he’s going to think about being with you long-term.”

With Michelle, perhaps the problem lies less with the men she dates and more with the way she schemes to get them. If character indicates a keeper, this one is a throw back. 

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