Bill Cammack

Deleting People From Facebook

Bill Cammack — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:25:51 +0000

Being connected with people on social networks like Facebook, Twitter & Foursquare has taken on a new importance in people’s lives in 2010 AD.

It used to be a frivolous decision whether to add someone as a “friend” or not. It used to be similarly unimportant whether you deleted someone after becoming friends with them. Those days are over. :) Friending and unfriending people is serious business now, as people’s IRL lives spill over into their online presence and “art” begins to imitate life…

Errors In Judgement

I personally learned this a while back when I deleted someone from a contact list on one of the social media sites I use. I deleted this person for very VERY *VERY* poorly-rationalized reasons. My thinking at the time was “I have this flimsy reason to delete them and no reason I can think of *NOT* to delete them”, so I went ahead and did it.

Long Story Short.. I found out that I had caused the deleted person grief, due to the asynchronous nature in which we relate to each other on the internet.

When we relate to each other IRL (In Real Life), we’re both aware that we’re spending time together and building or destroying our relationship to each other. Relating online works totally differently. You see people in pictures and they don’t know. You read their blog posts and they don’t know. You are in the same room with them at parties and they don’t know….

Just today, I got a message from a gal that was randomly searching the internet for information about something and landed on a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. If she hadn’t sent me that message, I wouldn’t have known that she EVER read my blog in life.

So, it turned out that the person I had deleted was asynchronously paying more attention to me than I had been paying to them. In effect, I had frivolously disrespected a fan, which is bad policy as far as business and HORRIBLE policy as a ******* human being.

Realizing the error of my ways, I apologized, explained and immediately reinstated the person whose online contact I had unceremoniously discarded. That was when I first realized that the online was seeping far into the offline.

Justice Is Served

I’ve also been deleted by people.

This is very hard to figure out when you have 2,300 Facebook friends. The only way I can tell is when someone I used to be connected to shows up in a picture with a mutual friend and their link looks different. I follow the link and it says “Add as friend”. :D

Personally, I don’t give a flying ****. 2,300 contacts is too much to efficiently manage. What I do care about though, is what I might have done to cause that person to delete me. I think it’s always good for one’s self-improvement and evolution when one can figure out how he’s inadvertently hurting other people.

One of the reasons is that cliques tend to form in social media circles and you can be penalized by being friends with someone that the other team has decided they don’t like anymore. That’s just a fact of my life that I have to live with. I don’t care about people’s beefs with other people, so I’m just going to have to suffer from the fallout of people’s petty rivalries.

Another reason is that people meet you IRL and don’t have the same impression of you that they had from your online presence. This is one of the reasons why I try to keep my internet posting as real as possible. There’s no point in meeting a new gal and then she finds out after the fact that I already know a million chicks. It’s like “Here’s what’s going on.. If you want to be down, get down.. If you’re not interested, that’s cool too. :)”. Still, you have people that don’t read enough of your material or they only read the social media posts and not the dating posts and then they’re all aghast when you’re pressed up on some chick (or their sister) at a party.

Too Bad.. So Sad.

So.. Having experienced both sides of the deletion issue, I can tell you that it’s in your best interests to figure out *IF* you should friend someone in the first place and figure out what your boundaries are for deleting them if they do something you don’t like.

If you delete someone, you should be fully prepared for them to be upset at you and potentially act out by deleting YOU from other sites y’all are connected on.

You should also be prepared for them to be mad if they meet you in person, feel like y’all built rapport and then you reject their offer to add you.

You should also be prepared for them to be mad at you if you decline their FR when you have a lot of mutual friends with them.

You should also be prepared for them to be mad at you if y’all were friends IRL back in the day and you don’t want to be socially connected to them now.

Is any of that rational? Nope. :) This a free country (world). People can be connected to or not connected to whomever they want. A friend of mine has a Facebook account where she uses a fake name and another one where she uses her real name. She thinks I don’t know who she actually is, so she accepted my friend request for the fake account and ignored me on her real account. :P

Then, you have the set of people that only friend people they “know IRL” on Facebook. I understand why people use that style. They’re using online as only an extension of their offline lives. Being the type of person that likes meeting new people and learning new things, I go in the other direction. If I had to rely on the time I get to spend IRL with people to build my relationships to them, I’d be way back on something like 900 friends instead of 2,300. I’d rather make the connection and read someone’s content so the next time I run into them, I know more about them and either have relevant and interesting things to say to them or I’ve determined we shouldn’t be friends IRL and keep it at “hi” and “bye”.

Catchin’ Feelin’s

Someone who shan’t be named *COUGHcathybrooksCOUGH* said “Just because you have friends in common with people does NOT mean that you should be friends with someone. Period. Full stop.”

That’s absolutely true.. However, you can’t control how someone else is going to feel about your accepting a bunch of people they know and then not accepting them. I’m not talking about what’s fair in life. I’m talking about how personally people are taking social media connections now that the civilians are trying to catch up to the fishbowl residents.

This is especially relevant on LBS (Location-Based Services) like Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Loopt, Brightkite… There aren’t currently distinctions between people that you’re connecting with in order to be sociable and people that you actually want to KNOW where you are whenever you check in. The choices you have are a) only add people you actually want to meet up with or that you want to meet up randomly with you, b) add everyone and be sociable, or c) make two accounts so you can use the app in its intended fashion but still connect with random people everywhere in the world that would like to be your friend on this service.

On top of that, you have people trying to add you that you have a history with, so you might end up deciding whether To Friend or Not To Friend the Ex! O_o

What about people you used to work with or *STILL* work with? How do you handle it when your boss wants to be friends with you on Facebook, since y’all are friends on the job, right? :D What about clients, if you’re a freelancer? What do you share on each site? Is your twitter stream completely different from your Facebook stream?

Some people utilize Fan Pages. This is all well & good if you’re an entertainer, because you’re offering one-way content. You talk and people listen. I have a Fan Page, but it has approximately 1/20 of the population my personal page has because I can’t listen to people from a Fan Page, so it’s essentially useless to me.

So what camp do you fall into when it comes to social media connections? Are you still living the “Online friends aren’t REAL friends” life, or do you aim to treat your virtual friends the same way you would treat your IRL friends & neighbors?

When was the last time you told someone IRL “Lose my number.”? >:D

Influence and Numbers

Bill Cammack — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:21:34 +0000

The Emperor wears no clothes.

Here’s how fads occur..

Someone does something that other people agree is a good or stylish thing to do and then everyone copies that person.

Eventually, all the guys want to buy the same car and all the gals want to buy the same boots and sunglasses and nobody realizes they’re all following one person’s idea.

One of the social media fads has been to incorrectly categorize the credit people deserve for how large their social network is.

People who are merely information-passers are being said to have influence.

This has been going on for years already. Companies have actually posted job descriptions that require the applicants to have more than so many Twitter followers. I’d like to laugh at that except that it’s so pathetic. I already explained why the number of followers someone has doesn’t mean anything at all, but let’s go over that again.

Follow Me Back

When I first got involved with Twitter, a couple of years before the Civilians found out about it and talked about it on the evening news like as if they understood what they were supposed to do with it, the philosophy of the community was “follow back”. Anybody that followed you, you were ‘supposed’ to offer them the courtesy of following them back. This was fine with me at the beginning, because the only people that knew of me on Twitter were my friends from other social media sites, so anyone that added me, I actually WANTED to listen to.

This got out of hand when randoms started following me. I became accustomed to 10 new people that I had never heard of before following me on Twitter every single day. This made me question the concept of automatically following people back because it was no longer people I wanted to hear from. My Twitter stream was being diluted with minutia & drivel instead of being a rapid-access version of forums or newsgroups I had been a member of.

I stopped auto-following people. Meanwhile, I noticed that others continued to auto-follow, going so far as to figure out programs to automatically add anyone that followed them so they didn’t have to sit there all day, clicking “follow” on their accounts. Next thing you know, there are people with tens of thousands of Twitter followers that they don’t know and that don’t have any relevant information for them and that they have zero demographics for in order to explain to someone why the community they have access to is valuable to their company.

Amassing Followers

There are some people that are celebrities and microcelebrities and weblebrities (etc, etc) that actually had a lot of people following them legitimately. These people were popular in the space or pioneers or selected a niche and always kicked out pertinent information that people wanted to listen to. This was way before the SUL (Twitter Suggested User List), and these people were amassing a crowd of listeners who were passionate about what they had to say.

Other people, I noticed, hehehehe were making rapid advances towards surpassing my number of followers without having anything relevant to contribute whatsoever. These people are social media clowns.. bums.. There was no way they should have been advancing like that, so I started studying their progress to figure out what was going on.

SInce Twitter only updates their following/follower counts once a day, it took me 3 or 4 days to figure out what was happening. The people who were progressing way beyond their personal merit always had their followING count leading their followER count. In fact, the gap was becoming wider every day.

How To ‘Game’ Twitter

If you think about this, it makes sense. If you have 10 followers and I have 2,888 (my current count as of this writing), I seem prestigious to you. If I follow you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to follow me back, first of all out of reverence for my accomplishments on Twitter (amassing followers) and secondly, so that you can say you’re connected to someone that a lot of people follow.

So.. I can essentially add ANYONE with fewer followers than I have and there’s a good chance they’re going to follow me back. On top of that, once they developed apps that told people who was following them back and who wasn’t, people were afraid of being unfollowed, so they got with the program.

These same apps added bulk following and unfollowing and then it was off to the races. The system-gamers would add HUNDREDS of people every day by going to the general population timeline and clicking “Follow” for anyone that posted anything. A percentage of those hundreds they added (which explains why their followING count is always higher than their followER count) add them back. The ones that don’t add them back get bulk deleted using the peripheral application. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

This is how people got so many Twitter followers before the SUL. In fact, gaming Twitter was so prevalent that people were getting people to pay them to explain how to amass followers. There were “clubs” where your price of admission for joining the club was that you had to follow everyone involved and your win was that everyone involved would follow you back.

Useless Community

Hopefully, you see what the problem is with gaining “followers” this way. You’re building a community of nobodies that don’t know anything in particular and have no particular demographic. People are following you IN ORDER TO GET FOLLOWERS FOR THEMSELVES and couldn’t possibly give a flying **** about what you say, ask or recommend.

This is why numbers of followers can’t possibly translate to “influence”. In order to have influence, you have to be determined to be an authority on the topic. The people that built their follower lists from people that recognized them as thought leaders, pioneers in the space or innovators have an active, useful, passionate group of listeners. THAT’S useful. What’s NOT useful is people who have tens of thousands of followers from gaming the system and providing no consistently demonstrable value to their “community”.

Unfortunately, when you incorrectly assign credit to numbers of followers, both camps look exactly the same. The person with 60,000 followers seems more influential than the person with 2,888 followers strictly by virtue of quantity over quality.

This is why companies go out like suckers and hire people based on their apparent fan base instead of whether they can do a job in a professional, efficient and cost-effective manor.

Anyway… Twitter finally figured this out and then set a cap on how much your followING number could exceed your followER number. This worked decently, but the damage was already done. People that shouldn’t have had so many followers already did. Also, they didn’t stop gaming the system by following people for no other reason than trying to get those people to follow them back, they just slowed their roll to the limits that Twitter set.

The next travesty was the Twitter Suggested User List.

Suggested User List

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

Basically, since people were joining Twitter and then having nobody to follow and nobody following them, Twitter offered people suggestions of whom they might follow… including someone’s ******* CAT! :/ (and *NOT* including then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama).

The problem with this was that at the end of the Twitter account creation process, they offered you two links.

One was a gigantic green arrow, which indicated that you could activate your account and automatically follow everyone on the SUL.

The other was a TEXT LINK that was practically unnoticeable that allowed you to activate your account WITHOUT adding the people on the SUL.

Of course, tons of people clicked on the green arrow, resulting in everybody on the SUL gaining tens of thousands of followers every single day who had never heard of them before, didn’t give a flying **** about them and probably hadn’t even heard of them before they accidentally followed them as a consequence of creating a Twitter account.

There was a hue and cry about this (as there very well SHOULD have been) from the people that had struggled to promote themselves and create their follower lists through legitimate marketing tactics and online presence management. The numbers that it took them years to build were surpassed in mere days by people who shot up from 20,000 followers to 200,000 followers in a matter of weeks, absolutely dwarfing the stats of the legit group and making them seem less popular… less… ?influential? O_o

The Town Crier

This is why it’s pathetically laughable when people attempt to equate number of followers with influence. Do you have a large network of people to whom you can quickly disseminate information? Yes. So does the Town Crier.

The Town Crier is in charge of telling people what influential people told him to say. The Town Crier didn’t make a single policy and probably wasn’t even invited to the meeting where the policies were made. He IS, however, the person that informs the masses about these policies.

Does that make the Town Crier influential? Nope. The Town Crier is a source of information.. A newscaster. An anchorperson for the nightly news. Does the anchorperson write the articles? Nope. Does the anchorperson decide what stories go on the air? Nope. Does the anchorperson film anything or interview anyone in the street? Nope. They’re not influential AT ALL, even though they’re the ones that INFORM YOU about news stories by reading from the teleprompter.

It’s exactly the same for people that have built social networks without demonstrating to anyone that they’re an authority on ANYTHING AT ALL. Are you influential because you have the ability to inform 60,000 Twitter accounts of an opportunity? Some people say “yes”. I say “no”. You’re a good person to *USE* to get the word out about something, but your numbers don’t indicate that you’re affecting anyone’s thought processes. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can get anyone to do anything they wouldn’t have done anyway without hearing your opinion. Your numbers don’t indicate how you attained them or why your followers followed you. Your numbers don’t indicate who’s actually listening to you. Your numbers don’t indicate who gives a **** what you think. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can build and maintain a community for a client and offer them an impressive ROI if they hire you to handle their social media presence.

Looking Desperate

Bill Cammack — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:42:29 +0000

A reader recently asked me a question about looking desperate. It was the basic situation of not wanting to overdo it or under-do it when contacting someone you want to kick it to.

If you contact them too much, you look desperate. If you contact them too little, you look disinterested. If you look disinterested, they might turn off to you. If you look desperate, they might think you’re a Herb or a psycho stalker.

This was an issue in one of my favorite movies, “Swingers” by Jon Favreau.

Mikey got a number from this chick, right? :)

So he’s all excited about it but he wants to seem like he’s cool about it.

When he goes back, he asks his friends, who are actual players, how long he should wait to call her. They tell him to wait two days.

Of course, Mikey gets overexcited and calls her several times on the same night he met her, fumbling the position.

So, the problem, to the casual viewer, seems to be that Mikey called her too soon. That’s not actually the problem. That’s the equivalent of women thinking that they got dumped after sex for giving it up too soon (especially on the first date).

Here’s the real problem…

Desperate People Look Desperate

See how that works? You got treated like a desperate person because you WERE desperate. Most of the time when people don’t want to LOOK desperate, it’s because they FEEL desperate. O_o

Desperate people look desperate REGARDLESS of how long they wait to contact someone. Similarly, when a guy plans to dump a girl after having sex with her, it doesn’t matter at all how long she plays it off like she doesn’t want to give him some. As soon as she does it, if she hasn’t demonstrated some other value to him that he decides to stick around for, he’s Swayze (Ghost).

If you meet someone on Wednesday and contact them on Thursday, that doesn’t automatically mean that you’re desperate. It could also mean that you just REALLY want to spend time with them, which, believe it or not, is completely different. :)

Similarly, if you meed someone on Wednesday and contact them NEXT WEDNESDAY, that doesn’t mean you’re COOL either! :D All that FRONTIN’ you did, only to arrive one week later, just as *SHOOK* as you were last week, haha What did all that delaying get you?.. I mean, of course, besides giving other people six days to butt in on your rap so that by the time you call/text, that person already deleted your number and forgot what you look like.

So your problem isn’t how soon you do something, it’s how you feel about yourself when you do it.

For example.. Let’s say I met a gal at 9pm and she gave me her number.

I might very well text her at 11pm to see what she’s doing.

I might text her the next morning around 10am.

I might text her the next day around lunchtime to see what her plans are for that evening.

If I met her on a Thursday, I might not text her until Monday if I already have plans for Friday & Saturday.

I might very well not text her at all, evAr. :D

I can do whatever the **** I want to do because I’m not desperate. I couldn’t possibly care any less whether she returns my texts, blocks my number or joins me for drinks. It doesn’t matter. If she’s not interested, I’ll call someone else or meet a new chick on the fly. It’s no big deal.

Go With The Flow

The problem occurs when a dude’s like “OMG! I *HOPE* I GET THE RAP TO THIS GALLLLL!!!!! :O” and then he wants to SEEM like he’s cool about the situation. That’s not going to work. That’s like being afraid of a dog but trying to trick the dog by standing still AS IF you’re not afraid of it. Good Luck with that! :D

So forget about what day you’re going to contact her and what you’re going to say and what you’re going to offer her and where you’re going to take her and what her friends are going to think about you and what you’re going to wear….. Get your MIND RIGHT so you can go with the flow regardless of what happens.

It’s also possible that you CAN’T get your mind right because this one rap to this one girl *IS* that important to you. :) If that’s the case, use your nervousness to your advantage instead of trying to suppress it. If you think she looks HAWT, tell her that. If you think she’s really smart or respectable, tell her that. Trust & Believe you’re WAAAAY better off getting comfortable with your own discomfort than trying to teach yourself how to act cool when you’re not.

No Romance Without Finance

Bill Cammack — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:44:10 +0000

A reader asked me a question the other day that pertained to my post “Hard To Get” vs “Expensive To Buy”. I’d like to clarify my position on dating & monetary exchanges…

The basic point of that post was that if a gal requires some kind of monetary exchange from a guy in order to give it up, she’s essentially a hooker. Sex for Money is Prostitution and there’s no way around that, purely by definition.

What happens is that the guy adds up the expenses he incurred while attempting to get on, and that becomes her “purchase price”, let’s call it. Buy her an expensive dress and you can get some. Take her out to three dinners and you can get some. She’s basically been reduced to a simple business transaction… “So long as I can afford X, she’ll give me Y”.

The solution to this for women is to make it clear that y’all are acting from your own personal power. You need to let a guy know that you hooked up with him because you wanted to and not because you accepted being bought.

Buying Sex

When I wrote that post, I was speaking specifically to the issue of gals that think they’re making themselves look good by holding out and then eventually giving it up. The problem with that style is how you’re perceived by that guy, going forward. If he thinks he bought you, once or several times, that’s a pretty terrible look for you.

The issue that was brought to my attention yesterday is that there are LOTS of guys for whom MONEY is their ONLY rap style. I hadn’t considered the situation from the viewpoint of a woman that’s *OFFERED* money, gifts, dinners, clothes, trips, etc because that’s that particular suitor’s style of wooing females and NOT because she requested any of these things from him before being willing to interact with him the way she genuinely wanted to from the first time she saw him.

This is a slightly complex situation which hinges upon the reason (in his own mind) why he’s spending money on her. He might consider himself doing her favors, as any guy might do for a gal he likes. He might consider himself building equity towards sex, like layaway. He might consider himself demonstrating to her that he can provide for her and offer her “the finer things in life” if she chooses to be his woman (and possibly fiancee or bride).

The other issue is how SHE feels about receiving money, items & favors from guys that are courting her. Some women like to pay their own way… ALL THE TIME. :D Some gals are used to the game and they know what’s probably coming down the line if they start accepting things from guys, which is “What can I get in return for all those goods & services I provided you? >:D”.

Perception Is Reality

Some women don’t want the time that they’re taking to get to know a guy and figure out if they want to mess with him to be perceived by him as the time it’s taking him to buy sex from her. Some gals like to demonstrate that they have careers too and they make money too and they want to come to the table as equals and not dependents.

As usual, I think communication is the key here. Gifts either need to be rejected with an “I appreciate that, but no thanks :)” or accepted while making sure that he understands that his gesture isn’t getting him any closer to getting laid.

That’s a tricky issue as well, obviously, because saying “Wow! :D .. This is GREAT, and you still can’t get any! :D” isn’t the best way to accept a gift.

Another thing that’s annoying, yet funny to me is guys that “Lead with their wallets” (statement credit: The Anh Vu Show). Instead of them having anything to say about themselves or even about *HER*, the first thing they want to tell chicks about is how much money they’re able to spend on her or what kinds of things they’ve already bought that she’ll be able to enjoy if she rolls with him. hahaha It’s *SO* Pathetic! :D

Countless times, I’ve overheard dudes telling chicks about their cars, boats, houses, expensive apartments, vacations they went on, salary and all other kinds of things that have NOTHING TO DO with one-on-one, interpersonal interactions, which, of course, are the essential *CORE* of dating. They’re basically saying “I know damned well that there’s nothing attractive about me as a person so maybe I can lure her in with these luxury items so she lays down for me anyway”.

Gimmicks & Bribery

Do I think dudes should use whatever gimmicks are available to them so they can get laid? Hellz Yah! :D … Do I think they should pull out the gimmicks *FIRST*? HELLZ NAW! :/ If you can’t get the rap off your looks, charisma & personality and the ship’s clearly sinking… *THEN* mention the Porsche & the yacht. Unfortunately, if that saves your rap, you know what kind of chick you have on your hands, so good luck with that.

A personal bias of mine, and I know this sounds funny as it potentially parallels how chicks are always clamoring for guys to want them for their minds or some other such ridiculousness, :D but I’m not really interested in chicks hanging around me so they can use me… for business purposes… so they can use me for business purposes… I have no problem with women using me if they run out of batteries for The Rabbit or The Butterfly… but I digress…

I’m not rich to begin with, but even if I were, I MOST CERTAINLY wouldn’t lead with my wallet because I’d rather have a chick come around because she wants to hang out with The Kid… Not because she knows she’s gonna be drinking for free or that she’s gonna meet a bunch of people that are actually DOING THINGS with their lives or she wants me to mix her new song or she wants to hang out with the cool kids and be all up in pictures & whatnot.

Then again.. If your wallet’s your last resort, it’s better to have that than to NOT have that. >:D

If the only way you’re going to get your hands on chicks is to bribe them, more power to ya and Good Luck with that. :D

Business Transactions

As you can tell, I’m not a strip club fan either. The concept of giving a chick money for showing you her body is ludicrous at best. Chicks are supposed to want to show you their bodies FOR. FREE!.. Which, I suppose, takes us back to my initial point.

I got the title for this post from this song called “Ain’t Nothing Going On But The Rent” by Gwen Guthrie.

This song was an hilarious reply to the common way guys would greet gals and try to talk to them by saying “What’s going on? :D”, to which she would reply “Ain’t *NOTHING* going on, but the rent! :D”. I’m laughing right now, just thinking about how upsetting this reply is! :D

Here are some of the lyrics:

Bill collector’s at my door – what can you do for me?

No romance without finance, no romance without finance

Boy, nothin’ in life is free
That’s why I’m asking you, what can you do for me?
I’ve got responsibilities
So I’m lookin’ for a man who’s got some money in his hand

‘Cause ain’t nothin’ goin’ on but the rent
You got to have a J.O.B. if you want to be with me

Boy, your silky words are sweet
But we’re only wastin’ time if your pockets are empty
I got lots of love to give
But I will have to avoid you if you’re unemployed

Oh, you look good to me, your silky words are sweet
But your pockets sure look empty

It’s like, ok.. I get it. You’re a ho, if not an actual professional hooker. I get it.

I also get that guys will use gals as much as they can for free, so I can’t hate on women that attempt to procure monetary compensation for agreeing to lay down for 5 minutes (or less) worth of sex before dude falls asleep on top of her.

What’s Real & What’s For Sale?

I think the WIN here for women is to make it clear that money & gifts aren’t influencing your decisions on whether you’re going to hook up with a guy or not.

Another WIN is making sure you understand HIS motivation for buying you stuff or giving you money or paying your phone bill or whatever.

He may very well be doing you a friendly favor. My friends and I buy each other rounds all the time… rounds of drinks, not ammunition.

It’s a social gesture that builds rapport and contributes to more of a “togetherness” feeling than if everyone’s paying for their own drinks.

OTOH, He may be keeping an accountant’s ledger of how much dough he’s spent on you, hoping that when he finally tells you what he really wants to do with you, you’ll feel too guilty from taking all those bribes to refuse his physical request.

Put it this way.. I’ve seen dudes drop $600 USD in one night in a strip club, buying 20-minute “Happy Ending” sessions in the back rooms. If you don’t think a dude will drop a couple hunnid to eventually (after several dates, shopping sprees or whatever) have you to himself for an entire evening, you’re mad.

There’s no amount of money that a guy can pay a gal to have sex with him that makes y’all look GOOD, so your best bet is to make it clear that money, gifts & special considerations don’t have ANY effect on your decision-making processes, whatsoever. If he’s clear on that and still wants to buy you stuff and you’re willing to receive it from him, good for you… Enjoy! :D

Trust & Believe that you’re way better off remaining broke (poor) and retaining his respect for you as well as your own self-respect than you will be if you have a couple more dresses in your closet or eat a couple of steaks and he thinks of you as ass for sale.

Responsibilities in Relationships

Bill Cammack — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:37:19 +0000

Single Life

Just two days ago, I was out to brunch with a friend and somehow, the topic of video games came up. I think I was explaining to her what I felt the value was of being yourself from the giddyap instead of doing what other people wanted you to do so they’d be willing to hang out with you.

I told her something to the effect of a chick would be a fool to give me an ultimatum to choose between spending time with her and playing video games because without a split second’s hesitation, I’d be like “Don’t let the door hit’cha… Where the Good Lord SPLIT’CHA!!!” :D

I can afford that though, because I’m single and I don’t have any kids. If a chick doesn’t fit in with my style, she can vamoose and make space for the next gal who’s already on deck, waiting to step into the batter’s box.

So just now, reader “Kim” brought up the scenario of a guy having kids with a gal and still spending all day playing video games with his homeboys instead of spending time with the kids, doing chores, whatever.

Being that that’s a foreign situation to me, I have a hard time properly processing it. I know how it feels to play video games all day and not pay attention to SOME OTHER CHICK’S KID(S)! :D hahaha but I can’t really grasp anything other than MAAAAAYBE handing the kids controllers so they could make themselves useful in the game I’m playing. >:D

The reason I wanted to bring this up is that I think this is a very important issue that couples don’t often discuss before they ~~accidentally~~ have kids.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It’s actually been funny to me, throughout the years, watching women get exasperated and frustrated because their boyfriends/husbands have ZERO to do with the kid’s maintenance. It’s funny because I know that in whatever brief fantasies I’ve had about having kids, I never imagined changing one or feeding one or really doing ANYTHING with them other than playing sports and reading to them from books, handing them video game controllers… you know.. FUN stuff! :D

Unfortunately for women, they feel like a guy’s going to automatically give a flying **** about child maintenance just because he’s the one that got her pregnant. It doesn’t work like that. They don’t give us baby dolls and carriages and ovens to play with when we’re kids. That’s “girl stuff”. They give us footballs and baseball equipment and send us for drum lessons. Changing a kid never crosses our minds because there’s no reason for it to. In order to have a kid, it’s got to come with a female, who just so happens to have been reared to take care of the kids since *SHE* was a kid. It’s like kids come with automatic nannies, off the bat.

This is why women are surprised and complain so much that they’re the ones that always get stuck changing and feeding the kid(s). They don’t get that THEY’RE the ones that go through hormonal changes during child-bearing, not US. :) We’re the exact same dudes that we were before… which brings up another issue…

Get a clue, ladies… If a dude doesn’t like to clean up after himself BEFORE you move in with him, what makes you think he’s going to want to start doing it AFTER you move in with him? O_o In fact, it’ll probably get WORSE now that he has YOU to clean up after him because that’s part of the reason he selected you as his girlfriend/wife in the first place.

Once again, no hormonal change occurs in guys when they move in with a gal that makes them different people than when y’all used to live apart from each other. If you want a guy to clean things when you live together… wait for it….. Date A Guy That Cleans Up After Himself From The Giddyap! :D

Same thing with taking out the garbage. Same thing with visiting your relatives on the weekend instead of staying home and watching the game. Same thing with going to Happy Hour after work with his co-workers. Same thing with him driving his Corvette when you think he should trade it in for a van so he can chauffeur your new family all over creation.

The Talk

I wonder how many couples have these conversations ahead of time?.. I know a bunch of them have the convo AFTER THE FACT! :D

I know I’ve never had a conversation where I would have claimed to take responsibility for ANYTHING, as you can guess, being that I won’t even let a chick interrupt my “ME Time”. I can only imagine that it’s stressful for both sides, unless the guy had been looking forward to feeding and changing kids beforehand.

If you have any comments on this topic (whether you have kids or not), please leave them below so we can all benefit from your wisdom. :D

Ladies, do you expect your boyfriends/husbands to automatically share, say 40% to 50% of the child-maintenance duties with you if/when you have kids?

Guys, is this something that ever crosses your mind, or do you just figure the female’s going to deal with it and call you when dinner’s ready? :D

Bill Cammack

Deleting People From Facebook

Errors In Judgement

Justice Is Served

Too Bad.. So Sad.

Catchin’ Feelin’s

Related Posts

Influence and Numbers

Follow Me Back

Amassing Followers

How To ‘Game’ Twitter

Useless Community

Suggested User List

The Town Crier

Related Posts

Looking Desperate

Desperate People Look Desperate

Go With The Flow

Related Posts

No Romance Without Finance

Buying Sex

Perception Is Reality

Gimmicks & Bribery

Business Transactions

What’s Real & What’s For Sale?

Related Posts

Responsibilities in Relationships

Single Life

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The Talk

Related Posts