Always go to the Flower Island

Advice for men seeking women

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Now, on with today’s column.

The Italian water steps at the island of Mainau during the tulip blooming 2010. Photo by Harke under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence

I have many problems in life, but an inability to attract the opposite sex does not seem to be one of them. Reading this excellent recent piece by The Manosphere and Beyond about advice for men seeking women, and picking up on a general vibe of a surfeit of male sexual frustration, I wondered if I too had any counsel to offer young men about how to secure female interest.

There’s a refrain in the incel subculture along the lines that a man needs to be jacked or ripped to attract female attention. I am neither nor have even been of those things, and there is indeed a certain type of very sporty woman who’s never shown the blind bit of interest in me, except possibly to be repulsed. I do though have my crowd, women who are are more likely to be impressed by a man doing a funny voice for an item of fruit than his having a six pack. Still, if you’re in a situation where you’re finding it difficult to attract any females at all you can’t set your conditions in advance.

I’d say I have two tips, really, which worked for me.

The first one is to grow facial hair. I mean you have to be able to grow it – some sticky bum-fluff thing isn’t going to draw any female interest. Still, from the time I was able to grow a proper beard, and once I’d seen said beard through its difficult initial stages, the attention I got from women increased almost overnight. It isn’t enough on its own – well, it would have to be a pretty big beard to sustain a relationship single-handedly – but it will get you into the conversation with women who like facial hair, who appear to be numerous.

Another tip would be to keep fresh flowers in your living area.

I used to live on a ground-floor flat next to a Saturday morning farmer’s market; every Saturday morning I’d go and buy fresh flowers, different each time, and take them home to set in a bright orange jug on my dining table. I remember telling the woman selling me for the flowers one day that as for buying flowers, ‘Das kommt bei den Frauen wahnsinnig gut an.’

Flowers are such a hit with the ladies.

Flowers then – giving, placing, and having them around. Not just motorway service station apology flowers in their sad metallic foil but flowers in the good times too, flowers as part of the texture of life.

In my Freiburg days, which I wrote about here, I once went on a day trip to go to the Island of Mainau in Lake Konstanz, colloquially known as the Blumeninsel. Blumeninsel, the island of flowers. I think we stopped in Konstanz too and moseyed around the cobblestones there; it’s likely we had a certain amount of cake. I went with my partner of the time, who looked beautiful, floral even in a green dress and our weather was magnificently constant and bright the whole day.

What I distinctly remember though and the reason I mention this trip today is that all the wives on the trip had gone without their husbands and were asking my girlfriend in relation to my presence, ‘Blumeninsel, wie kommt das?’ Meaning – how did you convince your boyfriend to come to the Flower Island?

It was pretty easy for one because I like flowers.

Flowers are beautiful; they smell great too. They also bloom at the more pleasant times of the year. I really didn’t need much convincing. What, after all, could I have been doing which was preferable than walking around an island full of flowers with a pretty woman?

And here’s what I think the incels and their MRA tutors get wrong; there is no substitute for doing well with women than actually on a deep level liking them. I mean, Andrew Tate appears to have women around them, but his women are more props than companions. He’s using women as accoutrements in an essentially onanistic lifestyle; such men seem very alone.

In my dating days I encountered this sometimes in men, a sort of protective attachment to male-coded activities like sport and drinking and a resentments that their women took them out of these worlds. That they’d rather be doing whatever those German husbands were up to that Saturday, which I suspect in some instances didn’t go beyond watching TV. A few years I was in a supporters lounge with fans of Ilkeston Town football club, after they’d lost a rare cup final appearance, I joked that losing a big game at least wasn’t as bad as getting your heart broken; I saw in their faces that for them it was.

I’ve often loved being in masculine social environments but I’ve never felt a desire to cleave exclusively to them, and I’ve never felt there was any activity I should or shouldn’t have been doing because I was male. And I think this openness to a variety of experience has put me in a lot of environments where it’s been to my romantic advantage to be a bloke.

Now I should make clear that I’m also not the straightest card in the deck, and I’ve had my same-sex experiences too; no-one would mistake me for Dave Bautista. Yet it’s also the case that my approach to the romantic side of life – not overthinking my gender role, going with the flow, being open to a wide range of interests – has led me to do better with women than I would otherwise. I’m advising you, bluntly, to try and do things women seem to like doing. Your presence in female-dominated milieu doesn’t preclude acting in a conventionally heterosexual fashion in them should the opportunity arise.

A friend a while back said that she if she went with a mixed group of gay and straight women to a gay club, at the end of the evening while the gay men paired off, any straight man around suddenly became the most desirable person in the world. Now, I do understand the issues around straight men and women encroaching on gay spaces; I’d just say that it’s more than possible for men to recreate that ‘scarce bloke premium’ elsewhere; in language classes, at book clubs, or by moving to Nottingham. You can easily increase your chances of meeting someone purely by going places where there’s more women and less men around.

Some years ago I was in charge of a group of ESOL students on a trip to the British museum. I would have been 26; they, twelve years younger and entering an age where girls were a big concern. I was walking with them and one of them, a young, skinny Russian, observed that the exhibits were all boring. I launched into an impromptu pep-talk about how, if they wanted to attract women they had to be cultivated, to know about history, archaeology, art. I remember as we passed a young female museum assistant was sat next to us and hearing me say that evidently charmed her.

I mean, that’s flirting catnip, isn’t it, a young guy (good-looking too, although of course I couldn’t see that then) taking on a position of educational responsibility. And advocating for learning too – though not purely on the basis of attracting female interest. The great advantage of learning is that it’s fun in itself anyway.

In a way this approach requires not thinking about the whole man/woman dichotomy too much, but seeing it as something that arises through openness to experience. As you grow secure in different social settings, opportunities with the opposite sex will arrive. You can still drink beer and still hang out with your dudes, you can still love sport; indeed, when you’ve got a partner, perhaps trying your guy things, entering into stereotypically masculine settings from time to time, will be fun for her too. You’ll be surprised how many women appear to get a kick out of watching cricket, though I may be deluding myself for my own sake here.

In the meantime you still have to find the women in the first place. You need to put yourself into situations where you’ll meet the opposite sex. In the end what I’m saying is always go to the Blumeninsel. After all it’s hardly the greatest sacrifice; there are thousands upon thousands of pretty flowers there.

Tulpenfeld auf der Insel Mainau 2017. Photo by W.Pfahler under a CC BY-SA 4.0