And it's not just me. As a woman who talks to women, I can tell you there's plenty of women boo-hooing to their girlfriends during girl talk time about not being able to get a date. Maybe men miss out on this wonderful experience because it's more embarrassing to boo-hoo about it to a man. I don't know.

Part of the disconnect is that the guy who "never gets any" is not getting any sex, and the girl is complaining that she can't get a relationship. Now, I'm not saying all men just want sex and all women just want relationships, but the deal is that society shames men most for not having sex and shames women most for not having a dude on their arm. Society considers the sexless man and the mateless woman failures. Society is mean.

It's not generally an insult to call a lady a virgin, while it's fighting words if you say a guy "can't get laid." In fact, for the crude, insulting a lady means going the other way and say she has been boned by too many people. But it might hit harder to tell a single woman that no one will date her and she will be an old lady with 50 cats, or basically, "you'll never have a relationship."

Healthier people can shrug it off and be secure about who they are and why they're not dating or having sex. This article is not about those people.

In movies, girls that chase guys unsuccessfully are pretty much always crazy and/or ugly. Lena there hits both counts, then you have Wayne's ex in Wayne's World (crazy), Eddie Murphy's fat lady character in Norbit (both), Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding (crazy, but learns her lesson at the end), Sandra Bullock in All About Steve (crazy), Uma Thurman in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and then your all-out nutters in Fatal Attraction and Disclosure. I'm not saying these characters or movies were bad; I'm saying they're easy to think of, while I can't name a movie where a girl directly went after a guy (openly, not pining secretly and following him around and dropping hints) and was not crazy or a laughingstock.

Guys that chase girls unsuccessfully are split 50/50 -- some are portrayed as stalkers or losers, while many are the noble protagonists trying to get the dumb/damaged lady to see they obviously belong together (a la Breakfast at Tiffany's). Their persistence is supposed to be sweet. If a woman is persistent, it's either comical or horrifying.

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"One more try. I'll get the mouth this time, I know it."

So that's it. It was a choice between being the crazy stalker lady and being the crazy cat lady. It was pretty tough. If I liked a guy, I'd try to hold it in as long as I could to avoid looking desperate, but at a certain point I just had to know. Everybody always says that this dynamic (girls can't pursue) means that there's these hilarious misunderstandings where a girl and a guy are interested in each other but neither one is brave enough to bring it up, so they miss their opportunity. So I'd always give in eventually and make the first move to make sure it wasn't one of these little accidents. It never was.

Most of the time it was the old, "I really respect you as a friend, but I just don't feel that way" line, which I always took to mean I wasn't attractive enough, or at least I didn't fit his idea of attractive. If only I had known the term "friendzone" back then, I would have realized that I just failed to use the right moves and say the right lines that would obligate the guy to accept me as a girlfriend, no matter his preferences.

But I'm pretty sure I used all the right techniques, which are "copy everything the guy does." I would try to get into his favorite video games, despite being completely hopeless at any game with street cred (action, RTS, FPS). I would try his favorite hobbies, like cycling or hiking. I would wear the kinds of clothes he liked to wear (baggy jeans, hockey jerseys, surf tees). I'm not sure why this didn't work. What guy doesn't want to bang Kevin Smith?

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ROWRRRRR

Much much later (I'm very slow), I learned that I would have gotten a lot more mileage out of showing a little leg or not wearing giant glasses or not constantly talking about how everybody else was so fake.

But in the end, it's a good thing this didn't work, or I could have ended up marrying a guy who had a Kevin Smith fetish. Or the guy I tried to pretend to be outdoorsy for -- he ended up marrying an athletic woman who actually enjoys the outdoors, while I married a guy as lazy as I am. We're both probably a lot happier than we would be if we'd been stuck together, hating the things the other person wanted to do.

You might notice that this made me into a sort of hero or martyr for not being able to get a boyfriend, because I was this lone woman bravely being honest about who I was (smart and cool) instead of spending hours on clothes and makeup and giggling at every dumb joke a guy made and never correcting him. Men would stupidly fall for that and go out with girls who made them go shopping and watch chick flicks, when I would have played video games and watched sports and had clever debates with them.

As long as I kept believing that fantasy, I didn't have to change. It was up to everybody else to change. I wasn't wrong; the WORLD was wrong. If I had been on the Internet at the time, I might have written a whiny rant about how guys are dumb, shallow pricks who only like stupid, fake, giggly women who ooh and ahh at a guy's shitty achievements so he can feel like a big man, and oh by the way will one of you guys go out with me.

You might be wondering how I thought I could get away with insulting all men and asking a guy out in the same breath, and the answer is simple. And dumb. My plan was that the guy I was talking to would be ashamed to be lumped in with that group and would be motivated to be "one of the good ones" in my eyes, one who rejects the bullshit his entire gender had agreed to abide by. Surprisingly, shaming a guy into going out with me was a less effective tactic than I had expected.

Quick note: This type of "negging," recommended a lot by pickup artists, does seem to work on people who don't value themselves very much, but that just seems despicable -- morally equivalent to scamming the elderly.

Also, whether because of genetics or society or whatever, women tend to be more comfortable holding in anger, while men tend to need to act on it. I don't think this is necessarily something to be proud of, as some people speculate that this is why women are more prone to depression than men. But it does mean there could be 100 women silently stewing about this for every one that lashes out.

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"I wish he could just read my mind and know that I think he is a moron with bad taste."

The combination of shame and societal conditioning to hold in the anger is probably good news for the Nice Girl's "victims," though. She's probably less likely to try some of the more terrifying stalker behaviors and less likely to confront the guy that "owes" her a relationship. Nobody wants to get the nickname "Fatal Attraction."