Why making your desire unmistakable can change everything.
The Man at the Grill
It is a Saturday in late August, and there’s a man at the grill.
He didn’t volunteer for the grill so much as drift toward it, the way certain men drift toward any job that gives their hands something to do at a party. He brought the extra folding chairs. He fixed the gate latch that has been sticking since June, and nobody asked him to. He knows where the host keeps the lighter fluid, and he knows not to use too much of it. Every child at this party has already shown him a rock.
He’s funny in the dry, unannounced way that makes you laugh half a second late. He’s patient with the host’s elderly father, who has now told the same fishing story three times, and he laughs a little every time.
And he hasn’t asked a woman to dinner in four years.
Across the yard, a woman has been watching him all afternoon. She watched him fix the gate. She watched him flip thirty burgers without sacrificing a single one to the coals. She watched him crouch down to admire a rock with the seriousness of a museum curator. Somewhere around the third rock, she made up her mind.
So she walks over holding two beers, hands him one, and says, “I’ve been trying to think of a clever way to talk to you for about two hours. I don’t have one. So I’m just going to tell you I’d like to take you to dinner.”
Screech! Hold that moment. We’ll come back to it.
The Shrug
Any woman who has spent time in the modern dating world knows a certain shrug. You mention love, or marriage, or even a second date, and a good man, a genuinely good one, employed and decent, with clean fingernails and a mother who adores him, lifts his shoulders and says something like, “I’m kind of done with all that.”
It is tempting to take him at his word. He is a grown man. He said what he said.
But I’ve learned to read that shrug the way you read a dark storefront with a light still burning in the back room. The sign on the door says Closed. The front of the shop is empty. And yet somebody is still back there, sweeping the floor and keeping the lights on, for reasons he would rather not explain.
Some men truly do not want a partner, and they deserve to be believed. But “I’m done” is not always the truth. Sometimes it is discouragement, and discouragement has an excellent disguise. It looks almost exactly like indifference. It speaks in the same flat voice. It makes the same shrug. The difference is that indifference has stopped wanting. Discouragement has only stopped asking.
A man stops asking for a simple reason: it stopped working, and he got tired of paying the toll. Rejection is not free. Each one costs a little of the belief that he is someone a woman would actually want, and he has been spending that belief for years. At some point he looked at the balance and closed the account.
The wanting didn’t go anywhere. He just moved it to the back room.
The Missing Variable
Here is the provocative part, and I say it with enormous affection for my own gender. A great many women are waiting for a man to show interest. A great many men are waiting for proof that their interest would be welcome. Two people stand in the same backyard, each certain the other one ought to move first.
Meanwhile, the burgers burn.
A discouraged man runs the numbers constantly, whether he admits it or not. Is she interested, or is she being polite? Is that a smile, or is that just her face? If I misread this, will I have to find a new grocery store? His math is careful, pessimistic, and airtight except for one thing. It is missing a variable.
Her wanting him.
Not tolerating him. Not finding him “nice.” Wanting him, out loud, on purpose, with no plausible deniability left anywhere in the room.
When a woman makes her desire visible, she does something no amount of self-improvement can do for a man. She ends the guesswork. She supplies the evidence he stopped believing existed. The equation he has been solving for years suddenly has a new term in it, and the answer comes out different.
I’ve watched this happen, and it is one of the most beautiful things a human face can do. First, the flicker of disbelief. Then the quick glance over his shoulder, to see who she is really looking at. Then, slowly, the dawning. A man remembering that he is desirable is a sunrise, and I will never get tired of watching it.
Admiration does the same work in a quieter key. Telling a man you noticed him fix the gate, that you loved how he was with the old man, that you laughed at his joke again on the drive home: these are not small compliments. To a man who has been living on crumbs, they are a feast. They tell him he was seen, when he had assumed he was part of the furniture.
What Choosing Is Not
I can already hear the objections, so let me clear the room.
Choosing a man is not chasing him. Chasing is what you do to something that is running away. Choosing is what you do when you know what you want and are secure enough to say so once, clearly, and let him answer. There is no second lap around the block.
Choosing is not pressuring. A woman who chooses makes an offer, not a demand. She does not need his yes in order to feel whole, and that is exactly what makes the offer so irresistible. It comes from abundance, not hunger.
Choosing is not rescuing. He is not a project. He is not a porch you plan to sand down and restain. You are not choosing the man he might become if you work on him long enough. You are choosing the man at the grill, the one right in front of you, rocks and all.
And choosing is certainly not lowering your standards. It is the opposite. You choose a man because he meets them. You have watched him long enough to know he is kind, honest, funny, and reliable, good with small children and old men and stubborn gates. Choosing him is not charity. It is recognition. It is a woman with excellent taste acting on it.
Pursuit says, I will get you. Pressure says, you owe me. Rescue says, I will fix you.
Choosing says something simpler and far more dangerous: You. I pick you. Or, if you want to get really hot, I claim you.
The Door That Swings Both Ways
Here’s what surprises people. A man who has been chosen openly does not become passive, content to be led for the rest of his life. He steps forward.
The confidence he stopped spending comes back into circulation. He calls on Tuesday just to hear how her meeting went. He plans the second date, and the third, with the kind of care a man gives to things he believes are worth doing. He shows up with flowers that are very obviously from the grocery store and hands them over like they came from Paris. He begins to court her, because now he knows the door is open, and a good man who wants her too no longer has to wonder whether he is welcome to walk through it.
This is the romance nobody talks about. We tell women to wait to be chosen. We rarely tell them what it does to a man to be chosen first. It does not diminish him. It restores him. It hands back the one thing discouragement took: the belief that his wanting is welcome.
And then, of course, he chooses her back. Loudly. Repeatedly. With the particular devotion of a man who had given up on being wanted and got gloriously surprised.
That is where the heat lives. Two people who are done hiding, done waiting for the other one to go first, standing in the open and wanting each other in broad daylight.
Back at the Grill
So. Our man at the grill with the woman…
He stares at her for a moment, tongs in one hand and a beer in the other. He glances over his shoulder, just to be sure. There is no one behind him but the host’s father, who has started the fishing story for the fourth time.
Then something in his face gives way, the way a stuck gate finally gives when someone puts a sure hand on the latch.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
And then, because he is exactly who she thought he was, he hands her the tongs and says, “Hold these. I’m getting you a chair.”
He was never uninterested. He was waiting for someone to notice he was worth choosing.
She noticed. She said so.
That was all it took. It is, very often, all it takes.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— “Maybe I’m Amazed,” Paul McCartney,1970
This article is based on concepts from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
