Even more than soccer, the sport that all “men” engage in that requires zero effort on their part is arousing within a woman passions that she would otherwise like to suppress for the sake of self-preservation. Nothing is as big of a detriment to dignity than becoming emotionally vulnerable. However, as Dawson’s Creek taught us, whenever a “man” displays enough interest and determination, a woman is invariably prone to fall victim (not, in this case, a product of self-victimizing) to his “charms.” This usually means a lot of drunk texts, messages and, now and again, just “happening” to be at the same local haunt as the object of his ephemeral affection. Yet, as is always the case unless the “man” is being financially motivated to stay with his “love” “object,” he will grow restless and weary once the “having” of a woman is achieved. It’s the “having” that is the majority of the thrill. And then, once she’s fully succumbed, let down her guard in every way (even ceding to taking her makeup off at night in a manner that goes against the Mrs. Maisel regimen), he will recoil, proving that his intent to love was never really there, so much as an irrepressible “curiosity” that needed to be explored on his part. The signs of his withdrawal won’t be evident to the woman, in all her naïveté, and so the abandonment will seem like a botched excision as opposed to a gentle, anesthetized one.

It is, of all people, Bob Marley who said, “The biggest coward is a man who awakens a woman’s love with no intention of loving her.” This ganja-smoking, free love-touting (“Rasta men are permitted to have multiple female sex partners, while women are expected to reserve their sexual activity for their one male partner”) emblem of chillness managed to stay married to the same woman, Alpharita Constantia “Rita” Marley, for his entire life–love the same woman his entire life. And she, in turn, popped out eleven children, not all of them Marley’s, but all were essentially treated as his. While sure, it actually sounds like a waking nightmare to be saddled with that as a fate–not to mention impossible to find child care for the evening–at least Marley was a practitioner of his own aphorism. Even if all it took was regular engagement in extramarital affairs–on her part as well. Still, it seems somehow more palatable than a “man” simply up and leaving the woman whose love he’s awakened, never to be heard from again–never to offer an explanation of exactly why and when his alleged former ardor went cold. Of how the intent to love became so easily dispensed with. Like piano lessons taken up in the ambition of youth, only to be allowed to fall by the wayside in favor of something less time-consuming and involved.