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No-nonsense or common-sense? He's just not that into you

When a friend lent me He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys over winter break, I tried not to take it personally. I was already familiar with the famous line from a Sex and the City episode and was curious to see how Greg Behnredt and Liz Tucillo, writers for the show, had elaborated on the idea.

The book, half humor and half self-help, gives refreshing no-nonsense advice about how women should refuse to accept the excuses of the men who find ways to treat them poorly. The heart of the book is that women can be complete, happy people without having to worry about whether a man likes them. But the authors take it a bit too far. Instead of encouraging women to stop waiting by the phone and call men, they should refuse to settle for any less than the men calling first. Tucillo and Behrendt claim not to know of any successful relationship that a woman initiated. He's "on the rebound," he's "busy with work," he "has a lot on his mind right now?" All lies. If he's not willing to make the effort, he's playing games with you, and you should stop playing along.

Any book that claims to solve all your dating problems should be taken with a grain of salt. And perhaps this was the authors' intent. Their trendy, flippant prose seems to take itself seriously enough to make such claims, but not enough to be entirely credible. For example, a sentence that begins with the phrase "sexual harassment rules and workplace memos notwithstanding ?" is inevitably sketchy.

The idea that all men are uniformly incapable of intelligent thought is offensive. The statements about either gender ignore that there may be individual factors at play. Instead of simply encouraging women to ask, "Hey, what's up?" they insist that they have all the answers. This book is for women who need lessons like, "If He's Sleeping With Someone Else, He's Just Not That Into You," and frankly, if anyone in such a situation were in doubt of that, I doubt reading this book would be much help.

If he's just not that into me, that's okay. But if I had really wanted to read a deep discourse on the communication gap between men and women, I would have read Deborah Tannen instead. This book is an itty-bitty Band-Aid for a much bigger problem.

-reviewed by Nora Skelly

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