Relationship Advice: Locker Room Talk, What he tells his friends

As sage philosopher Andrew “Dice” Clay once mused: Get a group of women together and you’ll find they’re a LOT dirtier than guys are. Women tell each other everything and do so in excruciating detail. On the flip side, they have this crazy idea that men are also dishing the dirt to their guy friends about their relationships and sex lives. For the ladies, it’s happening over Cosmos; the guys, in the locker room.
 
That would be great, if it were true.

For one, men do very little conversing in the locker room because that would require looking at other guys. That’s just not something guys want to do when they are half-naked. Not that men don’t talk. They just do it in other places, such as the Frisbee golf course, on their surfboards or while drinking at a sports bar.

And it’s not that guys don’t discuss their relationships, particularly their sex lives. They just don’t say as much as women. Hard to believe? Tell me, when was the last time you saw a woman walk into a room only to have a bunch of men giggling? Probably never, but it happens to men in relationships all the time.

It may seem strange that a gender whose members have no problems burping or scratching their crotches in public have a code of ethics. But we do, at least when it comes to “locker room talk.” Here are the rules:

If you care about the woman, you don’t bring her up to the guys—EVER.
That’s because every conversation that a man has with another man is based on this concept: How much ammo am I giving my pals to use against me later? When a guy has a meaningful conversation with another male friend, he finds everything he’s said, positive or negative, gets thrown back in his face if the relationship ends badly. Smart guys learn from this experience.

“Back in college, I met this one girl and had one of those awesome first dates. You know, the kind where you feel you and the woman don’t have to say anything, you just both get each other,” says Hugh Billingsley, a San Diego-based software engineer. “I made the mistake of telling my college roommate, ‘I really feel like she could be the one.’ Problem is, by the third date, all the romance was gone and she basically dumped me. After that, anytime I even mentioned a new woman, my roommate would cackle in a high-pitched voice, ‘I really feel like she could be the one! I really feel like she could be the one,’ like some pirate’s annoying parrot.”