How to Pick Up Girls in Portland VIII

Beware the Friend Circle: Nowadays, especially in Portland with all its transplantation, the friend circle has supplanted the family circle in terms of approval. When the object of your affection is from Kansas, it’s pretty unlikely that you will have to go through that dating gauntlet referred to as meeting the parents. Not until it’s pretty serious. However, that doesn’t mean you should not be equally wary of meeting her friends. They are probably nice people. Probably nice people just like her, who will laugh at your jokes and maybe buy you a beer and start taking you aside throughout the night and commend you because she just thinks you are so great, etc. etc. etc. OR they will tell you awe-inspiring stories about her ex-boyfriend, ask you awkward questions about your line of work, roll their eyes at your ill-timed quip about Kyron (it’s just too soon), and you will end up banished from the friend circle and from her love, left only with your shame, a hefty bar tab, and a hangover. I’m not saying you shouldn’t get to know her friends. It’s a crucial part of the process. I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with avoiding it for a while.

Keep your Pretention Level at Medium: As a borderline book snob, I am not going to try to pretend that I don’t judge people based on what they read. If your favorite author is Dan Brown closely followed by Elizabeth Gilbert (you know, Eat, Pray, Love), I will smile politely, purse my lips, and never talk to you again. A liberal arts college-refined literary background means you can bond with any number of girls in Portland who know how to read. This is great. However, THERE ARE LIMITS. You can’t sit at your place of work wanly checking identification cards with your books stacked up in front of you like you just might blow through the second half of Ulysses during your shift, in which case you will follow it up with Anna Karenina.

Be a Man: While I know there’s this whole nationwide stereotype about the Portland bearded dudes running around being overtly manly with their neck tattoos and lack of hygiene and childlike fascination of the outdoors, I’m wondering where they are. As are a lot of other women in this town. We like manly guys. I think we all had that phase when we liked pretty boys with nice hair and slim-cut t-shirts but like a late-blooming puberty, we’ve discovered that we actually like men. Men. We want to know that you can use an axe, build a birdhouse, kick in a door, win a fight, pitch a tent (literally, not figuratively, but I guess that’s important too) and other manly things like reading maps correctly and knowing how to fix the sink when it won’t stop dripping. We are still feminists and all that, so it’s not like we’re reverting to a desire for homemaking, it’s just enough with the pale iphone-obsessed type that tells stories about his cat and has never gone camping.