Listen To What She's Saying: The Greatest Advice For Single Men: A Nevin Barich Blog Experience

I'm a listener. God put me on this Earth to listen to people. Their stories. Their jokes. Their woes. We all have purposes in life. Listening is apparently one of mine.

Originally, I was going to give a few tips to single men on how to help themselves stand out with the ladies, similar to what I did for women last week. But in writing this, I realized that while there's a lot of tips I can give guys to help them when they're out with women (Lord knows they need all the help they can get), there's one piece of advice that really stands out above the rest. If men don't do the following, any other advice is useless.

Listen to what she's saying.

Most men, when they're out with a woman, make the mistake of thinking that making eye contact with that woman is enough.

It's not.

Here's what men have to realize: Eventually, you will look at her breasts. At some point, you'll look at her butt. You can be the most enlightened heterosexual on Earth, and you'll sneak a peek at some point. It's inevitable.

Now here's another thing men don't know: Women notice every time you look. They catch every time your eyes venture downward. If you think you're being sly, you're not. Their "catching every time he undresses me with his eyes" dar is on 100 percent of the time.

So eye contact alone isn't enough. If all you got is eye contact, then every time you sneak a peek, all the woman will be thinking is that you're just pretending to make eye contact so that you can get in her pants.

And you brilliant "eye contact" plan will have failed.

What went wrong?

You didn't listen.

You didn't listen to what she was saying. You didn't respond to what she was telling you. It's not enough just to keep your eyes above her chest. You have to actually hear what she's telling you and respond in kind.

It amazes me how many men don't get this. It's not complicated. A woman just wants some acknowledgment that you're actually processing some of what she's telling you. How hard is it to understand that saying things like "Uh-huh", "Yeah", "Right", and "Totally" does not constitute listening?

All a guy has to do is say something in relation to what the woman is telling him. Regardless of the subject, all a man has to do to show he's listening is one of two things:

1) Add a comment about the subject in question. Don't worry about her agreeing or disagreeing. As long as it's related to the topic, you can say "REPUBLICANS RULE!!" to the topic of "Why Democrats Should Inherit The Earth" and you will be much farther ahead than the guy who just said "Yep".

And if you have no idea what to say to the woman, you can 2) Ask questions. Asking questions are a man's greatest safety net in relation to the opposite sex. The woman could be speaking sanskrit to you and if you just ask "How long did it take you to learn" or "Sanskrit. Why?", you will automatically stand out as "The guy who actually engaged me in conversation."

Believe me: That's gold, fellas. Because if you become the guy that the woman can talk to, you can sneak peeks at her body all night long.

Boys, heed the following wisdom: She's expecting you to look. She wouldn't be dressing up if she didn't want you to look. Honestly, if you don't look, she'll wonder if you're gay (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, but in this case, it's probably not the image you want).

If all you do is look, you're a pig.

If you look and listen, you're intriguing.

If you listen and don't look...

.....

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

And now for this week's:

SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE

Our national debt is so high that the national debt clock in New York ran out of digits to record the number.

As a result, the sign will be updated to record a deficit of up to a quadrillion dollars.

Cheerful, cheerful news.