Don’t be afraid of the femme fatale office beauties snaking around your man. Don’t be afraid of the random blondes discussing the US presidential election with him on the subway. Don’t be afraid of the giggly college girls adding him as a friend on social media.
Throw out of your head the beautiful plots of romantic melodramas. All those ladies with their scarlet lips, shadow-casting veils, and Salma Hayek-like figures in “From Dusk Till Dawn.” Their stern umbrellas, dissolving in the mysterious night fog. Their low, husky voices. Their slender, predatory fingers.
Relax.
In real life, our men are most often stolen by simple, good girls who come to us on Saturdays to drink tea and complain about their bosses. You usually call them friends. Usually, you can’t believe your eyes until the very end.
We’ve described several of the most dangerous female types, who are best kept at a respectable distance. Just don’t take them literally, please.
Unhappy
People befriend these people out of pity at first: they give them tickets to the Sunday exhibition, send encouraging pictures on Skype, share cigarettes, peanuts, and books. With these people, people initially feel needed, like they have interesting conversations, and live a fulfilling life.
She’s been wearing the same sweater for three months, speaks without adjectives, and listens to Edith Piaf while sitting on the windowsill of a rented room two hours away from humanity. She doesn’t have her own cup in the office, her clothes aren’t anything brighter than gray, and at home, they turn on the electric heater before she arrives. There’s nothing memorable at all except her name: you keep wanting to call this girl Tanya or Lena, but for some reason she’s Vasilisa/Tamila/Lilia.
You’ll get used to her, like the colors of your bedroom wallpaper. And you won’t understand how your closest man will mercifully pity and warm her.
Shirt-guy
You don’t watch football, you don’t eat pork, you’re not computer savvy. You fall asleep during Mad Max, ignore high-rise construction worker’s day, and drink mint tea while crumpling a teddy bear stuffed with silicone beads. You’re a real girl, and you appreciate it.
She flat-out calls breasts “boobs,” talks about why she quit smoking weed, and who taught her how to give a blow job in her freshman year. She loves strong alcohol, bad jokes, heavy metal music, Diablo III, freedom, and the Strugatsky brothers. She knows how to joke, wear plaid shirts, and tell the truth. And she’s so different from you that you just couldn’t help but befriend her.
One evening, she’ll show up at your place with her boyfriend, unannounced, right after her cousin’s wedding. In a dress. In heels. With her hair down. Slightly drunk and radiating sex within a five-hundred-meter radius.
They say it takes three seconds for someone to fall out of love with you. It’ll be those damn three seconds.
