“Teams” are groups of people who cooperate with one another to present a collective “front” during their performances. A successful performance depends on all members of any particular team to cooperate with one another in order to present a untied “front.” Think of how actors cooperate during a theatrical scene. They all have a collective interest in following the agreed-upon script so that the performance goes off without a hitch.
This same logic applies to everyday social interaction. Often times we are required to depend on those around us to enact a successful performance. When this happens, we refer to this as “team play.” You’ve probably heard the sayings, “Bros before hoes,” or “Chicks before dicks.” These are some examples of gendered team play.
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A Cute Woman Flirts with My Loyalty to My Friend Randy.
During my undergraduate college days, I hung out with few close friends. Since I lived in a very small single dorm room, I would go to their spacious house on a regular basis. These friends lived together in a huge house and seemed to always be entertaining a variety of our fellow students. Many of these fellow students happened to be female. And of those many female visitors, some of them were really attractive.
These frequent visitors rarely came to chill on the couch. Rather, the reason my friends’ house became so popular was because they always seemed to be engaged in some rather fun and exciting activities. That’s the exact reason I enjoyed hanging out there myself.
One warm afternoon, a spontaneous water fight broke out. The “sides” quickly formed themselves into a game of males versus the females. Obviously I sided with my male friends. And we performed well; after all, back then, we were young and agile. So our male team was able to dominate the water fight rather easily.
During the water fight, I was patrolling around the back of the house with a full bucket of water; on guard for any female who might ambush me at any second. As I turned a corner near the back door to the house, I ran into one of the better-looking females. She and I quickly found ourselves in a standoff. This meant that we both had our water buckets in a position to douse one another.
But something happened between us that almost caught me off guard. As we were both standing there ready to drench one another, our eyes met as we both had to quickly figure out what each of our next moves would be.
However, once our eyes met, and without saying any actual words, this very attractive woman gestured to me that we should avoid soaking each other. Her demeanor alone told me that she wanted both of us to let down our guard while we quickly negotiated a temporary truce. Her body language, and her body language alone conveyed all of that information.
So I complied with her wishes as I waited to see where this temporary truce was headed. Did she want to just walk away from each other? Did she want me to switch over to her team? Was her plan to get me let down my guard so that she could drench me while I stood there passively waiting for her to dictate the terms of our brief ceasefire?
Then, as a flirty facial expression crept across this woman’s face, her voice took over and she “suggested” that we should join forces and throw our buckets of water on my friend Randy. She went on to explain that we could successfully execute such a devious plan if we worked together. All the while, her level of nuanced flirting increased as she measured what my response would be to her suggested plan.
At that very instant, I got pissed, and quickly emptied my bucket of water directly on her; center mass. I couldn’t believe that she wanted me to betray my best friend. Plus, she tried to persuade me to comply with her devious gambit because of her feminine beauty and her flirtatious actions. All I could think was that only twenty minutes before that encounter, we had been complete strangers. I had no idea who this attractive woman was, and I didn’t feel like her “offer” was fair. She had failed to ask me what I wanted out of any such deal.
I felt as though somewhere in her past, this attractive woman had used her good-looks to get her way with males. I didn’t possess such good-looks myself. In fact, I was a huge dork. Therefore, I wasn’t about to cooperate with such a ploy that depended on such manipulation.
At that instant, I had absolutely no interest in going along with this woman’s request. Thus, her good-looks didn’t have the desired effects on me that perhaps it did on other average-looking men. What this woman didn’t know was that I was in a relationship with one of the best-looking women on campus. For that reason, I had absolutely nothing to gain by cooperating with her scheme. It’s not as though she was going to start dating me if I suddenly buddied-up with her. So, ultimately, I decided to maintain my loyalty to my male friends. In fact, I rejoined the water fight with even more determination to soak as many women from the female team as possible.
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My Rich Friends Swap Cars to Confuse any Potential Snitches
During graduate school, I had a wealthy Costa Rican roommate. He and I enjoyed sitting around our room drinking some beers while talking about the cultural differences in the dating patterns of our respective countries. It was particularly interesting to learn about some of the dating rituals in his country. Because of these long discussions, I learned that when it comes to dating, some things never change, while other things change completely.
What stood out and intrigued me most about the dating rituals in Costa Rica were the lengths some of the wealthy college-aged males would go through to cooperate with one another during their weekend dates. Here in America, I knew about how male good friends often employed a “wingman” in their quest to impress and date women. But as I soon learned, this wealthy Costa Rican and his friends took the concept of the “wingman” to a whole other level.
My wealthy Costa Rican roommate told me how he and his male friends had concocted a way to get away with dating several different women at a time. The way they did this was to first meet women they were interested in taking out on a date. During the week, these guys would look for possible women to date during the upcoming weekend. Then, on Friday afternoon before they went their separate ways to actually meet their prospective dates, these guys would swap cars with each other.
As my roommate had gotten this far into his lesson on Costa Rican dating patterns, I wasn’t sure what the reasoning was behind the idea of the guys swapping cars. So I listened intently as he explained the logic behind pulling such a move. After all, I was an American and enjoyed driving my own car. I wouldn’t necessarily want to swap cars every weekend just to go out on dates. However, as my roommate continued telling me about his and his friends’ dating strategies, the reason for this dating ritual soon made perfect sense.
As it turned out, he and his friends would swap cars at the beginning of the night so that no onlookers would be able to tell which guy was actually at any given woman’s house at any given time. These friends had also installed a dark tint on their car windows so that it would be impossible to see which of the guys was actually driving the car at any given time. Sometimes the friends would agree to meet at a predetermined location during the night to again swap cars. My roommate said that this swapping maneuver may have taken place several times over the course of the night.
The idea was that the women they became involved with would never be able to completely figure out which guy was at any woman’s residence based solely on what car was parked outside. I could see how such male team play served its purpose. He claimed that none of the guys were ever called out by their dates for pulling such a stunt. In fact, he said that this dating tactic had been handed down from their dads, who had learned how to work it from their own fathers.
Despite the fact that such a tactic seemed somewhat complicated just to simultaneously date several women, it did sound as though it served its purpose. I had never heard of, nor had I ever witnessed American men engaging in this type of devious behavior. But that didn’t mean that it had never been tried on American soil. After all, American “wingmen” have been known to go to some dramatic lengths to have their buddies’ backs.
