Women, beware these women

When Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider read this review, they’ll exchange a pitying smile and quietly start waiting for my distress call. For woe betide any woman who thinks she can live without the Rules: they are hard and fast and apparently foolproof: ‘You can truly do the Rules on any guy, in any situation, and get the fabulous payoff: a guy who is crazy about you!’ Time and again, women have thought they could ignore just one of the Rules, only to find themselves paying $300 for an emergency consultation with Fein and Schneider.

When their first book of Rules came out in the 1990s, it was a surprise bestseller. It has spawned a relationship consultancy and a clutch of spin-off books. Fein and Scheider have now updated it to include guidance for Facebook, text-messaging, online-chat applications and internet dating. The premise is that men are hunters; if you pursue one, he will lose interest. A woman should not speak to a man unless she’s spoken to, she should rarely return his calls and never offer to split the bill. If she’s wondering whether to answer a text-message, she should refer to the ‘Text-Back Times’ chart on page 53 (four hours is the minimum response time).

The Rules (and its updated version) hovers insidiously between reasonable advice and manipulative nonsense. There is some truth in the idea that men and women tend to play different roles when it comes to courtship, and that women can be strategic. It is better not to be overweight, not to be a weird internet stalker or to bombard people with inane chit-chat. Fein and Schneider don’t stop there, though; they stipulate that every reader be a Creature Unlike Any Other and solemnly add that all ‘CUAOs’ should wear their hair long and straight.