Jana Hocking on a simple way to get what you want from a man

It certainly isn’t a subtle approach but this trick will ensure that women aren’t left disappointed by their man, writes Jana Hocking.

When I was growing up Dolly magazine was the bible. It taught me how to apply makeup properly, showed me boys without their shirts on (swoon, hello Dieter Brummer) and more often than not had a sealed section that gave me a proper education on what was happening to my body during those hormonal years.

One of the most popular columns in the Magazine was ‘Dolly Doctor’ where girls would write in with wild questions about sex, puberty, hormones, and everything we were too embarrassed to ask our friends.

We would race home from the newsagent, close our bedroom door and dive straight into the pages of the mag looking for answers to all the questions on our hyper hormone brains.

One thing I discovered fairly quickly growing up with two brothers, is that they TOO enjoyed reading Dolly Doctor!

I would catch them in my room reading it with a horrified look on their face, other boys at school would bring in their sisters’ magazines and all huddle around it in the playground snickering at the ridiculous questions and answers.

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Jana Hocking was a fan of Dolly Doctor as a kid.

It suddenly became obvious – men are just as clueless about us as we are of them!

Just as we find men to be a confusing bunch, especially when they take half a day to respond to a text, leave their whiskers in the sink or punch walls when they are angry, they are equally perplexed by us.

Which seems crazy considering a recent study found that women use an average of 20,000 words a day, compared to the mere 7,000 that men utter.

It turns out, however, that we just aren’t using the right ones.

I’m currently living next door to three guys in their mid-20s who often sit out on their balcony on a Sunday morning chatting about the wild antics they got up to the night before. Now, I’m not eavesdropping on purpose, but my backdoor just happens to be underneath their veranda and, well, a girl likes some nice fresh air of a morning soooo let’s just say, I too, am across their wild antics. (Especially the one whose bed must be on the wall next to mine. Good lord that boy has stamina! Bravo neighbour. Anyway, I digress … )

Each Sunday morning in the midst of a hangover, they really unpack what’s going on in their lives. It’s mostly about chicks. I really love it when one of them reads out a text message he has received from a girl and they all try and figure out what it means.

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Jana accidentally hears her neighbours every Sunday morning.

OK so two things here … 1. They always get it wrong. 2. Who knew they try and decipher messages like we do. One of them is getting major ‘hot and cold’ vibes from a girl and it’s really driving him nuts.

It made me realise something. We women really need to spell it out for men because they are hopeless at working it out. Want them to ask you out? Tell them! Want a cute gift for your birthday? Tell them! Want them to start pulling their weight around the house? Yep … you know what’s coming next … TELL THEM!

All this “oh just buy me something special for my birthday” business is never going to end well. Neither is the silent treatment (as much as we like to do it just to play with their heads, yep guilty!).

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Tell a man what you want, he isn’t psychic.

Maybe we need to start addressing men like they address us … blunt and straight to the point. Because, according to the many DMs that slide into my Insta account from blokes with a variety of questions about women, I now understand that men are eager to please us, they just don’t know how – and we refuse to tell them! Well, at least not in any detail.

For example, sure, guys are visual creatures in the sense that they can always notice a perky butt or boobs, but according to psychologist Dr Jay Carter, men actually have fewer rods in their eyes than women, which means they miss the smaller details that we women may be focusing on.

So they might know you want an engagement ring, but unless you literally draw a big red circle around the specific diamond cut and shape that you want, you’re going to end up with whatever one they jolly well think looks good.

So ladies, it’s time to get a little more specific. Instead of saying, “honey, I would love it if you were a little more romantic” (because his idea of romance might be picking you up a pizza on the way home from work) try and give him action points like “honey, I would love if you held my hand in public or put your arm around me in social situations”.

It’s all in the details! Dolly Doctor would be so proud.

Jana Hocking is a podcaster and collector of kind-of-boyfriends | @jana_hocking | Jana (with a J)