advice

Ask Eight-Ball Willis

Eight-Ball Willis is currently serving three concurrent life sentences. Although the state has deemed him a difficult man with authority issues, this publication has discovered a different side. Eight-Ball is well known for giving some of the best advice on cellblock D. He will give it to you straight and he will give it to you tough.

Got a question? Ask Eight-Ball. He is not going anywhere.

Dear Eight-Ball Willis,

I have a simple question for you. I was wondering: what do you think a man really looks for in a woman?

— Curious Carol

Dear Curious Carol,

As the old saying goes, different strokes for different folks. Every man has his own personal style when it comes to finding somebody. Some look for beauty. Others value intelligence. Some look for a bit of both and tell themselves they are being reasonable.

But you did not ask me what men say they look for, Carol. You asked me what they really look for, and after a good deal of time to think about it I will tell you what I have concluded, which is that most men are looking for somebody who makes them feel less like they are getting away with something.

That is it. That is the whole of it. A man who feels like a fraud at work and a fraud at home and a fraud in the car on the way between them is looking for one person in the world in front of whom he does not have to do the routine. Beauty will not do that. Intelligence will not do it either, though it will keep you entertained while you find out.

The trouble is that almost nobody can tell you this about themselves, because saying it out loud is the exact thing they are trying to avoid.

So here is the practical part. Stop trying to work out what he is looking for. Watch instead for the moment he stops performing — the first time he tells you something that does not make him look good, and does not dress it up, and does not check your face afterwards to see how it landed. That moment is the entire answer to your question, and if it never arrives, you have your answer to that as well.

Take your time. I have got plenty.

Eight-Ball

Dear Eight-Ball Willis,

There is a reunion coming up. I have not seen these people in twenty years. Half of me wants to go and the other half would rather do almost anything else. What do I do?

— Restless Raymond

Dear Restless Raymond,

You want to go. You would not have written to a stranger about it otherwise. Nobody writes a letter about a thing they do not want.

What you actually want is a guarantee, and I do not have one of those. So let me take the two things you are afraid of in turn.

The first is that you will walk in and discover that everybody else got further than you did. Raymond, some of them did. Not as many as you think, and not the ones you are expecting, and every single one of them is standing in that room doing the same arithmetic about somebody else. Twenty years is long enough that the scoreboard everybody was using at eighteen has been thrown out. Nobody in that room is going to ask you what you do for more than ninety seconds.

The second thing you are afraid of is worse and you have not said it, so I will. You are afraid that you will walk in and feel nothing. That the people who mattered most to you once will turn out to be strangers with familiar faces, and that this will retroactively make the years you spent with them smaller than they have been in your head.

That one I can help with. It does not work like that. What happened, happened. It was real at the time and nothing that occurs in a function room in the next three hours can go back and take it off you.

Go. Stay two hours. Leave before you want to.

Eight-Ball

Dear Eight-Ball Willis,

My brother does not call me back. Not once in two years. I do not know what I did.

— Doubtful Denise

Dear Doubtful Denise,

Start from this: it is very likely that you did nothing, and that he could not tell you what you did either, because there is no what.

People do not usually stop calling because of an event. They stop because a gap opens up — a month, a bad patch, something they meant to say and did not — and after a while the gap itself becomes the reason. Every week that passes makes the call harder, because now the call has to account for all the weeks. That is a mechanical problem, not a moral one, and it grows on its own without anybody feeding it.

Here is what I would do. Do not call to ask what is wrong. That is the one call he absolutely cannot pick up, because it requires him to have an answer and he does not have one.

Instead, send him something that requires nothing. Not a question. Not a summary of the last two years. Something small and specific and from before — a thing that happened, one line about it, no ask. Then do it again in a month. Then again.

You are not trying to open a conversation, Denise. You are trying to make the gap smaller than it currently is, one inch at a time, until picking up the telephone is a normal-sized thing to do again.

It may take a year. I have got a bit of a head start on you where waiting is concerned, and I will tell you that a year is not what it looks like from the front of it.

Eight-Ball

Dear Eight-Ball Willis,

I am thirty-four and I am bored. Nothing is wrong. That is somehow the problem.

— Stalled Stanley

Dear Stalled Stanley,

Nothing being wrong is a harder position than something being wrong, and anybody who tells you different has not had it. When something is wrong you know what to do next. When nothing is wrong you are simply required to keep going, indefinitely, without a reason being supplied.

I am not going to tell you to take up a hobby. You have thought of that.

What I will tell you is that boredom at thirty-four is almost always a shortage of consequence rather than a shortage of activity. Nothing you do this week will make any measurable difference to anything, and you know it, and that is corrosive in a way that hard work never is. So the fix is not more things to do. The fix is one thing where it matters whether you show up.

Find something with a person on the other end of it who will notice if you do not turn up. That is the whole prescription. It does not need to be big and it does not need to be interesting. It needs somebody who is counting on you, because being counted on is the thing you are actually short of.

Do that for six months and write to me again. Although as you may have gathered, the address is a difficult one.

Eight-Ball

Editors' note