We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarassingly, A True Story

Social expectations of masculinity are an oblique but important influence on Sundquist’s behavior in dating. Such expectations include: not showing weakness, objectifying women, and pursuing them relentlessly, regardless of the feedback they are giving. While these cookie-cutter macho behaviors do not come naturally to Sundquist, he feels the social expectation to perform them, and experiences a loss of confidence when he falls short.

The macho expectation that a man should not show vulnerability, especially before the women he is courting, stumps Sundquist from the outset. Aided by prosthetic limbs which “come preprogrammed out of the box to malfunction at the worst possible moments in your entire life” (111), Sundquist feels his body looks conspicuously vulnerable and instantly compromises a macho front of impenetrability. For example, just when he thinks he has nailed the creation of a cool alter-ego with the aloof line “we should hang out sometime” (104), his prosthetic leg malfunctions on his date with Francesca, leaving him flat on the floor, with the prosthetic’s foot turned the wrong way. This embarrassing eventuality, so far from what Sundquist has planned, knocks his confidence and nearly makes him give up on the idea of dating Francesca altogether. When Francesca surprises him by expressing the wish to see him again, despite his macho cover having been blown, an astonished Sundquist vows that, from now on, nothing else will go wrong. This leads him to over-perform in the areas where he is confident, such as giving motivational speeches about his own dreams and encouraging Francesca to get her own. It also leads to his failure to act in kissing Francesca, an area which he is uncertain about. His preference to show strength over risking intimacy is conditioned by the social expectation that a man should be strong, and is what eventually causes him to lose Francesca.

While Sundquist draws strength from his athletic and motivational speaking talents, he is aware that his Christian background and resulting sexually cautious nature makes him the opposite of the allegedly desirable “biker dude with prison tattoos and a tendency to break anything that shatters” (126). He is aware that his tendency to be helpful and have long discussions with girls, sometimes about other love interests, makes him the kind of nice guy who only wins “in a race to the Friend Zone” (134). As the rebel heartthrob is so far from his natural personality, Sundquist’s male college friends advise him that he can take control of his love life by staging a “DTR,” a “‘define the relationship’ talk,” where he tells a girl he likes her and asks her to be his girlfriend (223). When his friend Kyle threatens that if Sundquist does not chance a DTR with his crush Lilly, he will put on his steel-toed boots and “kick you as hard as I possibly can in your balls,” it is a literal affront to Sundquist’s masculinity (234). According to some predetermined fraternal code, Sundquist must shake off his timidity and pursue the girl he likes openly. When Lilly rejects Sundquist’s suit and gives him no further encouragement, his stalkerish move to call her every day of the summer vacation also follows the macho rule that a man must relentlessly pursue his desired object, instead of moving on when her behavior indicates that she is not interested. In the end, it is Sundquist who suffers from not giving Lilly up when she rejects him, as his obsession with her squanders his opportunity to have a real college relationship.

The notion of giving up too easily comes up again as Sundquist ponders the results of his investigation. Two of the women he was interested in, Evelyn and Sasha, would have liked him to continue pursuing them, even amongst the obstacles of, in Evelyn’s case, an on-off boyfriend, and in Sasha’s, her uninviting frostiness towards him at the pageant. Here, these women also fall prey to the stereotyped notion that men should be the pursuers in a relationship, even in the face of significant discouragement. While such an idea has been challenged and deemed problematic by the recent MeToo movement, it was prominent at the time of Sundquist’s dating experiences in the 2000s and early 2010s. Sundquist is able to arrive at a version of the hardy suitor who takes obstacles—including competing suitors, and rejections—in his stride when he learns to love and accept himself as he is. With Ashley, he has struck a balance between being the confident man that patriarchal society expects him to be and being “the same person I had been all along, the person I’d always been inside” (245).