How To Get A Guy To Call You

Hulu has a series of videos called “Howcasts” instructing viewers how to, say, “Make Snow Angels” or “Untangle Necklaces.” They’ve just posted a new one called “How to Get Him to Call You,” and it’s as silly as it sounds.

So this video is mostly just unintentionally funny in its obviousness, especially when you imagine the opposite of the advice given, but when I first saw the title, I thought it was going to be about how to get a guy you’ve just met, or have been on one date with, to call you. You know, to make contact with you at all. That would be bad enough. But, no. Sadly, this video offers instruction on how to get the guy you’re already dating to call you. (Refreshingly for this video, it at least assumes he’s already texting, emailing, and IMing you. This is just voice contact we’re learning how to manipulate someone into making!)

So, I’m curious: is this video, with its assumptions that women desperately want their boyfriends to call them more often and even need to be told to lie (“tell him you have a meeting in five minutes”) to get them to do so, as off-base as it seems to me?

Personally, I am not a phone person. And I know I’m not even close to alone: I’ve had many more conversations with friends who are annoyed that their boyfriends call them too much than the opposite. And if I were going to lie to anyone about anything phone-related, it would be more on the level of “I’m going into the subway” when I’m not, just to get off the damn phone (and win knowing smiles from strangers on the street who get to overhear my obvious fib).

Maybe what bothers me the most about this mildly annoying video from the makers of “How to Buy Celebrity Dresses” is the fact that it’s aimed at women. Plenty of women, probably just as many as men, dislike talking on the phone. Consider the video’s “Step Five”: “Many men prefer texting or emailing because they can seem funnier or smarter if they can proofread their thoughts.” While it’s nice that they’re assuming dudes want to seem funnier or smarter for us, it’s absurd that the video has to offer a motive at all. It’s 2010, and male or female, we don’t want to talk on the phone because we’re multi-tasking. Duh.