most of my friends have a major problem talking to women.

i’m not sure if it’s a midwest thing

or a where-we-grew-up thing

or i’m friends with mamma’s boys…

or just totally inexcusable.

but it’s a major major issue.

you see, in chicago, if you’re female (and i use the term loosely) you basically have to ward off men like cicadas.

i don’t care where you’re at…there are three men to every woman and 90% of them are just waiting for you to put down your glass of wine or blink and they’ll take that as their sign to step up and drop their line.*

(note: i suspect this is the main reason my friends won’t approach girls…pure disgust for their competition.)

chicago is a single’s town.

sure, it’s undoubtedly one of the best places to raise a family and certainly the best city in america to be young and married…

but it’s a young, vibrant city, and as such it boasts an extremely strong hoard of young professional and non-professional adults wandering through their jumbled love lives.

my lord…there’s a bar on every corner!

so after a hundred (hundred thousand) conversations about how it could be POSSIBLE that five young, successful, attractive young men who don’t have a harmful or underhanded bone in their body could be SINGLE (god FORBID!), i’ve started to contemplate two things:

a) what is the root cause of my best friends’ inability to open up a conversation with a female stranger?**

and

b) are there women out there running around chicago who feel as sidelined and underwhelmed by their experiences in chicago’s social scene?

*if you’re not sure who i’m talking about, it’s that group of guys who smell like an abercrombie store, just bought a round of redbull vodkas, and left a few buttens at the top of that collared shirt undone just to make it easier for ya.

**i’m not claiming superiority here…in fact as of late i’m not really putting myself out there…but i will claim to have less concern for the guy-to-girl ratios of destinations i may or may not present myself to. i’m concerned about my friends, here!