It’s a pretty common belief that men wearing wedding rings are extremely attractive to single women. If a guy has a ring it means he can make a commitment, and some women like this so much that they will flirt shamelessly with him (which seems ludicrously illogical to me). But illogical as it is, part of me understands. I worked at Barnes & Noble for years and regularly tidied up the always disheveled shelves of self-help books bearing titles like Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others, How to Attract and Marry the Man of Your Dreams, and (my personal favorite) How To Get Your Man to the Alter in 1 Year.

At no point during all my years of straightening and shelving did I see a single book of this type written for straight men. This being the case, can anyone explain to me why it is that ever since I got married, random guys have been crawling out of the woodwork to ask me out to lunch, or for my phone number, or (I swear this is true) for my home address? Seriously, over the past two months I have had more guys hitting on me than I did during my almost 27 years of being single. Though to be honest, this isn’t saying as much as you might think. Previous to getting married, I could count on one hand the number of times anybody obviously hit on me. On two hands I could count the number of times I noticed being noticed. For years I wondered why all of my friends got ten times the amount of attention I received when we all went out on the town (for goodness sake, I’m not bad looking!), but after awhile I stopped caring. Unfortunately, this total lack of experience has left me completely unprepared for this sudden barrage of attention. Every time some guy walks up to me in a store, or on the street, I start out by thinking he’s trying to sell me something so I’ll put on my “busy and unreceptive face”, but in these cases that never works. Thirty seconds into the conversations, I’ll start to get suspicious and try to move my hand to a more noticeable position. Once he gets to the part of asking me out to lunch, or if I’d like to go jogging with him on weekend mornings, I’m blushing stupidly, and frantically trying to craft a sentence with the phrase “my husband” casually thrown in that I hope will end the conversation quickly and seamlessly. It almost always does.

What I don’t get is why these guys aren’t looking for my wedding ring BEFORE they decide to ask for my number? Furthermore, what is it about married Lela that is suddenly sparking such interest in the men of San Francisco when previously I was barely worth a first glance? Lastly, how on earth do other girls deal with this all the time?

All those years I felt sort of bad about the total lack of interest I inspired! Now I realize what I should have been feeling was gratitude!