"It's a date."
"See you at eight then."
It's as easy as that. You're all set. You're going out to have fun, see a show or drop in to dance somewhere. Only sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Sometimes the phone doesn't ring, sometimes the boys don't stop by your house on the way home after school, sometimes the girls don't tell you about a slumber party they're planning. Sometimes nothing happens, and those sometimes are the worst times any girl can have.
Such times occur even in the lives of the best of us, times when the social whirl slows to a standstill and life becomes a dreary round of music lessons and movies with the family. However, don't let these bad times get you down. If your steady beau, Johnny, has not called you in a week; if your best friend, Sally, suddenly starts walking home with another girl; if the prom is only two weeks away and you still haven't been bid, don't fold up.
Look the facts square in the face. Maybe this social slump has come about because of your own behavior. Maybe you've been too sure of yourself lately. Maybe you told Johnny that he was getting to be a bore; maybe you told a secret about Sally you swore you would never tell; maybe you acted as if going to the prom was the very last thing you ever wanted to
On the other hand, perhaps this dismal droop in your social life isn't your fault at all. All of a sudden, Johnny just decides to be indifferent, Sally is working off a peeve, and the prom is just one of those horrors that happen. If that is the case and you are as innocent as a newborn babe, it still does no good to sulk. Sulking never helped anyone.
No matter why the phone has stopped ringing, you are not going to improve matters by sitting up nights devising devilish tortures for every person you consider has done you wrong. You will only get dark circles under your eyes and a nasty disposition to boot. You will only make the situation worse if you take a negative attitude, if you shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, after all, who cares?"
Basically somebody does care. You care. You care, because like everyone else on this planet you want to be liked, you want to be popular, you want to be a girl who gets around. You want to have a crowd to pal around with, a few exciting dates and at least one boy who thinks you are about the most terrific female ever. If you say that you don't, you are really only fooling yourself. You are certainly not fooling others.
If you say, "I don't care," and start putting that philosophy into practice, you will find that you start retreating from life. You will withdraw into a shell until people will have a hard time deciding whether you are truly you or just an oyster. Now oysters, no doubt, have a way of communicating with other oysters in spite of their forbidding exteriors, but human beings are differently constructed. Human beings only talk to people who are willing to talk with them in return. They will only warm up to people who show that they have warmth to respond. If you want to be a human being, and a popular human being, then you have to stop being an oyster and come out of your shell.
So when things go badly, you must decide not to retreat; you must attack. But you attack in a special way, not by going out and slugging the first person who comes along, not by getting into an argument with your mother (who, after all, has had nothing to do with your troubles); you attack by working out your displeasure in a determined effort to make yourself so doggoned attractive that Johnny will come racing back, Sally will call you up for a Coke and a confession and the phone will start ringing again like mad.
First of all, let me say that every girl can be attractive. "Oh," you say, "it's easy enough for you to talk, you're a model." Of course, you are right. I am a model. As I pointed out before, I was not born a model. I had to make the best of what I had, just as you are doing. I had to experiment. I had to discover what was most becoming to me, to find out what weight was suitable for my figure, to find out which way my hair looked the most flattering, to slick up my makeup and to improve my posture. Things were not always smooth sailing. I had my ups and my downs. There were times when my skirts fitted me like panty girdles. There were times when my face was splotchy as an ink blotter. And there were times when my hair straggled all over my head.
But I learned how to put my best face and figure forward. I found out that being attractive was not so hard, and therefore I decided, as I explained to you in the beginning of this book, that because making the best of oneself was so easy I would share my knowledge with you. Now, before I have my final say, I want to stress one thing. Being pretty and attractive does help you to be popular, but being pretty and attractive does not and never can guarantee that you will be popular. There is another factor, a very important factor, and that is personality. Personality is that indescribable something that sets you off as a person. It is hard to explain but easy to recognize. You yourself know what it is when you say, "Gee, that Jane Smith, she sure has personality." Or, "She's sure got it." What you are saying is that Jane sparkles, she's alive, she's way out of her shell, in fact, there's no shell there at all.
Jane is the kind of person people like to talk to, boys as well as girls. She warms up to everybody and she is interested in whatever they have to say. She will discuss with equal enthusiasm last night's date or tomorrow's homework. But, at the same time, Jane will never pry into your personal affairs. She will not question you about this or that unless you ask her opinion. Jane is careful about what she says because she has learned that nasty words have a way of coming back like boomerangs. She may not like the smart aleck in math class (the one who always knows all the answers) any better than you do, but she keeps quiet about it. There may be a time, she knows, when that very smart aleck might be the only boy in the stag line.
Another aspect of Jane's personality is her desire to avoid bigotry. She is tolerant—she has respect for other people's beliefs, and she does not make fun of anyone who holds different opinions from hers. She keeps an open mind about complex questions of religion, politics, and such matters. She has her own feelings about these things, but she does not try to force them on others, nor does she think that those who differ are stupid. Because she is open-minded, she would try never to blackball anyone.
Blackball is a nasty word. When you say it it even tastes bad on the tongue. So it's a pity then that too many of us think that it's the thing to do. Without so much as a thought, one girl will rule another out of her club because she doesn't like the way she wears her hair or because she speaks with an accent. Jane, on the other hand, never bases her opinions on a girl's mannerisms or her family's car. Jane decides on the basis of fairness. Jane judges a girl on the girl's own merits.
But Jane is no goody-goody. She is just a popular girl. She acts in a friendly way, therefore she has friends. Naturally some of her friends are closer than others, and with these friends she feels more at ease. But she does not tie herself down to the narrow circle of her really close friends; she is a big enough person to know how to be pleasant to everybody, to say, "Hi," smile and go on.
One of the most important aspects of Jane's personality—the most important, in fact—is that her personality is all hers. It is not borrowed from a movie star, from a local college queen or from her mother. Jane is all Jane. Her personality is her own.
And just as Jane's personality is all her own, so is her appearance. She does not try to pattern her looks after someone else, no matter how beautiful the other person may be. Jane looks like herself. She has individuality.