Jake - Always Hit on the Wingman

by Cindi Leive, Editor-in-Chief, Glamour

If you want your car fixed, you ask a mechanic.

If you want to learn Russian, you ask, well, a Russian.

And if you want to understand men? For Gods sake, dont ask me . You think just because I edit a major womens magazine I have anything figured out? I spent my dating years walking around in the same confused fog as everyone else. Please: Ask a man .

Men, after all, are the only ones who really know the answers to such perennial relationship questions as:

Why dont they call (unless youve clearly signaled that youre completely uninterested, in which case they text immediately and often)?

Why are there always five of them around just one woman at a party when eighty-two other awesome girls have waxed their legs for just this occasion?

Whats up with Xbox, Ultimate Fighting, ashleymadison.com, the Three Stooges and Tron: Legacy?

Why do they all continue to do that thing with their tongue in your ear even after youre pretty sure youve communicated that it skeeves you out?

And, most important, what makes them fall completely and utterly for a woman, love her, open up to her, commit to her, hold her hair when she has morning sickness, and adore her for ever and ever?

Men know the answers to these questions. But the problem is they dont, or cant, always communicate them to us... and that is why the world needs Jake. Or so the editors of Glamour decided more than five decades ago, when, in February 1956, next to an ad for a $2.98 Clifton Hand-Tooled Bag, they introduced Jake Bellamy, a pseudonymous male writer whose job was to bring a mans point of view into each issue of Glamour. Jake, the editors wrote, was to be imagined as a dashing single guy eating veal piccata in a midtown Manhattan Italian restaurant. (Go with it, this was the fifties.) His job was to explain men to women: not as we want them to be but as they really are. And Jakewho in real life, as youll learn, was a onetime Princeton basketball star, navy pilot and New York Knicks captain named Bud Palmer did explain men, month after month.

For a generation of women raised before guys and girls talked openly about their feelings, Jakes willingness to do so was an instant hit. The mail started stacking up in Glamour s offices. Reader Nancy Lee Evans suggested that Jakes column should be printed on handbills and dropped from airplanes in all the 50 states. Marina Kuchar compared his writing to the poetry of Alexander Pope (truly!). When some were suspicious (Are you really male? wrote reader Leona), Jakes fans jumped in: Regardless of what your more skeptical readers think, you seem to me to be definitely a man... and a nice one, noted N.W. of Michigan in January 1960. Whatever it is that makes your columns so good, please dont stop!

To set the record straight: Yes, Jake really was a man. Not the same man all those years, of course (Palmer handed the mantle to a series of other Jakes over the decades), but always a man. I worked as an editorial assistant at Glamour in the early nineties, and since attractive male writers were so often in and out of the office visiting their editors, guessing games raged among us cubicle dwellers about which one might be Jake. None, it turned out: One of the unspoken rules of Jake was that he almost never entered the offices; to protect his anonymity, his editor was generally required to meet him elsewhere. (The editors assistant, who did the expense reports, confided that Jake liked a diner on 47th Street and, from the look of the receipts, usually got a burger.)

To this day, Glamour requires anonymity from its Jakes, though a handful of the men who have written the column have, with our blessing, gone public after the fact. (Were working on a secret handshake and an initiation ordeal, like reading the collected works of Erica Jong, wrote one, Brian Alexander, in 2001.) There are other rules of being Jake as well:

Jake must be single. He can date, fall in love even, but if he wants to get married? Sorry, Jake. Youre fired. The job is to explain why single men do what they do, and Jake, we figure, should be doing it.

Readers frequently write in asking to date Jake, but this must never, ever happen. (Too complicated, and too meta. Lets save that for Jake: The Movie .)

Jake must like women really like them. The best Jakes, like the one writing this book, have had female friends or sisters theyve truly cared for, and have been driven by a desire to help women get the love lives they so richly deserve.

And yet Jake must always, always tell it like it is. For that, more than anything else, is what we all want from the men in our lives: honesty, and answers, and openness.

Openness, of course, means something very different today than it did in the 1950s. Back then, Jake wrote about how to be an entertaining dinner date. (Dont show up drunk? Duly noted!) Today he covers everything from online dating to oral sex; the current Jake recently started a firestorm with a frank column about why men like porn. And yet over the years, there have been constants in the way men see, interact with and need women. Powerful constants that can help you unlock the secrets to a healthier, happier relationship.

Those constants are at the heart of this book. Youre about to learn Jakes Rules: ten of the most life-changing things women should know about dating and relating to men today. Whether youre single, married or, like so many women, somewhere in between, these truths will help you understand how to get what you really want in love.

But dont take it from me. Take it from Jake.

Lets meet this man.