Stealing Glances

It’s not as if anyone can claim any ownership of glances so I’m not exactly sure how they can be stolen, but I know that I’m guilty of it quite often. I’m usually a full on glance stealer on the train in the morning as my squinting eyes try to find the most attractive woman rider. It’s a little bit of an evolutionary compulsion to find a suitable mate for the promulgation of my genetic materials (romance!) as well as the old eyes seeking out the things they like, to covet. Perhaps that’s why it’s called stealing; coveting is a sin.

I’m not actually all about the whole “sin” thing. I’m not the most pious or Godly man. I simply can see the logic of a nomadic people cruising around the desert for forty years deciding that watching your neighbor’s half naked wife wash the lambskins in the stream was probably a bad thing. It could only lead to trouble within the tribe and therefore, as a practical measure, they decided that to covet was a sin and there was a punishment for it.

I suppose it’s very much like the laws on the books our society has against Peeping Tom’s or more recently, Stalkers.  I don’t think stealing a quick glance at a pretty woman or a handsome man while riding the train is a God’s wrath worthy sin. Lightening doesn’t rain from the sky to smite the cute girl in the cubicle across the office for mildly checking to see if I have a fourth head.  We don’t drag the coveters out into the street and stone them to death (well, in the United States anyway). Ultimately, we’re not murders for merely checking out a woman’s possible breeding potential based on the size and shape of her ass. (Cough).

The real punishment for stealing glances is getting caught in the act. There’s something slightly humiliating about looking at a woman, her shape, the cut of her chin, trying to see how she might look smiling or laughing, what a fun summer day in the park would be like rolling around in the tall grass by the pond when she catches you looking. That face you imagined being so pretty a moment ago turns into a subtle scowl of sorts and she moves from your field of vision without fully betraying how uncomfortable you might have made her.

I know I try to pretend that I wasn’t actually looking at her but somewhere past her, perhaps right over her shoulder. My eyes take on a fuzzy, glazed look, as if I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t even really notice that she was there. I’m pretty sure the girls never fall for it though. There’s just too many subtle male tells that ruin any attempt at being completely covert. 

There are those rare occasions when the theft of a glance is a mutual experience and both parties look away with muted embarrassment. Some of us actually act on it and say hello, others of us chalk it up to a “what if” moment and go about the rest of our days because we know that while we both looked at each other and imagined life together in the retirement home after a 60 year marriage there was something that told us that our kids would have started a war with Jupiter or something.  So it was best to leave it as a stolen glance and move on.

I do like an actual shared glance though, that leads to a smile, which leads to a conversation, which leads to a date, that leads to a kiss, which leads to a second, third, and eighth date. It turns into a relationship which might lead to marriage and then kids and then jealous looks at other men that are stealing glances at your wife because let’s face it, she’s pretty hot.

I’ll go on stealing glances until I do find that one woman that I can’t take my eyes off of and she can’t stop smiling at me. It makes me feel more like a fine art thief than a glance poacher.

I am a romantic dreamer aren’t I?