It all starts with a glance. Then a glance back. If you’re clever enough, you sneak in a sly quip about your surroundings. She laughs, flips her hair, and bats her eyelashes. You think you’ve got it, right? Yes. You’ve managed to get her number–somehow–and an uncreepy reason to call her. A date, maybe? Sure. You call her a week later and she says she’d love to have dinner. You go wearing something nice–not too nice–casual, clean, fly.

At dinner your conversation is controlled. How much of yourself do you reveal? You talk about your life but mostly listen, nod, and agree. Turns out you’re both closet Cat Stevens fans and you both like cottage cheese at strange hours of the night. You’re funny for once. You compliment her smoothly, subtly, and at one point she blushes and glances at you like she’s known you forever.

At the door she gives you the eyes and says she’s never met anyone like you. Silence falls. Molecules collide. You kiss. “Let’s go inside,” you say. But she recoils and suddenly looks at you like a stranger. “Sorry,” she says, turning away. And as you realize your grave error, she has already slammed the door in your face. Game over.

Dating is like a crime. Once you think it’s under control, one of a million things goes wrong. Some are good at it–they escape with the Hope diamond, murder without trace.

I’m not this guy. I’m one of the hapless 99 percent. A chump. A shmuck. A guy standing drunk in a hotel lobby wondering why he said, “Kiss me again, Becca!” A guy who seems to attract mistakes, say the wrong thing, moves too early, too late; uses too many emoticons, counts his chickens, drops the L-bomb a week in, is himself if “himself” means telling his prom date, ”I’m Gatsby, you see, and you’re my Daisy, and the glass between us just won’t break!” And that’s just me.

Admittedly, some of those mistakes are grave beyond explanation. But what about the more subtle stuff?

Human courtship is as old as humans themselves. From the earliest Homo sapien grunt to Billy’s big truck, courtship rituals have been the stream of verbal, non-verbal, and biochemical cues leading up to sex and/or a more enduring relationship. As cultures have progressed, intensified, and diversified, modern courtship may seem to some like an impossible landscape to navigate.

For young Americans, courtship is increasingly mediated by how and what we consume–our fashion styles, music tastes, brands of humor and flirtation; the media personas we emulate (perhaps unknowingly) to exude beauty, virility, mystery, wit, etc; and the personas we arrange through websites like eharmony and Facebook. The fact that courtship has been analogous to ‘advertising’ and ‘marketability’ is also infinitely telling.

But behind the curtain of consumer culture lies a deeper, more biological conflict that makes modern courtship frustrating, complicated, and at times disheartening when misunderstood.

The conflict is simple. Women give birth and men do not. Women have a bigger responsibility and thus a choosier, more complex mate-selection process. Men, on the other hand, are natural philanderers. Biologically, men can mate with as many women as possible, virtually risk free. This conflict of interests, according to Nathan Oesch of the Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology, creates a lot of confusion in the courting process and may be the secret factor in a male’s success or failure.

So dating isn’t really a crime. It’s only a crime for men. While dating, men hilariously devise stratagem to work their way through a woman’s subtle and complex screening process. They must dance their way past a females laser security, which allows few, if any, missteps. So be discreet, gentleman. And ladies, be on the lookout.