Here is the rest of it:
Danish women carry their own packages
Why are Danish men like this? I've asked my Danish male friends, and they say they're reacting to Danish women. Danish women, they say, like to do things for themselves. They don't want some clown opening the door for them, or helping them carry packages. They can carry their own packages. My Danish male friends say that after offering to be chivalrous a couple of times and getting turned down in a nasty manner, they don't want to do that any more.
So, the Danish male approach is largely passive. They wait to see if the woman is interested. I get a lot of mail from non-Danish women trying to figure out if the Danish man they're dating is interested in them. ''He's really happy when I call him, but he never calls me''.
I honestly don't know what to tell them. I mean, I come from a culture where men whistle at beautiful women they don't know walking down the street.
When I first moved to Denmark, I thought I'd stopped hearing whistles because I'd aged out of the whistle target group. But I've since established that beautiful young women don't get whistled at either. Danish men do not want to offend women.
Sometimes err on the soft side
Now, I'm a modern woman, and I like a lot of things about these modern men. But they can occasionally err a bit on the soft side.
For example, a few weeks ago, we had a big storm in Denmark, and it knocked down some large trees. Before the local government came to collect them, some people were sawing off bits for free firewood, or to make furniture, or other arts and crafts project.
On our street, there was a very large tree down, and as I was walking by that Saturday, I saw a young couple trying to take part of it home. The small, slender young woman was sawing away at this big tree with an old-fashioned manual saw, while her boyfriend was just standing there, smiling, with his hands in his pockets.
Now, I don't know what was going on.
Maybe he had a back injury – he was about 25, so maybe had a very youthful back injury. Maybe he was a professional hand model and couldn't risk his fingernails on a messy metal saw. Or maybe he was a big wimp who was willing to let his girlfriend saw a giant tree stump while he stood there, acting like a giant tree stump. Who knows?