As if I'm supposed to have an answer, the women in my life ask me that question whenever they're having trouble with their men, most often with some industrial-strength language thrown in to clarify the gravity of the situation. After decades of reading psychology and management books, surviving in female dominated workplaces, and watching male co-workers and male friends interact under stress, I've developed an understanding of how men and women think, and act, and why they drive each other crazy. We don't wake up in the morning trying to think of ways to drive each other crazy. Much like the rest of the animals on the planet, men and women just go through our days reacting instinctively to our daily stresses, but we're working with different instincts. And we drive each other crazy.
My comprehension of the meaning of life, and the path to matrimonial happiness, started to jell one day when someone joked that men snore at night to scare away the wild animals and thereby protect their women. It set me off on a long journey of thought and discovery and Aha! experiences. The night-time snore really is a man's roar. I'll get to the inbetween stuff in a minute, but my latest discovery is that older people sleep less during the night (a fact apparently) because they are the sentinels for the village/campsite. The young warriors and females guardians of the homestead need to rejuvinate their strength and energy to survive the next day. They need the deep sleep. The older people, not facing battles or childrearing, can afford to be sleepy the next day. They have troubled sleep. By collectively being awake, more or less in shifts for all of the night, they protect the village from the approaching threats that aren't scared off by the young mens' snores. So what does that have to do with Lucy and Ricky down in Shipping? Everything that all mammals, including humans, do instinctively is behaviour that kept our ancient ancestors alive. By surviving, they passed it on in what is now our DNA. Our ancient ancestors were cave dwellers; hunters and gatherers living in a hostile world. The man and woman in each family unit had roles to play back then. The man went out and killed things in order to bring home food and keep the children alive. The woman stayed at the "home" and was the guardian of the family's space in the encampment they shared with the other cave families. Women and men deal with conflict and anger differently today because of it. A woman will talk about another woman behind her back, and convince other women that she's a bitch, then she'll go off to lunch with that same woman, just as if she's her best chum! It's all part of protecting her firepit. Men, on the other hand, need to know who their enemies are. If we're out on a hunt, I need to know whether or not I can depend on you to watch my back, and if you're going to co-operate with me. When a man has a conflict with another man, he makes it known to the other man, not to everyone else. The couples that played those roles the best to protect their space and children passed their bahavioural traits on in their genes. The ones who did it poorly died off.
The woman and man in the caveman family unit formed a united front against all of the threats to them. The women who constantly criticized their men, in addition to driving their man crazy, probably kept them alive by making them think twice about the things they were going to do outside of the cave. The men who didn't have nagging wives to double-think their plans wandered off and died because their spear wasn't sharp enough or their loincloth was too long and they tripped over it running away from a wayward sloth. Men today see the constant criticism as an attack on their egos, and a threat to their existense. Like George W said, if you're not with us, your against us. What men don't realize is that the more a woman likes you, the more often she will tell you you're wrong. About anything. It doesn't even have to make sense! She's just does not feel fulfilled unless she's telling a man that he is doing something wrong. Here's a twist on an old philosophical question: If a man is alone on an island and he has a thought, is he still wrong even if there's no woman there to tell him he's wrong? The women that I know, when I ask them that, say YES! I won't tell you what the men say.
Real men might or might not eat quiche, but they sure as hell don't think farther than the end of the conversation. Men are focussed on the here and now; solving the problems, keeping the wolf away from the door and the water out of the basement. When a man says "It's a nice day to go fishing," he really means 'It's a nice day to go fishing.' When a woman says "It's a nice day to go fishing," she really means: 'Don't think you're going fishing mister, because you're not. And don't think I've forgotten what you said about my mother that time we went fishing 2 years ago!' Everything in a conversation has a history for a woman, or is part of some intricate spiderweb plan for a future conversation. For a guy, he's either trying to get you into bed, or out of bed and out the door, as quickly as possible. At the end of a date, if a guy wants to go out again he'll say "I want to go out again." Me Tarzan. You Jane. If he doesn't want to go out again, he won't say "I don't want to go out again" because he knows from past experience that a woman will turn that into a two hour discussion about how it makes her feel, and he really just wants to go watch the Leafs game which will be over by the end of all that. If he's evasive at the end of a date, don't sit around for the next 2 weeks waiting for the phone to ring. It won't. If he wanted you, he'd be panting at your door like a thristy dog. Get on with your life girlfriend! Men don't tell you what they're thinking because they aren't, or if they are, you don't want to know.
At one of my Real Estate seminars, the leader put up a slide that said the average man speaks 2000 words per day, while the average women speaks 6000 words per day. As she looked at our responses, she said all of the men were nodding, and all of the women were looking at each other with puzzlement. Men don't need verbal skills in order to hunt and gather. In fact, if a man was a chatty cathy, the other men on the hunt probably would have clubbed him to death for constantly scaring away the prey. (If you're a woman, and you've gone fishing with the boys, you might now understand why the guys kept telling you to 'shut the XXXX up!') Women, on the other hand, need verbal skills to maintain the social order and protect their turf from the other families around them. Women, through chatting about their kids' diarrhea and buddha knows what else, create allegiances with the non-threatening women around the other campfires in the cave. It's a way of ganging up on the ones who ARE a threat. Have you noticed that when a woman has a squabble with a coworker, she's suddenly overly friendly and bubbly with all of the other coworkers? She's not nuts. That's just instinctive behaviour. She's enlisting the others to help her protect her space around her campfire. Have you noticed that when a man is in a stressful situation (Does this make me look fat?) he clams up? He's not nuts. That's just instinctive behaviour. Talking either scares away the prey, or lets the enemy know your location. The more stressful the situation, the less a man will talk. If you want your man to answer your questions, don't put him into fight-or-flight mode.
What could be more stressful for a man than breaking up? He risks being ravaged and scratched by press-on nails, and he won't be getting any anymore. The old "It's not you it's me" breakup line is one of those rare occasions when a man will, out of desparation, risk trying to compete with a woman in the I-said-it-but-I-didn't-mean-it game. It's risky. Like approaching a growling dog risky. But the alternative is far more painful in his eyes. What's he's thinking is, "Of course it's not me. I LIKE me! I DON'T like YOU!" Poor bastard though. It's only after his opening move in the game, when the woman says "What is it about you that we have to change so that it works?" that he realizes he doesn't have the proper equipment to play the game in the first place, and bails out. He'll pretend to get an urgent phone call, diarrhea or, in a last desparate hail-mary pass, dredge up some fake tears and promise to call when he's regained his emotional control, maybe, like, tomorrow...or sometime.
The way to a man's heart is through things that men are interested in. If you want to attract gay men, wear perfume that smells flowery. If you want to attract straight men, rub a little brake fluid behind your ears, or run your clothes through the exhaust of a two-stroke engine. Men really do like the chase. It's not that they like it exactly, it's just that they are programmed for a chase. The chase, the conquest, the slaying of the beast and the satisfying feast afterwards have all been programmed into the manly DNA. When the woman plays the part of the prey and pulls away, the man's hunter instincts kick in and he gets drawn into her web. When she doesn't run, she's like a dead mouse laying in the path of wandering tomcat. (Those dead mice that the cat brings home as a gift? They weren't dead when he found them.)
Women ask me, "Why does my son never tell me what's going on in his life, when my daughter tells me everything?" It's because you can't shut up about him! But it's not your fault. It's in your genes. I work with a woman whose son is a professional athlete. She constantly talks about her son and I didn't even know she had a daughter until another coworker told me one day. I wondered if she was unique. As I worked my way mentally through the women I know as coworkers, I realized that I could name the ones who had male children, but not the ones who had only female children or no children. I began to keep track of the way my female coworkers talked about their children. The one's with sons talked about their sons frequently. The ones with both sons and daughters talked about their sons two or three times as often as they talked about their daughters. The ones who only had daughters talked about them only as a way of joining a conversation but not in a way that revealed anything about the daughters' characters. That lead me to reflect on how much I knew about the sons of the women I work with and I thought, holy crap! Is that the kind of stuff my mother said about me?! I'll emphazise something I alluded to earlier. They don't talk about their husbands' interests and secrets in anything like the detail they talk about their sons'. I realized something else. The older the son, the more likely a woman is to talk about him to other people. How come? Two words: arranged marriages. Think back to the caveman days. How did the Chatty Mom gene get passed on? The women who talked about their sons constantly were actually advertising to the other women around the fire that they had a son available for mating. The sons hooked up with the neighbours daughters, and the chatty mom gene was passed on in his female offspring. The sons of the women who didn't advertise their sons' existence had to rely only on their looks and sex appeal. How likely was that to procreate a species? Have you SEEN a Neanderthal?
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