Ahh, I remember it like it was yesterday………….
Adam: “OoOo hey a text from Judy!”
Judy: Do you wanna co-write a blog?
Adam: Sure, what about?
Judy: I am thinking, “What is one thing you want the opposite gender to understand about men/women?”
My REACTION:
Let’s face it men are not exactly known for being great philosophers of women and their emotional states (didn’t Judy just talk about not picking out emotions? I don’t know I wasn’t really paying attention).
After sitting down with Judy and realizing this was, in fact, a great topic to discuss and realizing that we had a great resource group to pool from, I set out to gather directly from the male “horse’s mouth” what would help anyone from the single person looking to enter into a relationship to the person who has put in 10-20 years of hard time.
As the weeks ticked on Judy would randomly and enthusiastically text me with great responses from her female pooling group. These answers were deep, heart-felt, and showed so much meaning.
My group’s responses at first:
Text #1
This will be 100% anonymous?
-Corey
Text #2
Have you been talking to my wife?
-Anonymous
Text #3
I’ve seen this movie before.
After promising the upmost security, anonymity, data encryption, and manual hard drive wiping after the completion of this blog post, the heartless and heartfelt responses started to roll in…
Men
“Why does a woman work ten years to change a man, then complain he's not the man she married?” - Barbra Streisand
So when you are looking at your man and are completely confused on how his thought processes work, just remember… W T F:
1. We are natural problem solvers.
In no way am I inferring that woman cannot share the same trait, but from the context of male actions as a whole, we tend to automatically respond to emotional and relational stressors and moments of conflict in a completely counter intuitive way. Hypothetically, let’s say right now I am in a relational conflict with my spouse, the large pooling source I sampled all spelled out that in some way they forget to listen to the actual problem. We see these moments of emotional triggers a lot like Ikea bookshelves, we don’t need instructions or context we simply need a power drill and a much bigger hammer. All of this is detrimental to our actual desired outcome, which is harmony and mutual understanding.
2. Tenacity is our strength and our downfall.
What surprised me the most also made me smile at my fellow men was the humility of most of their responses in this regard. It is funny when I hear men talk about how stubborn women are, or like Judy pointed out “cray.” Yet, we will paint ourselves orange, pay $150+ and stand half naked at the 50-yard line of a football game to cheer on a professional team that does not even know we exist… “Yah, woman are nuts.” In many ways our tenacity is what attracts our better halves. Most of the time, women cite their attraction to their male counterpart is a male’s passion, confidence, and perseverance. Now let’s apply that tenacity to relational situations and what we seem to find out quickly is that same passion and confidence quickly turns to stubbornness and arrogance. It takes a long time for a man to sit back and realize when he is doing this. We are passionate (even though we like to make people think we are not) and while we might fight for our shining lady’s honor we are all too quick to bicker for our own dishonor. We are quick to not back down and we are quick to say things we will truly regret afterwards just to get the upper hand in the situation. In so many ways, men always get likened to a knight in shining armor and in so many ways, men argue with their loved ones in the same way, we put on armor. We shield ourselves and we try to slash our way through a conflict, but we forget that the emotional complexities of women are a lot like a Hydra (a poisonous multi-headed Greek serpentine water monster) we try to cut, poke, and kill one conflict and what we actually do is injure our loved one deeply and instead of limiting the conflict at hand, we multiply the variables. The lesson in all of this? Sometimes we don’t need to be the knight, we need to be Arthur at the round table.
3. Forthright and open books.
A direct response I got from one of my male pooling participants was very clear:
“When we say we’re thinking about nothing, we actually are thinking about nothing. We also say what we want in the order it was meant to be heard and using the dictionary definition of those words. Nothing more and nothing less.“
I remember sitting down with a couple wrestling with everything this friend of mine said. To put it in better perspective, men are type-writers and woman are iPads. Both can be the tools that write great things but so much is different in how they do it. Like the typewriter, men are very deliberate in what they do, our actions are made with force, and our mark made deliberately upon what we are trying to communicate with. Woman are just as deliberate with their feelings but their feelings are also attached and influenced by so many more fundamental things such as connection (Wi-Fi= love, touch, presence *non-verbal communication*) a deep source of emotional history (Google= emotional events and experiences of the past) and we can go on and on. Instead as men, we stay very present in our actions, solutions, and communication. All we have is a single sheet of paper in front of us or maybe a few sheets that are already written and as soon as that paper is removed, for some of us, so is the conflict. Where women seem to have a couple terabits of storage *crickets.* This is probably one of the most frustrating things in the male world, when we are arguing with our significant other and they start bringing up other things and asking if they are connected to our current frustration. Most of the time we are just frustrated with what we actually say we are frustrated with. Sure it could be connected to something else, but 99% of the time, like the quote above, we are being forthright with our frustration and it IS what we say it IS.
Suggested Readings: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray, Love Sense by Dr. Sue Johnson, Love and Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, How We Love by Milan and Kay Yerkovich