Let a little boy fall off his bike and scrape his knee-see how fast everyone tells him to get up and shake it off and stop all that doggone crying. We don't let them cry, we don't ask them how they feel about anything, we don't encourage them to express themselves in any meaningful way beyond showing how 'manly' they are. Communicating, nurturing, listening to problems, and trying to understand them without any obligation to fix them is simply not what boys are raised to do. From the moment we come out of the womb, we're taught to protect, profess, and provide. In our mind, problem solved-no more talking.Īll of this is to say that we men aren't in the talking business we're in the fix-it business. And if you don't wear that particular blouse to the office again, you won't have to deal with that particular problem again. You're not looking at the woman in the identical blouse anymore. How you felt at work while you had to sit there with this other woman on the other side of the room with the same blouse on is irrelevant to us.Īs far as we're concerned, the problem has already been fixed-you came home. In this particular instance, and many more examples such as this, we can't get more worked up than that. Your man: 'Really? Don't wear it anymore.'Įnd of conversation. She'll even go on to give you concrete examples of every other time something like this has happened to other women throughout the history of the world, and, hours later, you all will get up from the couch, having solved nothing but feeling so much better. You lay out your problem and she'll commiserate with you-give you all kinds of 'yeah, girls' and 'I know that's right,' and nod and agree and tell you stories about how the same thing happened to her. But seriously? That's what your girlfriends are for. We understand that this frustrates you time and time again, because sometimes you want to talk to share and get someone else's take on a situation-you know, put a listening ear on it. We just want to fix whatever situation is upsetting the balance. When men are talking, and especially when they're listening, it's with purpose. It's just not in our DNA to lounge around, sip coffee, and dab at our eyes with tissue as if we're in an AA meeting or on some psychologist's couch trying to get things off our chest. But even more? No man wants to sit around gabbing with you like we're one of your girlfriends. Now, we understand that we're not the essence of perfection and there are going to be times when you're mad at us and need to let us know it we get that, though we don't necessarily want to have to concentrate on an hourlong angry lecture about how we screwed up.

Act as a lady think like a man