Being a man allows us an emotionally undisturbed view of womankind: the myriad muddles and messes, complexities and complications; a view of life when emotion overrides logic. I have often interacted with women, in a professional capacity (mine, and sometimes, theirs). Each interaction left me enriched, enraptured, and enchanted, but also mostly wounded and smiling bittersweet. This column will address issues that baffle men, but women never know why.
Here’s the first thing then: men, as a collective, have no idea of what women want. No matter how hard we try and listen, no matter the effort we put in to arrange the most spectacular surprises ever, something will always be missing and we never know what.
Womenspeak is a different language with its own rules of grammar, a very nuanced tonality of diction, and vocabulary that can use the same word to mean absolutely anything and everything, including its antonym. Men would sooner learn to become horse whisperers and expect success than try to decipher women.
The problem is not the software, it’s the construct: we are built very differently from women and this disparity is what accounts for the eternal lapses in communication. That, however, is understandable. Just as you can’t run new software on old PCs, you can’t make men comprehend how women function. The result is that men foolishly keep trying and are dismally disappointed each time, as also are women, who feel victims of a cruel fate that bestows them with incompetent partners. In the end, we both need each other, perhaps us men more so than women. But what little adventure and stress that us males bring to the relationship table is still crucial to complete the equation. Nature decrees herself: no woman is ever complete without a fumbling man to keep her busy!
The writer is a lover of women and a sommelier