I don’t know that much about the brain’s anatomy. It may be that the thought processes to which I’d like to give the ax are located closer to my right ear, not in the frontal lobe. But wherever it is, there is one part of the female brain I’d like to excise and, if possible, transplant the corresponding segment of a male mind.
I’ve noticed that men seem to be more likely to get what they want out of relationships than women are. This is in part because men want simpler things, but mostly because they want things in a simpler way. When a guy wants his wife or girlfriend to do something, he asks. If she wants to, great. If she doesn’t want to but she does it anyway, just for him, even better.
Minds out of the gutter, people. I’m not talking about 35 sweet goodbyes or even anything necessarily sexual. Could be he wants her to call him “Big Pappa” (let’s hope he doesn’t), could be he wants her to play Guitar Hero with him. Whatever. My point is if he asks and she does it, they’re good. You will never hear a man say to his girlfriend, “But I want you to want to go to the Hardware Show with me.”
That’s what trips us women up. We want you to want to do things. In fact, usually we want you to want to do them, more than we want the things themselves. Which means we can’t tell you what these things are. It would render your acting on our desire meaningless.
I know. If you’re a guy and you just read that last paragraph, you probably got a little dizzy from all the twists in the syntax. “I want A, but I want to get A because of B. If I get A as a result of C, that’s no good.” It defies logic. But it’s true. Barb can never say to Bill, “You used to send me text messages from work a few times a week, and I liked that because it let me know you were thinking about me and made me feel good”? If she said that, and then he sent her a text the next day, she would know he did it because she asked, not because he wanted to.
Problem is, she’s looking at his “want” all wrong. Whether she has told him she likes to get little “thinking of you” messages from him or not, the fact that he sends a text still means he is thinking of her. How many times must a man forget to pick up a loaf of bread or let down a toilet seat before a woman realizes that if he does something she asked for, and he does it 14 hours later when she is not there to remind him, that he had to actually think about her to do it? More to the point, if he does something she asked for, he’s doing it because he wants to make her happy.
And that’s what matters. It is completely unimportant whether a man wants to send a woman text messages, or call her to say good morning, or give her a bouquet of handmade origami flowers. What matters is that he knows she wants these things, and when he’s done scratching his head wondering what the hell she wants them for, he goes out and finds some stupid origami flowers and sends them to her. And then he manages not to let on that he thinks they are stupid.
