Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Male and Female code

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Isn't it interesting how men and women can be so vastly different and how we can both completely stump the other gender?  Recently, my husband graciously listened along to a book on tape with me.  I had rented it for my trip to Georgia the other week along with others.  I hadn't gotten to listen to it because I ran out of time on my trip.  So, I went ahead and decided to listen to it on my way to work and back and while running a few other errands.


When my husband came to visit this weekend, I was around 1/4 through the book.  And he graciously listened along to "Shopaholic and Baby" with me.  lol  Of course, it seems as if it is impossible for a man to watch (or in this case listen to) a chick flick without adding his two cents.  This book is actually the sequel to the book and movie Confessions of a Shopaholic.  So, as he and I listened to the book, we ended up having a discussion about the characters.  "Well, I think she really..." "No, no man would say or do that without.." which really ended up being me explaining the woman's behavior in the book and my husband explaining the man's behavior!


To provide a VERY brief synopsis for background information, basically the woman in the story suspected another woman was interested in her husband.  This, of course, led her to believe that maybe she shouldn't trust her husband.  The book had built his character as a pretty reputable person who wouldn't seem to betray his wife.  Yet, there were little things here and there that gave her cause for concern.  My husband's thought was that she should trust her husband.  All of the things she was accusing him of doing in the story were not solidly backed up and she was jumping to conclusions quickly.  He kept saying, "But he hasn't had a chance to say anything yet" and "She needs to talk with him about her issues instead of obsessing over them and speculating."  


Of course, I jumped to the woman's defense (yes, I understand how ridiculous this conversation sounds but I think we were honestly discussing a more broad topic using the characters) and I said, "Well he is also absent a lot and she doesn't know where he is." And so on and so forth went the conversation.  I could see how the woman in the story had cause for concern because there was another female character in the book who was acting a certain way towards her husband.  Of course, like a true man, he had no clue she was flirting, but the wife could see it in an instant.

In the end, everything my husband said or thought about the male character turned out to be 100% true about him and everything I thought about both female characters ended up being completely true about them in the story.


 I do think that women (most of the time) have the ability to read other women.  You KNOW that a woman would not say or do a certain thing without specific intentions.  All you have to do is put yourself in her shoes and it's obvious! There are always exceptions to the rule, but it happens most of the time that women can know what other women are up to.

I have to assume that the same thing is true for men.  First, I have my husband's point of view to go from.  Whenever he says something about another guy to me, it seems to me like he has some sort of male ESP.  But it's probably that he can do what I can and just figure what he'd do.  This area is very fuzzy to me because I don't know enough to say anything solidly, but I can go off of my experiences.  I remember one guy who I went to college with.  Any other guy could look at him once and say, "he's a jerk," whereas, women didn't see it so clearly.  I didn't see how they could tell.  The guy was, in fact, a jerk.  Yet, I still don't know how they saw it.  One guy said it was in the way he moved, his tone of voice, his facial expressions, and things of that nature that made it obvious.  There is also the book "he's just not that into you" where a male author easily explains CLEAR signs that a guy is not interested.  The women, however, really usually wouldn't know without an explanation.


My friend has a husband who is (and has always been) totally unaware of when a woman is trying to flirt with him.  She's very thankful for this "fault" because he just goes on with normal life and wouldn't think anything of it.  I think blinders can be a good thing every now and then.  Maybe men really don't need to know when women are being deceitfully pleasant.  In a way, we wish they would sometimes so they would not take a "sweet" or seemingly "well-intentioned" interaction as innocent when we know it is not.  There are certain things I know I would never say unless my intentions were not proper.  


I know this blog is really going nowhere.  There is no insightful summary.  Nothing terribly inspirational has come to me.  I just find it mystifying how men and women almost even have their own language.  Perhaps that's why we have bounds of books on these things.  I'll leave the figuring out of it all up to the professionals.