Husband – What planet am I from again?

There are hundreds of books about relationships and the differences between men and women. Whether it is planets of origin or which brain hemispheres or whatever, we husbands really are wired differently.

When we first got married 13 years ago, my wife and I bought a few of those books and tried to better understand each other. I can’t count how many fights we had trying to make each other understand WHY something upset us or HOW the other could have phrased something differently. I wish I had all of that energy back.

Now I think we celebrate those differences in the way that we think. It comes in handy a lot of the time to have someone approach a problem from what I call (when my wife isn’t listening) ‘the opposite of logic’.

To illustrate the difference in the way we think, I would like to point to a conversation I had 15 minutes ago with my wife. I am working from home and she is watching the day after tomorrow. There is a part of that movie where the love-sick 17 year old, Sam, is talking to a girl he really likes but hasn’t told that. A boy from another school asks if she wants a tour of the school and she leaves with new guy. Just before leaving, she says “Sam, can you hold my drink?”.

I don’t know why but I told my wife the following “If you are ever single again and this situation arises, don’t make the dude hold your crap while you go off with some other guy. That’s just wrong.” After one of the most curious looks, she said “duh you idiot.. If a girl does that, it means she is coming back to you”.

Ah ha.. From my point of view, the girl is dumping her crap on ‘friend-boy’ while she investigates some dating material. From my wife’s the girl is dropping a hanky or ‘accidentally’ leaving her purse at his apartment.

So when I sat down to blog I was going to say how “gamey” girls are with stuff like that but in preparing to write it down, I noticed something. Leaving a drink like that is obviously a game but why did I think she was doing the wrong thing? Because “would you like a tour” is code for “let me get you away from all these other dudes so I have a shot at you”.

Here we are again. The exact same level of playing games but on opposite sides of the spectrum.

That is what you realize with time – On the scale of crazy, you’re both the same distance from normal, just in different directions.