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I really wasn't terribly surprised, though I wouldn't say that around my female friends and relations (something that would probably up their share of the word count for the day significantly). Another study I saw showed that women talk a LOT about their feelings and their relationships (and their feelings about relationships). Men talk about stuff and doing stuff.
Some girls at summer camp once wanted to know who the staff guys were interested in, so they hid outside the shower to listen to our secret guy conversations. They hid in the bushes for a half hour, learning a lot about water skiing, football, motorcycles and cars before they finally gave up and left. To their surprise and disgust, they discovered that guys don't talk about the same things that girls do. This fact is often a source of great disappointment to most women after they are married. They want desperately to talk about all this feeling/relationship stuff and men just don't have anything to say about that. This could account for why they out talk us almost 3 to 1. After a while we learn to shut up and let them get it off their chests.
One handy tip for you guys, though. Don't try to help or give advice. Just listen and make sympathetic noises. Women don't want us to solve their relationship problems or fix their feelings. It doesn't take too many times before you figure out what a death trap trying to fix her problems is. Sadly, though, for us guys, fixing things is pretty much all we bring to the table.
So after a while we learn to say "Uh-huh" and "I'm so sorry" a lot and find something to do with our hands to keep us from going nuts while the wives are talking about relationships and their feelings and their feelings about relationships. Nothing wrong with that. It's how we achieve balance in a relationship.
(c) 2014 by Tom King
2 comments:
Learned this lesson long ago. Don't always heed it, but I did learn it.
I clearly remember the showers at Lone Star - you could hear anything and everything just standing outside by the trees!
The girls were highly disappointed. It's also interesting that they would probably have gotten off with a reprimand for hiding outside the boys' shower if they'd been caught, but if we'd hid outside the girls showers and got caught, we'd have been pilloried, flogged and sent home in disgrace (and the girls would have been mad at us forever).
Two standards, that's all I'm saying.
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