Men are like search engines
Greetings. To begin with, I should say that I got some negative reaction to my post yesterday about thong underwear as a disappointing technology shift, in the sense that it didn’t mesh well with Dad’s post on the importance of listening in relationships. It seemed an interesting topic and an insightful post at the time, but I see now that perhaps it wasn’t and I certainly hope I didn’t offend anyone. All I can say is: It’s my mother’s fault; she did a bad job raising me. Thanks Mom.
For today’s topic, I’ve decided to concentrate more on relationships directly, talking about why men have trouble communicating. Now, to begin with, I feel like I should stand up for my gender. This is difficult, seeing as it’s my gender that’s primarily responsible for most of the bad things in this world, including but not limited to: war, pornography, foreign policy, violent religious fundamentalism and reality TV. Having said that, I think men get an unfair rep in our culture on one specific issue, that being that we are accused of not listening. .
Now this is really not fair: We do listen, we just listen differently than women. In terms of communication speed and efficiency, two women communicating vs. two men communicating is roughly equivalent to two people with cell phones, P.D.A.s, laptops and high-speed wireless internet connection, compared with two people sending smoke signals in the dark: You just don’t get as much information across. Now, I don’t know why this is, why men are incapable of processing as much information in a conversation as women. Maybe it is hormonal, maybe biological, maybe it’s because we played too much street hockey as children and took too many pucks to the head. Whatever the case, I’m here this morning to try to clarify this much-misunderstood situation.
When women communicate, so I am have it on good authority, they talk to each other, tell each other important things and then lend support and make decisions. When men communicate, we tend to grunt a lot, spend limited time in an awkward silence and then start making jokes about the female anatomy, or, if we’re really reaching a new level of understanding, jokes about the male anatomy. This is not what you’d call big-time communicating, so when we’re thrust into a conversation with a woman, who wants to say things and communicate ideas and even receive responses, we find ourselves without the tools to carry on a proper conversation, so we have to improvise. The best way to understand this process is to think of an Internet search engine.
An Internet search engine obtains information relevant to a query by searching for keywords, categorizing results based on those keywords and organizing them in order of priority and then ignoring unimportant information. Using this process, a search engine is able to sort through a mind-boggling amount of information, a staggering assortment of data of every subject imaginable, more information than the human mind can possibly comprehend. This is very much how a man sees a conversation with a women. He knows that he can’t possibly communicate at her rate of speed and so he attempts to sort through the data by scanning the conversation for important keywords and responding accordingly..
Unfortunately, this is an inelegant solution and we miss a lot of key information, partly because we spend a lot of our mental effort searching for keywords that may indicate that we are either about to get some, or are in serious trouble. We also spend a fair amount of time on high red alert scanning for The Big Bad Words: Commitment, Marriage, Children, Financial Responsibility and PROSTATE. Unfortunately, this leaves precious little brainpower left over for concentrating on the actual conversation.
Sometimes it can be helpful if the female will establish the appropriate set of keywords at the beginning of the conversation. `Honey?’ `Yes dear.’ `We need to talk about OUR SUMMER VACATION.’ `Okay. {Brain switching over to search for keywords connected to SUMMER VACATION, getting some, being in trouble and PROSTATE.} What do you want to talk about?’.
See how easy it is? I realize, having just read over this post that I’ve made men seem like pretty much total pond scum, but we’re working on it, we just need your help. You have to hold our hands sometimes, guide us through a conversation. Think of it like training wheels for your relationship.