Since the dawn of time, ladies and gents have had trouble understanding each other. Neanderthal women dragged by a fistful of hair to their suitor's cave-boudoir were most likely thinking, "If only Lance had brought me that saber tooth necklace I'd asked for, I would have gone willingly." Ancient tribesmen the world over would conveniently schedule hunting trips the few days every month their wives ate all the wild boar and sulked over the tightness of their leather loincloths.
Because humans have evolved as a species, you'd think by the 21st century this battle of the sexes would have devolved into a skirmish. But judging by all the self-help books, cartoons, jokes, and bumper stickers out there, we're still locking horns. And that's because guys and dolls were not put on this earth to figure each other out -- I mean, if Freud couldn't figure it out, really, why bother? We have never, nor will ever fully understand each other for one very simple reason: women are crazy and men are weird. Or, to put it another way, women frequently pass through Crazytown and men like to vacation in Weirdville.
Crazytown looks like Aspen and Vail, if the two mountains lived side by side. The weather ranges from warm and balmy one minute to dark and stormy the next. With the acres of sensitive flowers surrounded by an ocean of feelings, this is as you'd imagine, a very emotional place. Women congregate, commune and communicate here from sunup to sundown on every
conceivable topic. From pie recipes to bikini waxing experiences, nothing is off limits. Ambivalence isn't tolerated here, and as they're big on self-improvement, there's always a friend to get a colonic, head to a museum or try out a new crash diet. On Saturdays, they often gather to discuss and decode -- sentence by sentence, then word by word -- banal text correspondence from Weirdville inhabitants. Whitney Houston and Lorena Bobbitt lived in Crazytown and Lisa "Left Eye" Lopez was doing an artist's residence here right before she burned her husband's house down. Hallmark commercial criers live in Crazytown as do high-maintenance groomers, wine glass throwers, cougars, and women who never walk to the bathroom alone.
Weirdville looks a lot like Florida, only smaller and without the Panhandle. Storms are infrequent here and the weather is quite mild. Men who live here are prone to debate the intricacies of ever sport ever played using statistics and analysis that would make a mathematics professor swoon. Book clubs limited to biographies of deceased, white presidents are prevalent, as are swimmers who like to do laps at country clubs in the nude, and those who like to smell other people's farts, hang brain, and dance up to and grind the backsides of unsuspecting women. Weirdville has the distinct honor of being the birthplace of Johnny Knoxville, John Mayer and the guy who wrote the book He's Just Not That Into You. Weirdville is more of place for retreat than attack; when visiting, men tend to not deal, fly to Vegas for the weekend and break up with girls via text message without explanation.
But when men take a wrong turn and land in Crazytown and women head south of the border and end up in Weirdville, the whole shebang becomes a logistical clusterpuck. For example:
Lisa Marie Nowak, the lady astronaut who drove 950 miles in a disguise wearing a diaper to confront her lover's girlfriend, blew past Crazytown on her way to Weirdville. Her calm, premeditated plan of attack replaced that the spontaneous heat of a lover's quarrel is totally weird on ten different levels. Impulsive feminine passion is hot; deciding in advance to wear a pee-bag is not.
Keeping your feelings bottled up, not understanding social cues, or being one baseball stat away from being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome is male territory. You see, in Weirdville, there is a quirky methodology to the madness that totally works for guys, but when applied to the gals, it induces lot of cringeworthy second hand embarrassment. Think about it: Will Ferrell streaking full-frontal nude is funny weird, but Tina Fey, just downright weird.
Now Crazytown, even on layover, is no place for a man to touch down. I recently heard a story about a woman who shared a taxi with a male colleague after an office party. There hadn't been any kissing or any foreplay leading up to the taxi ride, just some verbal flirtation. As she was about to decab and call it a night, the guy decided it would be a good idea to show her how much liked her by whipping out his dong. And this, my friends, is crazy. And not just because he was the head of Human Resources.
Unpredictable and spontaneous actions or reactions like the dong whip, ranting about an ex on Facebook and apartment stalking are signs that a man's lost control. In-the-moment passion and heated emotionality is female territory and is not, nor should be, tolerated in males. When the timing's right, it's funny for a guy to lose his pants, but he should never lose his head.
When nestled in comfortably in their male and female comfort zones, weird and crazy remain dormant -- until they come into close proximity with the opposite sex. Then like some Pavlovian dating trigger, the power struggles begin before we're even out of the gate. Who calls when and how begin -- and oops, now we've gone and had sex, and, right on time, we're sending mixed signals. And just like that, the whole thing becomes messier than an ecumenical tea party in Jerusalem. We find ourselves acting crazier and weirder than we normally are -- and is that because women act crazy and cause weird, or does men's weirdness trigger crazy?
That question I'll leave to pontificate in the next installment. In the meantime, I'll let you mull over an insight on relationships I have learned to be true: Nobody wants the battle of the sexes to end when after a long day of fighting you get to have great make up sex with the enemy.