A strange and funny thing happened after my weekly Friday thesis meeting with Phil (my supervisor). This meeting is typically held right before Phil's urban geography course, when my brain is absolutely fried. ANYWAY, today Phil’s class will map out the differences between men and women. Here are some aspects the class censes covered:
Do you live with your friends?
How close do you live to your friends?
How much time to spend talking to your friends?
How much time do you spend playing sport/watching sports?
Do you live with your family?
How close do you live to your family?
Obvious results:
Women:
Spend more time talking with friends, more likely to live with friends and parents then men.
Men:
Less likely to live with friends than women, more likely to watch sports with friends and play sports with friends.
Phil was going on and on about men bonding through actions like playing games, as to avoid talking about personal things, and talking all together. All of it sounded a little too stereotypical. So, perfectly at the end of our meeting we turn around to discover 3 guys setting up a poker game in the postgraduate “lounge,” intent on bonding over beers and poker on a Friday afternoon. We shared a good laugh. I had to probe- why do men avoid talking about their lives? Phil didn’t know.
How to women measure up?
Yes, women tend to talk more. But why? Anne-Marie’s theory of similarities claims that women like to think (/obsess) about themselves and how they can relate others. How are we women the same or different from each other? Men like to think about themselves and how they stack up against others. Sports would be an easy way to measure this. Once a woman finds another woman with similar outlooks and life experiences both women are thrilled, and converse more with this particular woman than so they can uncover more hidden similarities. Outlooks on life change over time because we change, so then we have to keep talking about it with our top similarity women (shared experiences is included in the similarity category). Just a theory.
(Sigh) At times it is so hard to talk to men because they are so incredibly uninteresting. Have men considered their lives or other people’s lives? Can men be peeled away from TV sets, computer screens or status wars? Do men even want to get to know women in the same way women want to get to know men? Not really. Is that bad for women or for men? Who knows?
A quick note on sex, which my studies cover! Sex is a social super glue, it holds couples together when there is nothing to discuss, and it’s the only way monkeys decide/notify who they trust- through intercourse. Perhaps Christian couples use God instead of sex to hold their relationship together. Maybe that’s why all the Christian couples get married expediently, because it’s pretty damn hard to keep a relationship going on trusting God rather than each other (which can only ultimately be denoted with sex). One partner may trust God more than the other, what do you do about trust levels then?
Thoughts?
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