Venus and Mars

 

I love harmony. Without any hint of shame I will own up to possessing hippy qualities, so peace is the way to go in my manual, especially within  relationships. Yet friction, disputes, petty annoyances, squabbles and tiffs between men and women are just as sure a thing as death and taxes. I like being on the same page as my partner and often we are, so when an unsuspecting squabble takes place because of a well-intentioned yet potentially devastating comment out of the blue, I am caught so off-guard that I find myself  entering denial mode as I battle it out with my significant-other. Dressed in nothing but bra and knickers I was enjoying the after-effects of a warm shower when quite suddenly my boyfriend said, “You’re looking slimmer”! I took in those words and mulled them over in my head so that before I knew it the words that came out of my mouth were, “So you thought that I was fat before?!” That was it. I had unwittingly fired the first strike. Men think that they are dishing out compliments but little do they realise that any sentence with the word ‘slim’ in it is is a sure way of setting themselves up for a fall, even though they can give as good as they get. So my exasperated boyfriend took umbridge and attacked from all sides to make the point that even a compliment will fall wrongly in the unfathomable depths of the female psyche when its about that deadly subject. All I could do was laugh at myself as there is no escaping those mirrors put up to reflect our ‘silliness’. But to defend the female species this type of behaviour is involuntary and deeply ingrained within our make-up (no, not the Chanel kind).

Living apart together has its advantages but as my boyfriend tried to explain there are clear advantages to living together too. Whilst he did my dishes  having vaccuumed and scoured the oven like a true new millenium man, I was hit with, “Another advantage of living together is that the house will be cleaner”. Well, that was it. The arrow struck me in the heart, “So you think my house is filthy and  I’m a lazy cow?” Battle mode ensued once again. Clearly, the male brain thinks practically and communicates logical thought directly which he had done, but honestly, which female on this planet would not have reacted like that? My boyfriend in his emphatic defense explained that he was merely pointing out that many hands make light work. Of course he had a valid point but the problem was I had missed it on the way, blinded by irrational insecurity because of the ambiguity of that sentence. We can be the best communicators in the world but nothing is as fallible as the human psyche, male or female. As an American somewhere once said “embrace your differences” and laugh.