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The Bare Facts

One of my vivid memories from when I was a child was exchanging valentines for Valentines Day. Now this was way waaaaay back in the day when we would actually take some thought and create beautiful valentines or create ornate boxes to contain the little cards that each child would make with care.

My most prominent memory from elementary school was Valentines Day in the first grade. There was this little girl by the name of Jennifer with long brown hair and I will admit I was quite smitten on her. Our teacher told us to all go around and put our valentines in each other’s (shoe-box) valentines boxes. I went straight to Jennifer and put my Snoopy valentine into her box, with all the innocence of a little boy having a crush on a little girl. She stepped up beside me and handed me her valentine instead of putting it into my valentine box. Before I could say a word, she said to me “You know what makes us different?”. I shook my head, unable to speak and she said nine words that I was not expecting, “You have a penis and I have a vagina.” and she gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Then she merrily went off depositing her valentines into other people’s boxes, leaving me standing wide-eyed, unable to move due to the shock of what I had just heard. The simplicity of a child understanding the difference between male and female.

An Analysis

If only the differences between men and women could be defined as easily as our anatomy. There are absolute similarities between girls and boys prior to puberty, but once puberty kicks in, the abyss between us mentally, physically and emotionally widens. The truth is there is as much depth to who and what we are as a gender as there are drops of water in the ocean.

That is not to say that we move apart from each other, but rather our comprehension of each other shifts. Along with that diversion in understanding also comes a strong magnetism (physically and emotionally), a desire to figure out one another and find ways for the genders to compliment each other. I will start first be dispensing my understanding of women, only because they have always eluded me and yet fascinated me at the same time.

Women

Someone once told me that God created man, then saw man was lonely and created woman. Stepped back and said “Whoa man!” and thus we call them women. I don’t know how much credence I give to this explanation of how women came into being, but I do believe there is a comical value to our (males) relationships with women. If I can generalize, men were put on earth to kill the beast and bring it back to the cave so that woman can cook it. What man did not know was that woman would criticize how man brought back the beast, failed to kill it in such a way that would make it easier to cook and go on to prove how she is right in saying so, utilizing logic that man could not deny.

FACTS:

• Women are the more compassionate of the two genders except for 5 days a month
• They carry the off-spring for 9 months and make sure that the male never forgets it
• Care for the male but require that the male in turn, rubs their backs
• Women are something for the male to brag about, but when asked how the male got the female, the male rarely can come up with an adequate answer. To which the woman steps in and says “because he’s smart” – Both complimenting herself and the male at the same time.

All joking aside, women are very different in how they perceive the world around them compared to men. Both sides have a moderate understanding of each other but are frequent to redirect their perspective back to their own gender, where-in the problem lies.

Women are emotional creatures… many carrying their heart on their sleeve, but not necessarily reactive in that emotion. They may be extremely upset, but it may not come to the surface until enough has boiled to the surface to truly spill over. Women have the ability to stand back and analyze the situation before it becomes volatile. Generally speaking, women seem to have a firewall between their brain and their ability to act on things. They are more patient than men and not as apt to rush into things without thinking them through first.

Women are also mental creatures. Their mental and emotional side is directly linked to their physical side. This plays out in daily life and in bed. If a woman has something bothering her or stressing her out much more than normal, her sex drive goes out the window as well.

Men

Genesis (1:26) says that God created man to rule over the beasts of the earth. What isn’t stated, that we now know, is that man is a beast himself. Sometimes incapable of doing anything in his downtime aside from passing gas, staring blankly into space and requesting that his offspring pull his finger so that he can start the cycle over again. Again, let’s generalize… Man kills the beast, brings back the beast to woman and woman criticizes man. What woman doesn’t realize is that as she is stating, “Didn’t you think to drain the blood before you brought it home? Now, are you going to clean up that mess?” what man is actually doing is thinking about the beast he didn’t get to kill, but wanted to… internally praising himself for the job he did and what he actually heard was, “[blank space], blah blah blah home? Blah blah blah [blank space]?”

Which leads man to stare at woman as if she has three heads and has just rattled off the blueprints to the atomic bomb.

FACTS:

• The male hearing center does not engage unless woman is naked or holding food in her hand
• The adult male is a grown up version of a child, it just has a lot more responsibilities, because of this nature, males generally enjoying playing with the children
• True males will use any object that they come into contact with as a tool and will find uses for the most obscure tool
• Men will state a fact with absolute certainty, later being disproved by a woman, they will spend the next four hours analyzing how they could possibly be wrong on something, forgetting that they are nearly always wrong.

Again, joking aside, men too have their strengths and their weaknesses, but are greatly complimented by women. Men are instinctively self-centered, however that can be a strength as well as a weakness. Obviously in the matters of relationships it can be a weakness, but in a professional life, being selfish can help them to achieve the impossible. Most men are driven to defend and provide for their family, it makes them feel complete.

Men are very physical creatures, being driven more by physical attraction than by emotional or intellectual attraction. However, they also find a deep satisfaction when they do finally attain that emotional and intellectual attraction.

Medically speaking, men have been proven to process better in the left hemisphere of their brains, while women tend to process equally in both hemispheres. This explains why men generally are stronger with left-brain activities and approach problem-solving from a task oriented perspective while women are more creative in their problem solving skills and more aware of feelings while communicating.

Men tend to have a ‘fight or flight’ approach to stress while women often favor ‘tend or befriend’, caring for themselves and their children.

The Reality

Men and women are both divergent and yet at the same time complimentary. It is why we care so much about each other, our differences and our similarities.