The older I get the more I realize just how dense I am when it comes to understanding the opposite sex. But I do think I may have recently stumbled across a tiny little truth which men everywhere need to immediately pass along to their male offspring.
“What are you pontificating about now?” asked a longtime friend of mine who is usually even more confused about how the female mind works than I am.
“I’m serious,” I said to him. “Women all over the place are suffering from this poor body image thing, and I’m convinced that it’s at the heart of a lot of their strange behavior.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little bit more specific,” said my friend.
“Okay, here goes. Women think about bodies – especially their own body – in one way,” I explained, “and they just assume us guys also think that way, too – and they’re totally wrong.”
“How so?”
“Well,” I said, warming to the topic, “for example, say you’re strolling down a street and you suddenly see a woman you’re really attracted to – what is the very first thing you notice about her?”
“Well,” said my friend with a smile, “I guess that would depend.”
“On what?”
“On if my wife was strolling down the street with me.”
“You’re all by yourself,” I assured my friend.
“Okay, well, in that case, if she had sexy legs, I guess I’d probably notice them first. But if she had great hair or a nice rear end, I might look at that, too. It’s kinda hard to say. It would depend on what stands out the most.”
“Exactly!” I exclaimed. “That’s the way all of us guys do it. We see one thing that really attracts us and we focus all our attention on that one feature. It can be anything from sparkling eyes to great feet, but because we’re all kind of slow-witted, we’re really only capable of concentrating on one or two things at any given time.”
“And your point is?” asked my friend.
“My point is that when women look at their bodies in a mirror, they absolutely insist on seeing the total package, and if any one little area is all screwed up, they hate their whole body, which inevitably puts them in a bad mood, and guys everywhere are suffering because of it. Women just don’t understand that they don’t have to be perfect to be attractive. Guys just need to stumble across one nice body part that’s pretty or interesting and then they’re perfectly happy, and every woman has at least one of those.”
“And you really think this is an earth-shattering insight, do you?” asked my friend.
“Of course, it is! It directly affects everything from mood swings in women to the national divorce rate.”
“The national divorce rate?”
“That’s right,” I continued. “I firmly believe that the main reason so many women decide to stay in bad marriages is because their body image is so bad they prefer boredom and indifference to the terror of letting another man look at them without their clothes on.”
When my friend finally stopped laughing, he said, “And just when did you first stumble across this little theory of yours?”
“Well, I guess I’ve known that men and women think differently about their bodies ever since college when a girl I had been dating for almost a year suddenly blurted out, “I really want to thank you for never having once said a single thing about my nose”.
“What’s wrong with your nose?” I asked.
“Well, to begin with, it’s way too big for my face.”
“It’s not as big as mine”, I assured her.
“That’s not the point,” she said.
“What is the point?”
“The point is that I hate my nose!”
Anyway, when I told her I had never even given her nose a moment’s thought, and that it looked just fine to me, she was absolutely sure I was lying to her.
“So, in summing this all up”, said my friend, “you think women are wasting a lot of their time trying to come up with the perfect body when in reality, most men would never get around to appreciating all of it anyway.”
“Yes! And they’re making themselves – and men everywhere — miserable in the process. Here, I’ll give you another quick example of just how clueless guys are when it comes to this stuff. I was talking to an otherwise very rational friend a few weeks ago when she suddenly cried out, “Now stop that!’
“Stop what?” I asked her, wondering what I had done wrong.
“Stop looking at my pimple!” she ordered me.
“What pimple?” I asked, totally unaware that one even existed.
“The one on my forehead,” she informed me, pointing to a barely noticeable blemish.
“Then what did you do?” asked my friend.
“I did what I always do when I don’t have the foggiest idea of what a woman is talking about – I apologized.”