Communication between the sexes has been a long-debated issue. How can it be that men and women speak the same tongue without actually speaking the same language? Author John Gray of Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus certainly has a point. We do seem to come from different planets.
To illustrate my point, consider a recent conversation that I had with my husband about dinner meat.
“Did you use all of the meat?” I asked him while I hung the last wash of the day on our drying rack. The kids had been unbearable at bedtime, and my husband’s face still bore the strain of the evening’s events.
“I used one-third of it,” he replied in his scientific way.
“So did you finish up one of the two packages?” I asked. I knew that we had consumed at least two pieces of meat, and I wasn’t sure how many were in each package.
“We ate two pieces,” he said, telling me something I already knew. I became visibly irritated that he hadn’t quite gotten my question.
He could see the annoyance mounting up the back of my neck in shades of red.
“There were six pieces of meat in all,” he remarked.
“So, did we finish up one of the two packages?” I managed to say without throttling him because he was making this so difficult.
“We did not.” He turned back to his newspaper and smiled.
What was that? Here is how the conversation would have gone with a girlfriend.
“Sally, did you use all of the meat?” I imagined myself saying to my friend.
“No, there’s one piece left in the first package,” she would say, sipping her latte and complimenting me on my new haircut.
There you have it. Two sentences versus seven. If men are from Mars, I’m glad that NASA has found water there. They’re going to need it when we women send them back!
Christine Louise Hohlbaum, American author of Diary of a Mother: Parenting Stories and Other Stuff, has been published in over one-hundred thirty publications. When she isn’t writing, leading toddler playgroups or wiping up messes, she prefers to frolic in the Bavarian countryside near Munich where she lives with her husband and two children. Visit her Web site: http://www.DiaryofaMother.com.
