I was in the soup isle at Kroger when a couple rolled up behind me.
The forty year old wife said “I didn’t really like that thing I fixed last night. It wasn’t very good. What did you think.”
The man wisely said, “It was ok.”
“You’re lying,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”
I accidently laughed out loud. “He’s trying not to fall of the ice burg into the cold black water, that’s what he’s doing.”
The husband laughed out loud and I’m sure the wife glared at me as I rolled away. I probably got the guy in trouble. Once in the car I’m sure she hounded him about who I was and why I would say such a thing.
The truth is women are always setting traps for men. And I don’t know why we do it. We turn their words around, upside down and back wards then accuse them of being heartless, uncaring, cold or distant. When in reality men are just trying to figure out how to answer a question without getting in trouble.
But women can’t let it go. We insist on making a fight out of absolutely nothing. I’m guilty too. When I’m feeling insecure or unloved and I ask Alex how I look he sometimes makes the unforgivable mistake of saying “Fine.”
Well, that just blows me up. “Fine is average, fine is ok or mediocre. You’re saying I’m a five out of ten? Cause that’s what fine is. You didn’t say fine like Barry White your fine is a five.” and our night out is ruined.
Splash, my unwitting husband has fallen off the ice burg into the bottomless , frigid pit of my heart. And he didn’t even know he did anything wrong.
I will agree that most men, including my husband, don’t realize how callous they can seem, even accidently. And they don’t realize how hard it is to be a woman over 30. We are sensitive and needy creatures.
But maybe it’s time to cut them a little slack. We shouldn’t use their own words to crucify them when they were actually trying to be nice. I’ve started trying to warn Alex before he says the thing that will set me off. I say “The water is very very cold,” and most of the time he backs up from the edge and trys to say the right thing.
You see, if we let them fall off the ice burg, or we push them off all the time, pretty soon we’ll find ourselves standing there all alone. And nobody wants to be alone.