Mike at Night When Harry Met Sally
There's a scene in the movie that share's its name with today's column where Billy Crystal tells Meg Ryan as they're traveling from Chicago to New York that men cannot have platonic relationships with women they find attractive. Few things truer have ever been said. In spite of our goal of economic and positional parity for men and women, which is laudable, we must never forget nor diminish the significant differences, both emotional and physical, that men and women have as well. Women can become pregnant but can't impregnate others; men can impregnate others but can't become pregnant. Women pass through menopause, men don't. Women have menstrual cycles, men don't. The primary female hormone is estrogen; the primary male hormone is testosterone. Women, for the most part, are more nurturing than men. The differences between the genders are numerous. In fact, I put my students through an exercise one day in class where we listed on the board differences between men and women. The exercise ended up completely covering the chalkboard on three sides of the room. We have also done in-class exercises where male and female students are asked to write down the qualities they most desire in a mate. Invariably, women write down intrinsic characteristics like being a good father, a good provider, kind, funny, understanding, etc. Men, on the other hand, are much more likely to write down extrinsic things like physical qualities and attributes. This is the basis for the statement referred to in the first paragraph of today's column. Because men tend to be more ego driven than women are, the vanity of men surfaces much more often. Men in general want women to find them attractive and desirable and, consequently, any attention paid to a man by a woman is interpreted as flirting and men interpret flirting as an indication on the part of the woman that she wants to be more than just friends. Women, on the other hand, are very comfortable in having male friends and often give no thought at all to the man being anything other than a friend. This is when misunderstandings are most likely to happen. A woman can laugh, talk and touch with a male friend of hers with no ulterior motives in play at all and yet the man always reads more into what's going on than is intended by the woman. If a man finds a woman attractive and desirable, he is almost emotionally compelled to think that any friendliness on her part at all towards him has to be based in a mutual physical attraction to him and a desire to take things beyond friendship. In fact, a lot of friendships have been permanently terminated because of this misread by men. Men want to think that any woman they find physically attractive "wants" them, when most of the time they don't. This is why men end up making fools of themselves much more often than women do by trying to take the relationship somewhere the woman didn't intend it to go. If you're out in public very much at all, especially where alcohol is being consumed, you can see this scenario played out over and over again. It's a perplexing problem for women. In fact, many women develop a complex because they don't want to be perceived by the man as flirting or wanting anything other than a friendship because they either think the man is a nice person they enjoy being around or the woman is just naturally friendly to everyone. But the woman finds herself in the paradox of not wanting to act stuck up or aloof but at the same time, not wanting the man or men she talks to think there's anything else involved except a desire to be social and have a good time. Many men are so insecure in who they are and the picture they present to others they take any kind of acknowledgement by a female as an invitation to go to the next level when that was not the desire of the woman at all. If the man takes his false impressions to the point where the woman actually has to verbally tell him she's either not interested or he must have gotten the wrong idea, then that ego-driven, insecure man will often tell others that the woman is nothing more than a tease and a flirt when, in fact, that's not the impression the woman was trying to leave at all. Male-female relationships are a treacherous game with all sorts of innuendoes and interpretations going on all the time with misunderstandings and hurt feelings galore. Perhaps if we just practiced being more real and more perceptive and, just maybe, if we could put our egos on the shelf for awhile and stop reading desirability into every move and every word women say to us, the social world would be a much less hostile and potentially explosive place to be and all of us could enjoy the pleasure of other peoples' company without reaching the wrong conclusions and sabotaging potential friendships before they ever have the chance to develop. When it comes to most men, that's asking a lot. ****************************************************************** Mike At Night is this months guest on KSNK's Forum 8 hosted by Allison Toepperwein. The program will air at noon today (Saturday) on NBC affiliates in Oberlin and Garden City Kansas. ____________ Mike can be e-mailed at mikeatnight@hotmail.com |