Because they put up with us.
Face it: What seems like perfectly normal behavior to us is bona fide alien-nation stuff to them. And yet, often, with great grace and good humor, men do their level best to accommodate the needs of these strange female creatures. One woman recalls how a guy she befriended in an Austrian airport walked all over said airport with her in a feverish, furious quest to purchase . . . a lipstick. “I had lost my luggage and I felt so grungy and unkempt,” she says. “I just really needed some lipstick. This guy, Jan, walked from kiosk to kiosk with me for about an hour. He really tried to be helpful—he kept holding up mascaras and sunblocks and saying, ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’ The only time he got irritable was when we finally found some and the shopkeeper accidentally tried to sell me the wrong color. Jan acted as though the guy had tried to kill my whole family or something—he was so indignant and adamant that I get exactly what I want.”
Another woman remembers how she and a male co-worker used to go every day to pick up lunch at a deli nearby. “I was on a diet at the time. I used to order the same salad—just lettuce and tomato, no avocado, no croutons, and just vinegar, no oil, on the side. I made a real stink about it; I must have seemed like such a little fusspot—like Sally from When Harry Met Sally. Very high-maintenance. Anyway, one day, we got back to the office and Chip unpacked the bag. He looked at my salad and exploded, ‘Those idiots! They didn’t put your dressing on the side! And there are croutons all over the place! How the hell do they expect you to eat this?’ Before I could stop him, he had stormed out, salad in hand, determined to right this great wrong that had been done to me. I loved him for that. Because it was important to me, it became important to him.”
Basically, even if it doesn’t make sense to them, men will, more often than not, do their best to keep their mouths shut and go along with the whole rigmarole. They can be a pretty accepting bunch—which is more than we can say for us. So the next time you’re tempted to snatch the remote control out of the hands of your brother or roommate (or even your new boyfriend?) and shake it in his face and scream, “What is this, an extension of your penis?” stop and think about the night he unquestioningly walked around with an extra pair of black stockings in his breast pocket, in case the ones you were wearing sprouted a run. And then shake it in his face anyway. You can’t help yourself.
Because they don’t want us to be afraid.
Sure, we’re brave and independent. We are woman, hear us roar. But there are still times when even the most self-sufficient of us can turn into shrinking violets. When we might feel paralyzed with fear. Times when it can be awful nice to turn to some guy and silently mouth, “Help!”
Which is, more often than not, exactly what he’ll do. At the top of the list of Situations Where We’d Most Like to Have a Man Around the House are those that involve visitors from the insect world. “For three years, I would call my super to come up and kill waterbugs in my bathroom,” said a thirty-year-old New York district attorney. “They were so big; they terrified me. Every time he came up, he’d give me an indulgent smile and then quickly whisk the thing down the toilet. When I apologized profusely, he’d always say, ‘No, no, I understand; they’re big, these waterbugs. Hard to kill.’ He never made me feel ridiculous or wimpy. And he never complained about doing it.” Another New Yorker told us how she used to tape paper cups upside-down over roaches she found in her kitchen and then have a male friend who lived a block away come over and dispose of them. “I couldn’t stand the crunching noise they made when I stepped on them,” she says. “It was scary enough just trapping them under the cups. I needed my friend to do the rest. He was always nice about it — he’d try to make me feel better by telling me that it wasn’t a roach, it was a piece of food, or a ball of lint, or a paint chip. Once he even tried to tell me it was a ladybug. He wanted me to think that I didn’t have a roach problem; he didn’t want me to stress out about it.”
But bug squashing isn’t the only way that guys can soothe our fears. Don’t forget all the times a guy has insisted on driving or walking you home after dark, the way he’ll wait in the car until he sees that you’re safely in the door. A woman who felt nervous about living in a first-floor apartment regularly depended on the kindness of neighbors—more specifically, her upstairs neighbor. “We had become good friends, and often we’d go out at night, to dinner or a movie,” she says.
“When we got back, if it was late, I would be anxious about walking into a dark apartment. It was irrational—the building was perfectly safe—butI was always afraid that someone would be lurking in the shadows somewhere. We fell into a routine—I’d unlock the door and he’d say, ‘Wait here,’ and then he’d go methodically from room to room, switching on lights and looking into closets. Then he’d say, ‘All safe,’ and I’d go in. It was so silly—I knew it and he knew it—but he always acted as though my fears were perfectly normal and legitimate. He never made me feel stupid about it.”
Or what about the woman who was watching a video with a good male friend when a rather spectacular car accident occurred, right outside her window. “We heard the screeching of tires and then the crunch of metal. He looked out the window, gasped, and then, right away, turned to me and said, ‘Don’t look. Don’t look—you’ll be scared.’ Then he ran to call 911. Of course I eventually looked anyway—some poor motorcyclist was lying on the street under a car—but I always remember how my friend’s first thought was to save me the awful sight. In that totally inappropriate moment, I felt happy that he was such a good friend to me.”
to be continued
