People love a good mystery, they will say– the mysterious stranger with the shadowy past, the tight-lipped acquaintance of many secrets. “What do they have in their medicine cabinet?” we wonder in friends’ bathrooms.
Men tend not to find each other mysterious. We don’t spend much time thinking about hidden messages and unspoken intentions. We tend to assume that we can take each other at face value.
As a father of a two-year-old son, my son, for all his uniqueness and individuality, isn’t an inscrutable mystery to me. The fact that he is a male explains a lot. When he pounds on things and throws things and runs around uncontrollably, screaming for no apparent reason, that all makes sense to me. Kicking and throwing balls, all that physicality doesn’t concern me in the least. Jumping off chairs and sofas, all the things he does that cause people to say, “Be careful! That’s dangerous!” I can relate. If I tell him, “You’ll hurt yourself,” I know that just makes him all the more determined, because a boy is supposed to hurt himself and not shy away from daring, dangerous, precocious feats.
The women in his life don’t seem to have that intuitive connection with him.
My wife and I might have a baby girl. If we do, I thoroughly expect to be at something of a loss in helping that child navigate through childhood and life, because I know nothing about being a little girl.
I’d love to have a girl, because I’d love my wife to have that intuitive connection with her that I share with my son.
We are mysterious, we men. Not only do we like to watch sports on TV, everything from football to golf, we even like to listen to the broadcasters narration of the events.
Sometimes we have to watch games that become such civic events that even casual fans are interested enough to sit down with the devotees.
Men are baffled that some people would rather have their ordinary conversations while the game is on than listen to the game, while the casual fans seem baffled that we would prefer to listen to the expert analysts than listen to our friends’ uninformed commentary, questions, and unrelated conversations.
Each side can criticize the other, but in matters of professional sports, the casual fan would do well to be mature and respect the experience preferred by the true believers, as we would all do well to respect the mystery presented to us by the inexplicable other– i.e., the opposite gender.
We can talk during the commercials.