Women Don’t Know Anything About Guys
I knew something was wrong when I walked into the bedroom.
Men don’t sense much, like emotions, subtlety, or the passage of time after high school, but we do realize when something un-guy has happened. And it happened to me.
A free video rental card, a dollar I’d found on the street, and scraps of paper that, at one point may have been movie tickets to “The Empire Strikes Back” sat on my dresser (guys don’t clean out their wallets—ever). Someone, I’ll call her my wife, had violated something more private to me than childhood memories, my fear of clowns, or my prostate. She’d gone through my wallet, a genuine cowhide wallet with real money in it. (While devalued to the point I couldn’t use it to buy a tamale in a poor mountain village, but the last time I checked, a dollar still counts as “real” money.)
“Uh, honey,” I began, words dropping out of my head like rocks. “Why are my ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ tickets on the dresser?”
“I went through your wallet,” she said, like Jeffrey Dahmer confessing to police, but not realizing killing people and eating them was wrong. But she knew. Oh, she knew.
Did her parents teach her nothing?
“Let’s use this money to (insert something I didn’t want to do),” she said picking up my dollar, oblivious to the fact that I was in shock. She had broken Guy Rule Number One: never go through a guy’s wallet.
After I regained consciousness, I wondered what other manformation she wasn’t privy to.
10 things women don’t want to know about guys:
1. A guy’s wallet is more personal to him than the first time he did anything. It’s a sacred place, home to an insurance card, 42 cents, a football schedule from 1997, and a Hooter’s receipt we don’t want you to know about. Stay away from the wallet, don’t touch the wallet, the wallet doesn’t really inhabit your reality.
2. Football games, even Pop Warner football games played by kids we don’t know, are more important to us than birthdays, anniversaries, open houses, Pampered Chef parties, your family, and weddings—unless there’s an open bar; and then there’d better be a TV and it had better be on.
3. Men don’t like romantic comedies, floral patterns, shopping, or window treatments. If your man likes any of these, or actually uses the term “window treatment” when he means “curtains,” don’t expect children.
4. We lie to you more than we tell the truth. If you ask, “Do you mind going to my parent’s house for dinner?” the answer “yes” is a lie. If you ask, “While my sister’s staying with us, would you please not mention her divorce? You know how much that upsets her,” the answer “yes” is a lie. “Did you see that trashy blonde in the halter top?” will also demand a lie.
5. We don’t like meals that don’t include meat. The perfect man meal is beef and alligator wrapped in an entire pig.
6. We don’t like to talk about our day because it’s over. We’re ready to talk about something else, preferably in one-syllable words while holding at least one beer.
7. We don’t like the same music as you (see No. 3).
8. We don’t really enjoy having people in our house. Frankly, having people in our house makes us unhappy because we can’t walk around in our underwear.
9. Clint Eastwood is a religious figure. Don’t speak badly of Clint Eastwood and don’t look directly at Clint Eastwood. It’s a scientific fact men are incapable of moving off the couch during a “Dirty Harry” movie. Please subscribe to TV Guide to plan our social calendar.
10. We don’t remember things not related to our daily routine. The fact that you’re claustrophobic might push out some vital piece of manformation, such as how to run a band saw or who has the right-of-way at a four-way stop. And, yes, sports trivia is vital information. That’s how guys establish the social pecking order.
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You can order Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at jasonoffuttbooks.blogspot.com.
