Living with women is like riding on an emotional rollercoaster ride with its exhilarating, unpredictable, and equally confusing. Being a husband and a father for more than 20 years, I have seen it all. My wife and my daughter, who is now 20 years old, have been my personal laboratory for studying the confusing world of female behavior.
Here's the thing I have seen about living life with women, one minute everything's great. The house is full of laughter, conversation flows like honey, and life is complete. Then BAM! The switch gets flipped. No warning signs or anything. The mood changes overnight. As men, we're left standing there, completely baffled, replaying the last few minutes in our heads trying to figure out what happened.
The way God created women is just mind-boggling. Their ability to experience and express such a wide range of feelings in a matter of minutes is both incredible and, I imagine, at times exhausting to keep up with. It's like we men are watching a master artist using every color available on the palette, while we men huddle with our comfortable primary colors.
Talk about self-centeredness, one of the more dominant traits of feminine nature. Now, this isn't all bad. It's just the way they are created. This shows up in everything from simple day-to-day decisions to how they process things. It's just something in their nature that we men have to learn to live with and accept, not fight against.
Their relationship with food is another interesting aspect. Women approach the choice of foods with the precision of a surgeon. Their finicky eating and idiosyncrasies make restaurant choice look like negotiating an international treaty. Most men, on the other hand, would be satisfied with a burger from any decent establishment.
Having my wife and daughter live with me has provided me with a front-row seat to these behaviors. Though they're both women, they exhibit these characteristics differently. It's as if seeing the same movie acted by two different actresses, the script is the same, but the performance is different.
Let's talk about one of the most frustrating things about women - their peculiar behavior around money. It's amazing how they will keep their own money as if it's Bitcoin and yet expect men to cover every check that comes through.
You see it all the time. Talk about their own salary, that's all personal savings. Their cash sits untouched in their account, gathering cobwebs, while the bloke is expected to cover all expenses ranging from dinner dates to household bills. It's as if their wallet has a one-way door - money goes in but rarely comes out.
The final kicker is how this action is rationalized. "You're the man, you should give." "My money is my money, and your money is our money." These are so deeply ingrained that to question them typically creates conflict. Even in the situation where both individuals are holding full-time employment, somehow or another the man's wages are viewed as the family budget and hers as a personal piggy bank.
This dynamic is played out on a daily basis. Is it paying bills? They glanced at you. House rent and school fees? Your credit card can do the dirty work. Grocery shopping? That's clearly coming out of the man's wallet too. Meanwhile, their own pay just can't seem to come out for joint expenses.
What is most fascinating is how this behavior does not align with current discourse surrounding equality. Women want equal rights and opportunities as they rightfully do, but when it comes time to pay the bills, suddenly switching gender roles are very convenient. It is a discriminatory application of equality that is leaving a lot of men in wonderment.
These are not complaints, but rather field notes from the coexistence battlefields. Their emotional depth might be hard to manage, but it adds incredible richness to life. Those mood swings that have the potential to flip our lives around are the same energy that puts passion and intensity into our relationships. And that egoistic side so often comes with deep empathy and caring skills that enhance our lives.
Marriage and fatherhood have shown me that peaceful cohabitation is not a question of attempting to break these habits, it's a question of knowing how to accommodate them. Struggling against the tide is useless. Instead, learning to roll with the punches makes the world a better place for everyone.
Living with women is a fine balance. Their special nature defines our daily existence in a way that can be both enriching and trying. Our duty is not to revolt or reform these tendencies but to master dancing with them in the big dance of life.
Experience has taught me that the very things which drive us mad are at times the things which make life worth living. Those refined, at times infuriating qualities are what give women their character, interesting, complex, and indispensable partners along the path of life.
So here's the lesson we men can take from all this, instead of getting frustrated with these differences, love them. Practice dancing along. Because at the end of the day, it's these very disparate qualities that enrich our relationships, add color to our life, and make our journey more purposeful.