"Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship." - Oscar Wilde
The poker game is about to begin, and my friend excuses himself for a moment to call his girlfriend.
Figuring a short call to touch base will prevent interrupting an "all-in" situation later in the game, he steps off to the other room and I hear normal salutations ensue.
Five minutes later, he has moved further down the hall and shortly I hear the back door swing shut.
After ten minutes of waiting for him, I check the back porch and see my friend sitting solemnly, nervous and frustrated, waving me to go on without him. Hoping he will rejoin the group, we begin the game.
Five hours later, the poker is over but the conversation is not. The next day I hear that my friend and his girlfriend broke up that night, about six hours into a conversation begun on the best of terms, and he doesn't know what went wrong.
While this is an extreme case, every guy I've known in a relationship with a girl has found himself trapped on the phone with her after what initially was a simple courtesy call.
Sure, we love to talk to our girlfriends - that's why we're with them (hopefully at least one of the reasons), but if you're on the phone with her instead of hanging out with the guys, is there really a difference if she's around or not? And why does such a conflict of conversation exist between the genders? Is there any cure?
The gap begins during childhood when children associate only with their own genders and continue to do so unabated until co-ed parties and sleepovers are acceptable (something I'm still waiting for).
Boys will be boys, socializing through contact sports and video games. Their phone conversations consist of thirty-second exchanges focusing on the logistics of what to do, where to do it, and how to get it done. In groups, the major fear is physical confrontation and the only words held back are those warranting a beat down.
In Girl World (I'm going out on a limb here), women progress from play groups to playground groups, to lunch groups, to shopping groups, to dinner groups and so forth.
Their biggest moment in their childhoods was graduating from a toy phone to their own room phone, and the biggest arguments centered on that extra line, phone limits, and calls from boys (which seemed like such a hassle that I just never called).
Instead of violence, girls had to fear the evils of gossip and backstabbing as punishment for stepping out of line in their groups. If boys gossiped, they'd get hit, and that was it.
I'll always remember the first relationship I had where, all of a sudden, I had to spend considerable amounts of time on the phone. When the first pause in conversation arose, I literally asked, "So what do we do now?" Apparently, you just talk. Strange, but I didn't hate it - for the first hour.
And this is where all males find the first stumbling block in a relationship (provided that you didn't swap her for her sister) - we simply are not good on the phone.
Give us a topic, a direction, a question, a scenario and we'll break it down to a conclusion, a solution, or a stepping-stone. But give us enough time, and we'll slip up. Our lives are just too full of distractions, and finding a guy able to give anything, especially the phone, 100 percent is rare (even a football game has commercials).
Sidetracked, we say the wrong thing and the girl is quicker to the kill than a cheetah. Now we're trapped in a game of semantics over the most irrelevant subject known to man ("Yes, the shot glass was facing the front. OK - it was facing the front. You're just saying that. No I'm not.")
To you, it's conversation, but we just want to get off the phone without a harsh goodbye.
Bring in text messages and instant messenger and suddenly the playing field looks a little better. Now, men have time to reread what she's saying and make sure they're ready before sending a message back.
But let's face it - we still have no idea what we're doing, yet that shouldn't be misinterpreted as being uncaring. We appreciate that you were brought up to value minutes on the phone, but we'd rather be there next to you (because we're better at reading facial gestures than punctuation marks).
So simply tell us when to stop by, hang up, and begin the anticipation game - that's foreplay we don't have to work for.
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