Men & Women? Or Women & Men?

Do the sexes really differ, in childhood and later on as adults? I turn this over in my head fairly often. My husband, for instance, seems to be blind in one eye and unable to see out of the other. The moment I pull into the drive or walk in through the back door, my attention goes straight to everything that needs doing. Trash in the yard, trash in the house, all of it waiting to be gathered up or thrown out. Things that wore out long ago and should have been swapped for new ones. Projects somebody started years back and left half-done, now rotting toward the point where they'll have to be knocked down and probably never rebuilt, after all that money and effort went into them. I notice every one of these, every single time, and it wears on me. It's a to-do list so long I can't even begin it, never mind finish.

Men do notice things, mind you. What they tend to notice is whatever you've rigged up to deal with a problem, and that they'll complain about, threaten to rip out or toss. A few of them (heaven help us) will cuss about it, as if you'd earned a scolding instead of a thank-you for at least trying. Look closely and you can see the maneuver: nobody wants to own the pile of problems you're stuck living around day after day, so the blame gets handed back to you.

People like to say men are better at locking onto one thing and tuning out whatever doesn't matter. The flip side of that claim is that women juggle more and finish more because they simply can't put things down the way men can.

Men have their ways of letting steam off too. They'll goof around, trade talk about what other people are or aren't doing, pull a prank on a buddy and then shrug it off by the next morning, laughing about the whole thing. Women carry it differently. We take it to heart and, elephant-style, we don't forget.

I still remember my roommate's future sorority sisters deciding to toss me into the shower with my clothes on. I fought them like a wildcat. They wrecked the room, emptied out my belongings, tried to haze me right along with my roommate, and I wasn't even pledging with them. I didn't have it coming, and the anger hasn't fully left me. Guys in the same spot might have shaken it off, or decided afterward that it was hilarious.

Men can be furious with one another, throw punches even, and seem to patch it up and move on by the following day. Put them in training with a bar they're expected to clear, and they go in assuming they'll be treated harshly. Then they brag about having lived through it, and sometimes they scheme together ahead of time about how to get one over on the instructors trying to wear them down. For them it's part of the game. Maybe some of the rough treatment women recruits get traces back to men not grasping that women won't, or can't, or simply don't care to play along. A guy thing, in other words. Do men stand there thinking, the way Henry Higgins does in My Fair Lady, why can't a woman think more like a man?

Then there's the deeper question of whether men even register any of this as a problem they're on the hook to fix. Or is that labor left to women? Do they find it harder to live with than we do, or do they figure they've already handled it back when you couldn't even get them to look at the thing, let alone touch it? Maybe they decide hurt feelings don't register, that such feelings ought to evaporate as fast as theirs do, or go unspoken, or just not count. If you can take a punch to the face and be back to normal with the guy the next morning, business as usual, then I suppose you can manage that. For me there may still be a bruise, an actual injury, a reminder of the debt the person who hurt me owes, something that won't forgive so quickly, if it forgives at all.

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