Rule Reversal

Curiously enough, women also experience difficulty in shopping for their significant others for Valentine’s Day. Or, more accurately, they experience difficulty in finding gift items that their significant other finds as exceptional as they think he ought to. It seems counter-intuitive, given that most women (in Western cultures) are socialized to enjoy shopping, and even those who do not are generally fairly good at, particularly when compared to their male counterparts. Shopping in general should not be difficult for these women, and men in particular are not all that difficult to shop for (some combination of food, drink, sports-related materials, gadgets, or in extreme cases, sex, will almost always be acceptable). Perhaps even more to the point, most men do not have a strong emotional investment in the holiday, and are thus unlikely to attach much importance to receiving the perfect gift – or the perfectly romantic one.

Therein lies the true nature of the problem. As noted in my last post, the often-heard female complaint that “this just isn’t important to you” is surprisingly accurate: V-Day is not actually important to the majority of males in most Western cultures. Even highly intelligent males who are capable of understanding that the holiday is important to their significant other and taking appropriate action BECAUSE it matters to their partner are unlikely to muster any strong emotional need to receive anything. Thus, in many cases, female efforts to find gifts for their significant others are unlikely to create the desired emotional reaction. The males in question may be pleased (in rare cases even delighted) with the gifts they have received, but they have almost certainly not spent days/weeks anticipating the event and wondering what their significant other was planning for them.

Compounding the problem, many women persist in their own traditional form of denial: seeing their significant other as the man they would like him to be, rather than the person he actually is. This may result in tragic events, such as women who enter and remain in abusive relationships because they believe they can “change” the man they have into the one the want, but it does also result in comic events, such as a man looking at something intended to be The Ultimate Valentine’s Gift and being unable to determine what it is, let along why he would want one. As a public service, I would like to offer the following “reversed” (e.g. female to male) rules:

Rule One: Don’t assume that your significant other cares as much about V-Day as you do, or has spent as much time/emotion anticipating it as you have.
Rule Two: Never purchase things he doesn’t use but you think he ought to. If he doesn’t moisturize already, a V-Day gift is not likely to get him to start.
Rule Three: Never purchase lifestyle or wardrobe accessories that conform to your ideal of him. For example, if doesn’t already carry a “man-purse” you probably shouldn’t get him his first one. If he already does, there’s nothing wrong with getting him a new one, but otherwise…
Rule Four: You can figure out the difference between tan, taupe, nude, suntan, ecru and light brown; you can remember the difference between football and baseball.
Rule Five: You can explain the difference between three hundred different styles of black shoes; you can remember which sports team out of thirty he actually likes. If he’s a Dodgers fan (for example), don’t get him Giants or Yankees paraphernalia.
Rule Six: If you find yourself arguing with Rule Five because baseball teams (or football teams or even rugby teams) are not important to you, listen to yourself for a minute. Who do you sound like?

In his classic book Nice Guys Sleep Alone, the legendary humor writer and screenwriter Bruce Feirstein writes that when somebody is trying to change the way you dress, cut your hair, wear your beard, and so on, “what they really want is someone else.” I’m not saying that any woman who keeps being frustrated by her significant other’s reactions to V-Day gifts (and most likely birthday and anniversary gifts, too) really wants someone else; I’m simply suggesting that if your partner enjoys beer, steak, baseball and sex it makes more sense to buy him a case of microbrew, a gift pack from Omaha Steaks, a replica jersey from his favorite team with his name on it, or just wrap yourself up in a ribbon than it does to get upset with him for not being thrilled to receive a day at the spa, a tie that you liked, or a “murse”…