So, the other day the garbage disposal in the house broke. After getting the number for the repair person, I sent it to my wife for her to give the guy a call and schedule the repair. Now mind you, normally when we need a repair or anything related to taking care of stuff with the house, my wife usually handles it. I make sure she has the money to get it done. Well, this time when I sent her the number she responded, “Why can’t you call?” I said, “Because you normally take care of those things.” With a slight attitude she said, “Well you could have called the guy as easily as I could have.”
My reply, “Ummm…ok, I’ll handle it.”
After calling the repair guy and setting up the appointment and letting her know what he charged (like she asked me to) she says….”Well…we need to call a few other people and get price quotes. He’s kinda high. Now that I think about it, we can probably just YouTube it and do it ourselves…you think?”
The dialogue that happened between us is the reason I asked her to handle it in the first place. For me I saw the problem, found the solution, and put the solution in play (repair guy, Friday night at 5:30pm Boom!) Now after I’ve done that, suddenly she wants to add 13 more steps to what I saw as a 3 step process. Now I’m a little frustrated and I’m back to….”Well how about you just handle it!” I know some of my brothers out there feel me on this! This got me to thinking even more about how in our relationships we can allow our man and woman differences to cause more frustration than they need to. Many times that frustration comes from the fact that we want our mates to think as we do and when that doesn’t happen sometimes it can cause conflict. I heard Pastor Steven Furtick say “Frustration is the difference between what we expect and what we experience.” Here are a few areas where men and women may differ and if we just seek to understand we won’t be as frustrated.
Okay…I know every woman in America is going to say this is an “excuse” and won’t even try to understand this point, but if you understand it, you just might make your lives easier.
Have you ever heard the saying, “Men are like waffles and women are like spaghetti?”
When you pour syrup on a waffle, it falls into the squares…every section is separated from the next. Nice and orderly right?
Well, when you put sauce on spaghetti, it falls all over the place, no rhyme or reason. Once the sauce is spread, it’s all in a big pile but it ends up working out just fine. For men if we have established clear roles and duties then we will probably do exactly what our role entails…we will do what’s in the squares. Women however, are more “big picture” oriented. Things can be all over the place and everywhere for them, but they make sense of it all even amid the seeming chaos.
See how the story concludes on the next page —>
So, back to my story about the disposal repair…of course I could have called the repair guy…but that’s not normally my responsibility; it wasn’t in my waffle square, if you will please note though, that I called once she asked me to!
Ladies another example might be dishes in the sink. If your guy walks past a sink full of dirty dishes 10 times, he will probably continue to walk on by if doing the dishes isn’t something that he normally does in the house. However, if he is like me, if you ask him to do something he will oblige. So, instead of getting mad or passive aggressive, do yourself a favor and just ASK him to do the dishes. Take it from a guy: yes, he sees them there but it probably won’t click in his mind “I should do these dishes” if that is not something that normally falls into one of his waffle squares!
I hear every lady right now saying, “Well I shouldn’t have to ask!!!” and I understand because in your spaghetti mind handling multiple things comes naturally, but it doesn’t for US! If you think I’m lying then watch your man try to multitask and see how well he does. My wife gets frustrated with me because I just can’t seem to talk to her and watch TV at the same time. She thinks I’m just ignoring her when realistically I’m just not good at multi-tasking. Now that she understands that about me, if she wants to get something across to me, she will ask me to mute the TV or turn away from the computer and face her as we speak. Just like a man I try to prove that I can do both and hit her with the “I’m listening babe,” but if I’m honest with myself while I might HEAR her, I’m really not LISTENING (she has also figured this out…thus the muted TV and facing her when we speak!).
Fellas, we don’t get a pass on everything just because we are different in our thought process. Just like we want our wives to cater to our thought process, we must cater to theirs sometimes as well. For example, sometimes we have to ANTICIPATE her needs even if they aren’t CLEAR. Every now and then instead of walking past those dishes, just go ahead and do them. Sometimes even though she normally calls the repair guy, you go ahead and call and get the information needed. The truth is that, even though I got a little frustrated initially with my wife for making the disposal repair more complicated than I thought it needed to be, she ultimately made me very proud of her. She didn’t get an estimate she was happy with, so she found a video tutorial on You Tube and replaced the disposal on her own while I was out of town for work. This is another testament to men and women using each other’s strengths and differences for a better result. Besides…who doesn’t like saving a few dollars?!
BMWK: Do you and your wife have a different thought process?