Untitiled

I find men to be utterly fascinating. I really do. I think they are generally very direct, straight to the point, simple creatures. I like how they tend to see things in black and white. I like how they don’t over analyze things or get too emotionally involved when dealing with situations. Women sometimes tend to over think things, men generally don’t.

It is simple. One day, I was having a conversation with this Dude who was all up in my business at the time. I knew I could never go into a relationship with him, and I was trying to let him down gently, but he was being so persistent. So I decided in a flash of inspiration to use an analogy to get my message across.

“Okay” I said “Imagine if you for whatever reasons that are personal to you, decided that you wanted a blue ball. As in that’s what you really want. Blue or nothing right?” He nodded. “So what do you do? You go to the market, to people who sell stuff like that, and you search far and wide. You see many, many balls, in different colors, red, white, green, yellow, brown, but-no blue. What do you do? You go home, and decide to either come back another day or to go to another market and continue your search from there. Right?”

He stared at me slightly puzzled “Er no, wrong. I buy any ball I see, red, green whatever, take it home and paint it blue. Simple, why would I want to keep walking around?”

Two things hit me in that moment 1. That I had failed miserably in getting my message across and would have to think up another strategy  2.The huge difference in the way men and women solve problems.

I took an emotional stance towards solving the problem, I had to find the perfect colour or nothing, and I was willing to walk the ends of the earth (or at least the breadth of Lagos State markets) in search of it. He wasn’t. What he was willing to do was take whatever was available and make it work. This was a few years ago, when I was still in the early stages of coming to the realization that men were from Mars and women from Venus.

You know what though? The thing about being practical is that it simplifies things. Women are not the visual creatures men are. This means that with a few exceptions *cough* (you-know-yourselves), physical attractiveness is not as important to us as it is for men. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard a female say something along the lines of “Oh I really wasn’t attracted to him at all when we first met, but then when I got to know him better, my feelings totally changed. Now, I think he’s really cute”

Well, I, Mimi B have personally NEVER, ever met, seen or heard of a man who said the same thing. If a man is not attracted to a woman, then nothing for her period. No matter how nice or charming he finds her. No matter how well they get along and how much they have in common. No matter that they can talk on the phone for hours and he finds himself confiding in her. He simply puts her in the ‘friendship’ pile and there she will remain, until she wisens up, gets rid of any feeling she may have towards him, dusts herself up and get back out there. As long as he does not find her physically attractive or appealing, he will never take their relationship from a friendship to something more intimate.  Shikena.

I’m not quite certain that this is a bad thing though. I think men were created that way for a reason. That’s why (in my opinion) women have the ability to alter their appearance in ways that a man simply cannot. What I am saying, is that I really believe that there are no ugly women, simply lazy ones.  All na packaging. As long as a woman looks reasonably put together, sooner or later, men will come knocking.

I believe that the differences in the way either gender sees things has led to a lot of misunderstanding, misconceptions and  miscommunication over the years, decades and centuries (millennia even?). Like was mentioned in my last post, it seems women are naturally more expressive. We like to talk about our feelings and analyze what went wrong. The result of this is that most relationship stories out there are told from a woman’s perspective.

This brings me to the point of my post. I would like to give a few guys out there the opportunity to air their views and express their opinions on my blog. I want to hear relationship stories, the good, the bad, the ugly and the wonderful, all told from a male stand point. I am also interested in receiving write ups about any rants or raves you guys have about the female folk.  I have decided to title this series “He Speaks” and will run it alongside my normal posts on my random, mulls, rants, etcetera, read-my-blog title-and-you’ll-get-the-drift-posts.

Any interested contributors should feel free to contact me via email on: mimibarberblogspot@gmail.com.

I am more than willing to put up guest posts anonymously if a contributor so desires. I am aware of the fact that not everybody is comfortable putting their personal business out there. So, if you’d like to remain anonymous, please state so clearly in your email.

I look forward to your responses.

For those of you who are wondering, yes,  you are absolutely right. This post is partly a shameless plug to increase the number of my male readers. But it is also inspired by a genuine interest in the subject content.

Cheers