Women are from Venus, men from the basement

By E. Effendi

JAKARTA (JP): Communicating with the opposite sex has scared, and sometimes killed, many men.

Let's face it, although men and women basically come from different planets, they both have to live together, and sometimes in the same house. Therefore, it is unavoidable that they communicate with each other. However, although many relationship experts will try to convince me otherwise, I think the two genders do not share the same language when they are talking to each other, which leads to the risk that people will end up in conflict or even starring in a John Wayne Bobbit incident.

Yes, there are many interpretation problems that arise when people talk with the other sex, and unfortunately, those problems are understandable only to those of the same gender. Men and women always blame each other for any miscommunication without first trying to recognize the cause of that misunderstanding.

Men do not communicate enough.

The most common thing that women find unsatisfactory when they communicate with men is that men do not communicate back.

For example, one evening, when I had just come back from a job interview, my girlfriend called me and asked how the interview went. I answered that it went fine and continued with "bye", because after the ride home in a bus filled with the same amount of people as the entire population of Belgium, I needed to hit the shower right away. But my girlfriend continued with, "That's all?"

Apparently, my answer had not satisfied her enough. She needed to know every little detail about the interview: who interviewed me, what he was wearing, every question that was asked and my every answer and the interviewer's response to that answer.

A woman needs to know every little thing that happens to everyone she knows because she needs to talk about them with her lady friends, whereas men tend to forget about them.

And you can not blame them for that, because men, with their limited brain space, have to remember a large amount of information. They have to prioritize and summarize all the data that they receive and decide what they want to keep in their tiny brains. They have to keep enough room in their brains to store all the vital and important information that they need, such as the name of all the NBA champions, and the phone numbers of all the pizza delivery services.

Men do not want to talk about their feelings.

Yes, it is true, most guys try to avoid any conversation with women because sometimes, out of the blue, women can bring to the conversation the topic of feelings (or relationships, or fashion).

However, nothing can stop women from asking their men about their feelings. A woman will keep pushing her man with thousands of questions until he has to stop pretending that he has ear problems and answer them.

That man will appear to be concentrating hard, as though he is thinking about why E is equal to MC2. Then, after the longest and most silent five minutes ever, he finally puts his deepest feeling into words by saying firmly, "I am not sure".

But the truth is, in that five minutes he has not been thinking about his feelings. The only activity that has been on his mind was trying to find the right thing to say that will let him off the hook, which of course is harder than trying to explain to an oyster how electricity works.

He also knows that later, no matter what topic they are discussing, his partner will ask him about feelings, relationships, or fashion ("What I do not agree with in George Soros's remarkable three hour explanation about the future of our financial condition is, umm, well, his haircut. I mean, hel-lo? His face is so not the curly type").

There are many guys who can open up and express their feelings. Everyday, you can see them openly and honestly shouting their feelings when they are stuck in a traffic jam, mostly in the form of a single f-word or s-word. You also see many guys discussing, freely and without shame, what they feel they want to eat for dinner. But that is as far as guys go when they are talking about their feelings.

Men are always distracted.

A woman often complains that when a man is talking to her, his eyes and mind are not focused on her, which proves that he is not paying a full attention. Many women say that men are easily distracted by many other things, such as women, TV, cars, women, sport news, pizza and women.

I must admit that men are sight animals, which means they have an instinct that always drives their eyes to the sight of breasts. But that does not mean that all men can't pay full attention to one thing. When a man wants to concentrate on one thing, he can leave everything aside and put all his determination to it.

To prove that, at this moment while I am writing, I have placed a Playboy magazine, open to the centerfold, on the side of the monitor. And I, as an intellectual and determined man, will prove that the naked picture will not affect my concentra ... Breast! Boobies! Bazonga! Hooters! Bazooms!