Consider the following scenarios:
Guy to guy:
"Hey man, you forgot to pick me up last night. I waited for two hours."
"Yeah dude. I'm really sorry. My bad. (insert reason for why he didn't show)."
...life goes on.
Guy to girlfriend/wife/fiance etc:
"Hey babe, you forgot to pick me up last night. I waited for two hours."
"(insert any other argument, related or unrelated, that she has a better chance of winning)."
I don't understand this phenomenon. As far as I can tell it's pretty much universal. Girls just don't like to say sorry - to boys that is. Most girls have shared a moment with one of her girlfriends, involving a couch, a box of kleenex and some quantity of alcohol and tearfully apologized for every perceived slight since the dawn of time itself. But not to us.
I freely admit that in discussions or arguments with my fiance, I am often wrong. I find myself the one offering the apology the VAST majority of the time. It used to cause me a lot of stress. Lost nights of sleep. Hours of my day attempting to figure out where I had gone wrong.
Then it hit me one day and I realized there were actually two solutions. It was my own little Eureka moment. It came, I have decided to believe, because my fiance overstepped her bounds. There's some sort of unwritten code that women follow that limits them to the amount of arguments they are allowed to win before we start to catch on. I was losing so many of them I started to ask myself the question: How could I be wrong so often? I mean I am not a genius, but in the rest of life's discussions I'm on more of a 50/50 split. What's going on in this relationship that causes me to be so misguided so much of the time?
And then came the proverbial two-by-four. Solution one actually followed solution two but I'll start there.
I realized that girls won't often enter a discussion if they think they might be in the wrong. They will avoid it like the plague. Any excuse will do and I have been privvy to some of the most creative, unrealistic bouts of logic twisting imaginable in order to put off, or ignore talking about 'somewhere they screwed up'.
But this of course is unfair, as I think the same can be said for boys. So let's just say Solution One is a human way of dealing with issues. It's just that women seem so much better at it. No matter how hard I try to avoid talking about an issue I don't want to discuss. My success rate is proportional to my success rate in arguments with my fiance which is to say...miserably low.
But Solution two is what I'm getting at here. Solution two is insidiously successful. Solution two, due to it's very nature, is so well disguised, I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd passed my whole life without figuring it out. Women don't like to merely participate in a discussion, there is this overwhelming need to win.
As an aside - I recognize the overwhelming need to win because it is inherent in myself. I like to win discussions/arguments/off-hand comments thrown out by strangers in the street/child raising issues (I have no children) - pretty much any kind of discourse. I like to win and I will participate in that discourse as long as the other player will allow me to, working on details until that Topic is outright won - by me. I really like to win.
The difference between my desire to win and her desire to win is that I'll stay on the topic of conversation. And as much as I like to win, I have found myself having to concede a point and even the argument, or wishing to retreat and give the concept a little more thought in order to better be able to WIN the next time. But it's all the same discussion/argument/discourse as where we started.
Here's the twist. The crux of Solution two. Aye, the rub: Women like to win arguments too...but it doesn't have to be on the topic which began the discussion.
That's it. Very simple. I finally realized that I usually ended up apologizing for something completely unrelated to the start of the conversation. Then I started paying attention to each conversation where I was clearly in the right. No mis-communications, no 'from a certain point of view', just clearly in the right. Suddenly we'd be somewhere else. The discussion would be guided into territory, sometimes familiar, more often unfamiliar but always on a completely different continent to where we just were.
It's sneaky, it's devious, it's nasty, it's underhanded, it's...it's...incredibly effective.
And all so they don't ever have to apologize.
How do they actually accomplish the switch? I have absolutely no idea. But pay attention boys, because the next time you find yourself thinking 'aha - i've got her on this one'... you will immediately start to notice a strange sinking feeling as your heart loosens itself from your chest and slides inexorably down to it's final, heavy resting place, somewhere within your bowels. You may even notice that it is tied in to the last statement uttered by the girl to whom you are talking. But you will never know how you got there, only that very soon it will once again be you uttering the words...'I'm sorry'
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