Dear Wives/Girlfriends, It's Not Our Fault - By John Cleese
Allow me to quickly describe a scenario, and feel free to skip a couple of paragraphs ahead if you already know how this story ends. For the six of you who haven't experienced this yet, pay attention because this is stuff they don't tend to teach in high school.
You've had a long day at work, and all you can think about is bursting through your front door, stripping down to your underwear, decapitating a beer bottle, and sinking so far into your couch that the material wraps around your back and touches both of your nipples. But just as you check off step three and start sprinting for home base, your wife/girlfriend appears from the bedroom.
She's in her "I think I'll order the lobster" dress and fastening the back of her good earrings -- the ones with gems that don't start with the word "cubic" -- and before you can get past "oh" and right into "sh*t," she shoots you a look that you've only seen in movies just before the guards attach the anti-bite mask.
Today is one of those "special" days, but dear God, which one? Is it your anniversary? No, you remember it was hot the last time you celebrated it because she was in a bikini. Is it her birthday? It has to be. It's sometime in February, right? Toward the end? Sh*t, this week is the end of February. And before your mind even has a chance to switch into emergency excuse mode, she knows. Worse, she predicted it:
"I knew you'd forget, you inconsiderate ass! You don't even remotely care about me, do you? How hard is it for you to remember one measly date?"
And therein lies the misconception: that we forget because we don't care.
It All Comes Down To Monkeys
To understand why we are what we are, you have to go back about six million years, which is roughly the period that chimps and humans branched off of our common evolutionary ancestors. Over the course of the next 5.5 million years, we developed a very specific set of behaviors that dictated our survival as a species, and that was pretty set in stone by the time modern man evolved, half a million years ago.
The behaviors and roles were pretty simple: the male was the hunter, protector and general "problem solver." He provided strength and physical safety to the family. The female was the gatherer, child bearer and general caretaker of the household. She provided stability and growth. Over hundreds of thousands of years of rinse-and-repeat actions, nature has a way of saying, "OK, that's been working for quite some time, and I'm sick of repeating it, so instead of having to learn this every time a new generation springs up, we'll just include that line of code in the DNA. It's now a part of your operating system."
Here's where things start to screw us over as guys. Our brains were pretty advanced back then compared to other animals, but they weren't very efficient by modern standards. So to conserve space, we were programmed to tackle problems in a linear fashion. "Wolf attack family. Kill wolf. Eat wolf. No more wolf bite. No more hungry."
Then we'd move on to the next. "Cold coming soon. Build shelter. Keep cold out. Keep warm in." In other words, we learned to operate in the present and the near future. Anything from the past that wasn't vital to our survival was sort of just pushed out of the mind because there was no need to have that information taking up space.
Solved problems were filed in the "safe" folder and forgotten about. You don't worry about hunting when you're in the middle of eating your kill.
Wait, It Gets Crazier
Now, consider the amount of time we spent with those sorts of lessons and roles infused into our genetic makeup. These weren't suggestions or "good rules of thumb to consider." They were hereditary laws. Now, with that six million years worth of reinforcement in mind, consider the fact that we've only been in our current intellectual and civilized state for a few thousand years.
.05% of our entire existence.
That's important because evolutionary changes in complex life forms such as humans happen over tens of thousands of years. A couple thousand is obviously not enough time for our physical building blocks to adapt to our present mental expectations.
Why It Makes Us Forget Her Birthday
It turns out that we still use a lot of those seemingly outdated genetic commands. Granted, we use them in a much less violent way, but they're still dominating our actions. Let's consider the "problem" of relationships. When a man is looking for a woman to be with, he subconsciously sees his loneliness as an immediate problem that needs a solution: "Me want woman."
When we do meet a woman we'd like to win over, we do so by showing her attention and making her feel elevated and desired. We remember the first outfit she wore on our first date. We pay attention when she tells us her favorite movies and songs. It's as much a courtship today as it was a few million years ago. But once she's accepted us and committed to the relationship, she starts noticing that we don't try as much. "You're not the same man I met five years ago! You don't love me anymore! I'm setting your car on fire!"
We didn't turn into that guy on purpose. As bad as this sounds, once we felt secure in our relationship, we just subconsciously put her into the "safe" pile and moved on to the next problem. "Me have woman. Now make more money at job." We never really considered the fact that the relationship needed upkeep and maintenance. We're just still operating under the "kill wolf/eat wolf" mentality.
Don't Think We're Making Excuses Here
Look, we're not saying it's right by any means. We understand that they make calendars for a reason, and it would take very little effort on our parts to jot down that date and check in from time to time. We know that we can't look her in the eyes and say, "Oops. Sorry I forgot our anniversary. I can't help it. It's in my genetic makeup." But what I'm saying is that very few guys forget those special days because they're just self-centered, malicious demons who thrive on women's misery. If it's a gender-wide issue, obviously it's not something we do by choice. There's something larger at work there.
Of course, there's an easy fix to this. If she puts it back on our plates by saying, "This is a problem that needs immediate attention," most guys will throw that right back on top of the things-we-need-solved stack. But if she remains silent about the problem and expects us to remember on our own, unprovoked accord, she's going to be sadly disappointed because she's asking us to do something our brains simply aren't wired to do.
At that point, all we can do is stand there while she scream at us and think, "What make woman no scream?"
