Men and Women

I recently came across this little gender-based joke of prejudice:

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.

While I do agree, for the most part, with this statement, I would change it slightly:

A woman finds a man she doesn't loathe and then tries to change him into a man she can love driven by a desire to be happily married.

A man finds a woman he can love until the day he dies and then struggles to adapt to the changes in her as time goes on by constantly altering his core beliefs and principals, as well as his behavior in the futile pursuit of making her happy enough that she will stop changing at some point and settle into just being who he met and fell deeply in love with all those years ago.


This is a fundamental difference between men and women, I think. Women are constantly in a state of fluctuation but men are happiest in a state of not having to change. It makes me wonder if more women say that their teen years were good than men. I hated my teen years and the chief reason is that I felt that during that Hellish decade I was being forced to change to fit into one of the convenient pockets into which society likes to place us. I often tease my wife that she's not happy unless she's unhappy about something in our relationship. Most of the time, I'm joking.
I think this is related to that famous quality of women to forget nothing emotional and use it later...much later...in an argument to completely throw the man for a spin so that it is impossible to win. Women store away all the times they are offended or aggravated by something their man does and wait until "a good time to talk" comes along. Of course, that good time comes when I am tired and she is not and the lights have been shut off and we are lying in bed. Just as the first mists of the dream world are wafting into my mind I hear next to me, "There's something that I want to talk about with you." That's when I know I'm in trouble. Some time during the past few weeks or months I said or did something that I wasn't supposed to or didn't say or do something that I was supposed to and now I have to face the music. It aggravates me that it is usually played out this way because I really do love her and by doing this every 28 days or so, it helps her, but means I lose sleep and get aggravated and then have to change myself in order to have her love me for another 28 days.
Now, I'm half-joking about the 28 days. The half that's serious has noticed that this generally happens at the end of the month or the beginning - rarely in the middle...and we all know what that means. Sure, I know it's not politically correct to speak of PMS, but it IS scientifically correct. During those two weeks surrounding the release of an egg and the following flushing of the uterus the hormones in a woman's whole body (mind included) are very different from the other two weeks of the month. This difference effects the emotions and therefore thoughts of the woman. Men might be able to liken this to watching all 4 Rambo movies and then debating politics with someone from the opposite side of the spectrum or sitting in a strip club for 5 hours and then going to a dance hall for people under 25. Hormones have dramatic effects on our behavior and judgement.