God either intentionally skipped a few critical switches while designing men, or installed them somewhere in the brain and forgot to tell us how to activate them. I have increasingly begun to suspect that the switches are actually there, but buried under cricket scores, car registration numbers, old school incidents, forgotten passwords and useless information about machines that are no longer manufactured.
Take something as simple as a woman coming home after a terrible day. Her boss behaved badly, a colleague took credit for her work, the driver cancelled at the last minute and the washing machine has started making a noise that suggests it is preparing for take-off. She is telling you what happened. The male brain, unfortunately, hears an assignment and immediately gets to work. Speak to HR, confront the colleague, change the driver, call the mechanic. Before she has even finished, the man has prepared a turnaround strategy for her job, transport system, domestic appliances and possibly her entire life.
He is usually feeling rather useful by this stage, which makes what follows particularly confusing because every suggestion somehow makes matters worse. What she perhaps wanted was merely for him to listen and say, “That sounds awful.” This is not easy for men to process. Why would anyone describe a problem without wanting it solved? To the male brain, that is like calling the fire brigade only to discuss the emotional consequences of smoke. So he arrives wearing an imaginary helmet and carrying a toolbox when apparently he was only expected to sit there and listen.
This same brain, capable of launching a rescue operation at the slightest hint of trouble, can be spectacularly blind in other areas. A woman may return after having her hair cut, coloured, shortened and rearranged by a team of professionals and the man looks up and says, “You’re back.” Curtains may have changed, cushions may have changed, spectacles may have changed. A wall may have been repainted and one corner of the house completely redesigned. Very little registers.
Move the television remote by three centimetres, however, and the entire nervous system lights up. Where is the remote? It was here. Who moved it? The same man can detect a faint new sound in the car engine, notice that the television picture is fractionally less sharp and remember the exact location of a screwdriver last seen in 2007. He may remember the registration number of his first scooter, the score of a cricket match played thirty years ago and the price of petrol when he joined his first job, but the haircut can pass completely under the radar. This is not poor eyesight. It is highly selective national security.
Perhaps the problem is that men are quite comfortable with signals as long as they arrive in a format they recognise. A warning light on the dashboard is understood immediately, a strange noise from the air conditioner deserves investigation and a blinking router means there is trouble. Silence is more complicated.
A woman may become quieter over several days. Her answers become shorter, she stops sharing small things, her expression changes and the emotional temperature of the room falls steadily. The man notices none of this. He continues watching television, eating peanuts and feeling quietly pleased that the house has become so peaceful. Then one evening the accumulated case file is placed before him and he is genuinely astonished. “But you never said anything.” She had, of course, said plenty. Just not in the language recognised by his operating system.
And once that case file is opened, another peculiar instinct usually kicks in: the immediate urge to defend oneself. When someone says, “You never listen to me,” the sensible response is probably to understand the frustration behind the sentence. The male brain, on the other hand, becomes deeply interested in the technical accuracy of the word “never.” That’s not true. I listened to you on Sunday. You told me something about your cousin. I may not remember which cousin, but I definitely listened.
Within minutes, a small domestic complaint has become a constitutional matter. Dates are produced, precedents are cited and technical objections are raised. If sufficiently cornered, the man may even attempt to establish that she too has occasionally failed to listen, which is generally the point at which a perfectly manageable discussion becomes a prolonged hearing with no possibility of acquittal. A simple “You’re right, I wasn’t listening” could probably have ended the matter much earlier, but there seems to be something in the male design that prefers being technically correct while making the evening progressively worse.
The same instinct may also explain one of our more remarkable abilities: hearing something perfectly clear and then spending hours trying to prove that it means something else. “Why can’t we just be friends?” is a fine example.
There is no hidden poetry in that sentence, no encrypted message and no invitation to demonstrate patience, loyalty, emotional depth or the ability to wait outside metaphorical railway stations for several years. It means you are done. Stop chasing. Yet the words enter the male ear and immediately begin undergoing reinterpretation. Maybe she is confused. Maybe she is afraid of commitment. Maybe she has been hurt before. Maybe she wants to see whether you are serious. Maybe this is merely a difficult chapter before the interval, after which the story will turn in your favour.
By then the tsunami of hormones has already entered the control room. Every warning light is blinking, but the pilot is busy interpreting rejection as a minor weather disturbance. A woman says, “I don’t see you that way,” and the man hears, “Not yet.” She says, “You are such a good friend,” and he begins wondering whether friendship can be upgraded through patience, strategic availability and occasional suffering. Men have an extraordinary ability to convert a full stop into an ellipsis.
Cinema must accept some of the blame. For years, the hero was rejected in the first half, followed the woman to college, office, market and bus stop, sang songs outside her window and generally made himself impossible to ignore. Eventually, exhausted by his persistence, she discovered that he was the love of her life. An entire generation therefore grew up believing that rejection was not really a conclusion but merely the opening scene of romance. Real life, unfortunately, is less musical and she may simply block you.
Somewhere behind the male ear there should perhaps have been a small switch marked “accept signal, do not reinterpret.” Most men locate it eventually, although usually after several years of embarrassment, unanswered messages and the painful discovery that persistence is not always romantic. Sometimes it is merely poor comprehension dressed up as devotion.
Maybe that is how these switches reveal themselves. Not together and certainly not through any sudden arrival of wisdom. One appears after an argument that went on three hours too long, another after failing to notice something that apparently everybody else noticed. The listening switch comes after years of offering excellent solutions nobody asked for, while the apology switch takes longer because being right is a difficult habit to surrender. The “just friends” switch generally requires more field experience than most men would care to admit.
God may not have forgotten the switches after all. Perhaps he simply hid them extremely well and then, just to make sure men would not find them too early, flooded the entire control room with testosterone.
If you are a man and have read this far, congratulations. One of the switches is clearly working.
If you enjoyed this little investigation into the male operating system, you may also enjoy [LinkedIn Uncles] — another species we have been observing closely at Tadka Life.
Still wondering whether this is a male problem or a generational one? [The Stepney Generation] may provide a few uncomfortable answers.
