Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-08-30 - 8:35 a.m.

Pondering the Gender Thing Again

There's a peculiar thing that seems to happen to unmarried women around my age (and I don't mean hot flashes.) We all seem to be doing this weird dance with men. We want 'em, we don't want 'em. We're lonely when we're in relationships. We don't understand them, they don't understand us. We're all bewildered. What happens next?

We no longer need breadwinners or fathers for our children or mechanics or physical defenders - not that we would have chosen relationships purely for those things, but those things did carry us through times when we felt distant; there was a physical partnership assumed. Somehow, for those of us single, those partnerships decayed or dissolved or disappeared. And now we find we don't need to replace them - we need something else altogether. We want partnerships of the heart.

It must be unfortunate for men, because if they WANT to "couple down" (a friend's phrase that I really liked), they gotta pony up the stuff that was never easy for them in the first place. All the years where we were whining about intimacy and you-never-listen-to-me and you-don't-support-me-as-a-person, they could always throw up their hands and go FIX something, back on the safer ground for at least a little while. Feeling needed. Probably much the same thing that exasperated married women fuss about: "If I weren't here, he'd eat out of cans and wear the same underwear for a week!" Men figured if they weren't there, we'd be wailing by the side of the road with flat-tired cars, or shrieking up on the kitchen table as the dishwasher poured out forty gallons of soapy water onto the floor. We assumed each other's helplessness was our own value and necessity.

We can't get by on that one any more. If you're in your forties and you've been living on your own for a while, you've either learned to wash your own underwear or discovered that dirty ones won't kill you. You've figured out how to turn off the water main, or how to make enough money to be able to call a plumber when you need one. You've worked it out that if you don't know how to run the copper line for the automatic ice-maker, then you do without one and it's no big deal. You've learned to make chili, which is all you ever wanted to eat anyway. You're a long way from helpless.

In some ways, we've returned to playing house with each other. A nice meal cooked isn't a routine, it's a gift, and it's appreciated. A computer fixed or a set of shelves installed for you isn't part of anyone's "honey do" list of expectations; it's a favor, and welcomed as such. From each according to capability, to each according to need. We can be complementary.

But the stakes have changed on more intimate relationships. We don't want our men to fix the heater - we want them to give us warmth. We don't want them to make money so we can buy romance novels - we want them to rip our bodices. We don't want them to put up the new mirror in the bathroom - we want them to tell us they think we're beautiful. And we don't want to sit with them and watch sitcoms; we want our own dialogs, we want to share each other's (gulp) feelings.

"Huh?" the men say. "I was. I do. That's what all that stuff meant."

In some ways, that gap is widening, although it shouldn't be. We should all have gotten wise enough, and serene enough, to stop looking for perfection and start practicing better tolerance. Not that it's getting any easier to change, but shouldn't it be easier to accept and cherish another person without needing them to change? Why don't men feel relieved, that they no longer have to be strong and silent and an expert with a pipe wrench? Why can't women feel that when our men pat the sofa next to them, that they're actually saying they want to be with us, that there is no one in the world they would rather be with, instead of figuring they just can't find the remote?

I got no answers; that's okay, because I haven't got any sofa-patter, either. I have a little safe academic distance, for the moment, to ponder this stuff. My bodice is unscathed. But I wonder, I really wonder, how we will all manage to grope through the complexities that keep us apart, and find again the intimacy that sustains us.

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