Oh, come on, Mike. We all know you can read. And most of us are pretty sure you don’t really think that saying sometimes a person is too worn out and stretched too thin to enjoy socializing is the same as promoting the idea that being married is like having an extra child. That’s not even apples and oranges: it’s more like apples and distributor caps or rain boots and oranges.
But as long as we’re on the subject, let’s talk about that stereotype. I don’t want to name any names, but someone around here once told me that most stereotypes existed for a reason. Someone, somewhere, made that comment for the first time: some woman sighed and said to her friend or to her sister, “It’s like having a fifth child.” She didn’t say it because she was conditioned by stereotypes, because the stereotype didn’t exist yet. She said it because she was bone tired from picking up her husband’s dirty clothes off the floor and watching him track mud across her newly-mopped floors, or because somehow the things he promised to take care of never quite got done but he could never just come out and admit that he hadn’t done them and wasn’t going to do them, or because they were dead broke and he bought a car stereo instead of paying the rent.
Maybe it was just because no matter how little cash they had, he insisted on walking past the fifty cent bottles of Pepsi in the refrigerator and stopping at the gas station a mile down the road to pay $1.29 for an identical bottle of Pepsi every single day. Just as a completely random hypothetical example that has nothingwhatsoever to do with my ex-husband.
Are all men like that? Of course not. Are most men like that? I don’t know. Are enough men like that to have started women making that comparison? Obviously. Should those women stop talking honestly about their experiences because someone else might hear them and might extrapolate and so might unfairly think that you’re more work than you think you are? I don’t think so. But I think the question is moot anyway, and here’s why: I don’t think that those women who tell you they’re stretched too thin to date are saying that because they think they’re going to have to pick your socks up off the floor. I think they’re saying it because they don’t want to date you.
Is that personal? I have no idea. Maybe they don’t want to date you, and maybe they just don’t want to date, and that includes you. I am, as you know, prone to those “just don’t want to date” phases (or decades). Obviously not every woman thinks the same, but I can promise you that I’ve never once thought, “Wow, I’d really enjoy going out to dinner with him, but then we might start to like each other and we might get serious and we might move in together or get married and the next thing I know I’ll be picking up his socks off the floor. I’m too busy for that.” The reality is more like “Do I want to go out to dinner with him? Not so much. I’d really rather take a long bath and read a good book.”
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