Column

Last week, a friend had a mini-relationship crisis. While she was browsing pictures on her week-old boyfriend’s computer (with him present of course) she came upon a folder containing pictures of his very serious ex-girlfriend.

Of course my friend had known about the relationship but the pictures jolted her nevertheless. As her boyfriend kept questioning her about why she was upset, he asked her, “Are you upset because her pictures are in the same folder as yours? I know I should have moved them to a separate folder?”

I was as incredulous hearing this second-hand as she was upon hearing it from him. Here she was upset about coming face-to-face with his past and he was thinking that it was all about the right thing in the wrong place!

Suddenly all those myriad conversations with different girl friends at different times over coffee and wine about men and their compartmentalising ability became scarily real and I had an epiphany.

Girls were passengers waiting on the giant platform of life waiting for the right train (aka man). The trouble is that the trains don’t have a fixed schedule or announced destination.

So it’s left to our imagination and intuition to catch the right one. But so busy are we in identifying the right train and scrambling onto it when it passes by that we don’t realise that we may have got into the wrong compartment!

We want to board the Forever bogey and end up on the Fun Times one. Or we want to be in Priority Class and end up in the Frivolity one. And then we automatically try to do the one thing which is pointless at best and dangerous at worst; switch compartments. We all know the outcome of trying to cross over compartments in a high-speed train, don’t we?

It’s an inescapable fact that for men, life is the sum of its parts. Career doesn’t preclude marriage. Children don’t preclude career. Love doesn’t preclude lust. Friendship doesn’t preclude ambition. And nothing precludes self-gratification.

Very unlike a woman whose self-actualisation is as linked to a career as it’s to looks, relationships, parenthood and family ties. Everything is tied in to everything else and absence of one can negate the presence of the other, and most often it’s the relationship or marriage that is of paramount importance. All other accomplishments and achievements stand diminished if the relationship status quo is sub-optimal. (Let’s not even get into all the psycho-social conditioning which gets a woman to be this way; that’s saved for another exposition!)

No wonder then that women find it difficult and frustrating being relegated to one compartment in the man’s life. They want to share all aspects of their lives from bank accounts to boxer shorts with their men and expect quid pro quo. And the men look this expectation in the eye . . .and turn around and run a mile! This has nothing to do with love.

A man may love a woman to bits and yet have certain areas in his life marked Private Access Only. Like his bathroom cabinet and telephone diary for starters.
What is a woman to do in these circumstances?

Well, my friend for one has ditched normal mascara for a waterproof variety (much less messier if one wants to cry on a friend’s shoulder in a coffee shop) and decided not to let an Archive Folder ruin her relationship. After all she has the rock and he just has some memories; she can live with that.

And I’d say, girls, smarten up. When you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Guys will be guys and have nooks and corners of his life he doesn’t want you entering. That’s fine in the long run as long as you’re not the one stuck in one of those corners. Just make sure when you’re boarding your train, pick the First Class salon car the first time round!