Understanding Women Randomness

I used to think I understood women. I didn’t. And I don’t. Generalizing about an entire category of people is usually not my style but in this case I can lump together several seemingly common female personality characteristics that amuse and confuse me. Here are a few random observations, in no particular order.

Many women want men to be mind-readers. They claim they are individuals and say they want things to be a certain way, but then when men go along with that it turns out the women didn’t really mean that at all and what something completely different. And we men are assumed to be able to figure that out and act accordingly. A scene from the movie Tootsie comes to mind. Dustin Hoffman plays an actor who stumbles into a role as a woman, which he is then compelled to continue off screen as part of an unintended deception. An actress he likes confides in ‘her’ that she wants a decisive, aggressive manly man to come on to her in a specific way. In a later scene he is at a party as himself, approaches her; she doesn’t recognize him as anything other than a complete stranger, he comes on to her using the exact words she told Tootsie and she slaps him. I don’t understand.

Gender roles can be confusing. In my parents’ day men were men, with that ‘cave man’ attitude about providing and protecting. During the 1980s the ‘sensitive’ man image became popular and because the real me leans in that direction anyway, I was popular with women. I don’t know how else to say this: being sensitive got me laid a lot. I guess that means I was sensitive yet a ‘typical’ horny man too. But many of those women eventually left me for the exact man they claimed to not want … fake macho, insensitive bad boy. I was their sensitive break from their normal jerks. Kind of goes back to the mind-reading, doesn’t it? And I am a proven stable, provider/protector man but that doesn’t seem to be enough.

There is also a school of thought that says some younger women are attracted to older men. As I get older and realize I am attracted to younger women, I acknowledge two things. First, I am normal. Second, I don’t really believe women want older men, at least not more than a few years older. I would like to think that when I am single again I could eventually attract a younger woman, but if you read this blog a lot you know I am not really dealing well with aging. I am confident about growing older but simultaneously beginning to feel some of the inevitable loss of youth.

And that all brings me to the reason this is on my mind tonight: I am growing a goatee. I had a full beard in the early 1980s so displaying my facial hair is nothing new to me; however nobody I currently hang out with has ever seen this. My reason for the goatee … I feel like it. And I wanted to see how gray it is. It is at least 50% gray. That is no surprise but the shocker is that I have received rave reviews for it from at least eight women in the past week. Eight younger women like my goatee! And when I kid about it coming out half gray, they say that is what they like about it. I do not get it! These women range in age from 34 to 48. They are all attractive co-workers. They are also all married so that doesn’t lead to the first thought my non-sensitive side conjures up with all this positive attention. It does, however, provide additional evidence to support my claim that I do not understand women.

My closest friends are women, so I should understand this. But I don’t. I guess one good thing about aging is that I don’t care all that much. I am who I am and the older I get the more confident I become about being myself. People can like me or not; I do not control their feelings. But I do wish I understood women better.