The Relationship Scorecard

Women keep a scorecard. There is a mental checklist that keeps ticking in their head and there are points assigned to each and every thing you do. If you are in a relationship with a woman, you have probably encountered this. Maybe you caught on, maybe you didn't. To me it was like an epiphany - sort of what happened to Jake in the Blues Brothers, minus the light at the end. I just realized that the system is unbeatable. It is made for you to lose.

The basic tenets of the system are that you can win a maximum of 10 points for something outrageously outstanding that you did. 10 points. Sounds like a perfect score.
So you get up in the morning, go to the 24 hour store (nothing else is open at this unearthly hour) and buy stuff to make a pancake. You come back home and spend the next hour or so making pancakes instead of joyous slumber (oh! what a glorious start to the weekend) and serve pancakes in bed. Of course assuming she happens to like pancakes and you don't spill anything in bed bringing them over. If all goes well, you will earn 10 points. Yes, the perfect score - the number that made umpteen footballers and Nadia Comaneci famous. You feel good - for the next 3 seconds.

The points you earned have not won you anything. They have possibly been used to cancel out the black marks you earned or continuously earn.

Black marks have the same inherent value as a positive point. But they can only be earned in multiples of 50 or 100 or 500. you can never earn one black mark. If you do something that warrants a black mark, you will earn 50 at the very least. One black mark is strictly a theoretical concept.

Earning black marks is a ridiculously easy thing to do. You can earn black marks simply by being sometimes. For example you bought a new home theatre system. You spent the next couple of hours setting it up so that the TV, the cable, the game console and the home theatre are all linked. You stand back to admire your work, looking forward to a well earned spell on the couch when you are informed that there are wires.
"Of course there are wires. The thing needs wires to function." (-50 points)
"I mean I can see the wires."
"There are wires, that's why you can see them" (Clever, but -50 again)
"They look ugly"
"All wires look the same - these are the normal black wires" (-100 points)
"I don't want to see them"
"Ok, I'll remove them" (0 points since you were asked to do it anyway)

To me, this would be a single incident. I have gained 200 black marks for ugly wires been seen. If I make the wires disappear at that very moment, I will stand at -200 points. If I take my well-deserved (according to me) rest and watch TV for a while with the new sound effects, my negative points will go into an exponential negative points generator.
So fast forward to next week and the wires are still visible. My feeble attempts at pushing them behind the TV console with the TV remote (after telekinesis failed) have been stoutly resisted by the wires.

Wife walks in. "I can still see the ugly wires. We are having guests tomorrow. They better not have to see the wires."

I get visions of the guests walking in and being transfixed by the wires, forgetting to eat and drink and when we finally pry them off the furniture and make them leave our apartment they leave their souls behind horribly entangled in the wires. Oh and by the way, I have earned 500 black marks for her having to see the wires again. The protection afforded by the previous 200 having expired.

If the guests so happen to "see" the wires (tell me, do you go looking for wires in folks' living rooms when you go meet people?) it would be -5,000 points. And from then on each time she sees the wires it would be a negative 1000 points and then a while later every time you breathe it will remind her of the wires that everyone can see and the counter becomes unstoppable. So you see, if you have been married, you have no hopes whatsoever of staying in the black as far as points are concerned.

The same principle does not work with positive points though. There is no 'positive point accelerator'. Even though both positive points and negative points share the same inherent value, their behaviour could not be more different. While black marks go at it like rabbits in heat with a single mating pair capable of covering the earth with it's progeny in a relatively short period of time, positive points are solitary monks. They don't bond, don't procreate and have an amazing ability to get lost in the hustle and bustle of modern living.

Taking the pancake example further, the first weekend you made pancakes, you might earn 10 points. The next weekend, the same nifty trick would earn you only 5 (even if the pancakes were much better). the weekend after that you'd be lucky to get one. The following weekend, if you made pancakes again, you'd be in the red. If you slept on and didn't make anything. You'd be in the red too.

So face it you cannot win.

This then brings us to the question of how to keep women happy once you have acquired them (or truth be told, you have been acquired).

No one knows the answer to this.

Note: throughout this piece I have used the terms 'black mark' and 'negative points' interchangeably.