Creating the Mythical Beast through changes in Communication

Marriage is a great thing to be in. There is companionship, there is friendship, there is support, there are children, there is a fly in the ointment. Okay, there are a few flies in the ointment, but today, here, I am talking about one specific fly. Communication. Between husband and wife. We both seem to speak different versions of the same language - supposedly well understood, common words that mean entirely different things to people who have vowed to stay together for better or for worse.


"Nothing," a man says. He means precisely that. Nothing. Zot. Zero. Aught. Cypher. Empty. Blank. Void. Null.


"Nothing," a woman says. I won't comment on what it could mean, but can safely say that if Tolstoy were a woman and decided to write War and Peace, she could just have written "Nothing."


This vast chasm in the meaning of words does not arise, as many people term it, due to a variance in wiring between the female and male brains or due to gender differences arising from distinct roles played during the infancy of our species - hunters versus gatherers, etc., etc. Don't get conned by all this. It is all misinformation. Women can speak and understand the language that husbands, boyfriends, brothers communicate in perfectly. After all how hard can it be to interpret the ideas of a mind that is incapable of keeping more than one idea afloat at a time? And that too a mind that has a total library of some five ideas. 


It very inconceivable. It is unbelievable. It is done for a reason. To keep men in a constant state of bafflement. On tenterhooks. To constantly feel they as if they are treading on eggshells.


Why do women do this? Control is part of the reason.


The major reason is that women in general and Wives in particular have an Agenda. The mis-communication is merely a means to a larger, sinister end. All women actually belong to an ancient sisterhood that is in search of a mythical creature - the perfect husband (pH). Millennia of search without any one in billions getting to say "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" made Wives turn to another avenue - Creation. Like alchemists of yore who tried to turn lead into gold by doing all sorts of things to it, wives try to turn what they have found and married into what they want - a perfect husband.


When I first learnt of this, I tried to figure out what this pH is. The descriptions are fairly misleading. The perfect husband seems to be a normal human male, but if you look at the purported feats of this 'normal' being, from the sounds of it, he should have a hundred arms and legs, a thousand ears, a few dozen heads, no ego (once inside home) and with a brain that runs the birthday/anniversary function of social networking sites on an online jewelry store catalogue platform. And these are just a few of the things that this pH does. 


I concede I do mildly exaggerate, but it is merely to demonstrate the sheer weight of expectation that is piled upon husbands. The wife that I am pledged to, despite having more than a passing interest in baubles, would rather have me be more responsible. How? I ask her. I am already responsible for everything that goes wrong in our house. If I was more responsible, I'd probably be incarcerated.


In all my studies on the matter, I have discovered that there is a philosopher's stone for the alchemical metamorphosis of a normal husband to a perfect husband. It is called "Setting Expectations," or since everything now has to be able to be done, men need to do expectation setting.

This small two-word phrase is possibly the most convoluted two-word phrase that mankind has ever encountered in its short existence of half a million years. On the face of it, it sounds very simple: I simply need to set expectations. And then all would be well. Or at least most would be well.

My literal interpretation doesn't work, naturally. 


Does expectation setting mean that if I told my wife right at the beginning of the year that I intended to forget the anniversary, everything would be all right? Apparently not. This is not expectation setting. This is a recipe for disaster. 
'Expectation Setting' actually means that I need to do what needs to be done, as desired by the wife.

It leads me to believe that a Perfect Husband is ephemeral. It cannot exist for more than an instant in time and this existence is brought about on a deed-to-deed basis, but the legend of these deeds is distorted in the common generational memory of Wives and pinned one one hapless, non-existent creature. And the burden of this memory is shared by all husbands as a collective responsibility. 

In short, between us all, there is a perfect husband around.