Caught you, didn’t I! Ordinarily, as you peruse the FFB News each week, you pass by this column. Oh, you read it once or twice long ago and because you couldn’t understand it or it irritated you to no end, or the subject matter just didn’t appeal to you, you put it in your ho-hum list and you go on to read the Lunch Menu for the Shirley Grade School for the upcoming week.
But confess it: this headline snagged you because of its innuendo flavor. You thought that maybe you would find some tasty, salacious, titillating tidbit here. Sorry, pal, but this story is about the differences between men and women when it comes to using the telephone.
I think that I am like most men in that I don’t like to hang on the phone. To me, a phone is like a water moccasin: the minute I pick it up, I want to drop it as fast as I can. But not so with my wife: to her, a phone is like a post-birth umbilical cord. It is a two-way channel used to convey everything from critical, life-and-death issues, to the most insignificant speck of absolutely worthless chatter. Time on a phone for a man is akin to making a getaway after robbing a bank: not a second to waste. For most women, however, picking up a phone is like boarding a Princess Cruse Ship embarking on a round-the-world tour, traveling to lands where time does not exist.
Is this wide difference between men and women on their telephone comfort level simply a matter that men don’t like plastic objects near their mouth and women do? Or does this disparity go several layers deeper, way past the skin of an instrument and its cradle? You bet it does! It is absolute fact that women are born talkers, while men have only learned to grunt in comparison. It is estimated that the average woman uses 30,000 words per day while the average guy uses less than 10,000. And most of the man’s words come about from having to answer his wife’s endless questions. While the larger number of words used by women helps explain why the phone is their friend, it is only part of the story.
Another major, major difference that accounts for the incongruity of phone use between men and women is the SUBJECT MATTER. Men are focused on action, not feelings. When you are pitching a bale of hay, you don’t need to say a word. Since the beginning of time, man has been mostly involved in things agricultural; herding, hoeing, harvesting, etc. Plants don’t talk and most farm animals don’t have much to say either. And so, our forefathers, not having a need to talk, left the development of their tongue incomplete. Meanwhile, back in the farmhouse kitchen, mother is chatting with her young ‘uns and the neighbor’s wife. With no TV or radio on hand, chatter about anything came into play. Cookies, recipes, quilting, sewing, washing, diaper rash etc., all became very interesting topics of conversation. Our foremothers developed a huge tongue muscle that would be passed on to their daughters generation after generation.
And there it is. Women can talk about anything important or mundane and it doesn’t make a bit of difference. The subject can be that her cake fell or that her mother is going through a divorce, and both stories make for equally good conversation, with a soul sister on the other end of the telephone line. A woman’s conversation does not have to be important, nor does it have to be concluded in a certain amount of time: it just needs to be, like breathing.
A man’s conversation must have importance: it must have a point to it; and it must all wrap up swiftly because “ there is something else I have to get to – and right now, if you don’t mind.” And if the subject of a telephone call is touchy-feely, forget it!: a guy would rather talk to someone selling burial insurance than express his emotions into a telephone mouthpiece.
Now, you know. (This story is a reprint of one that appeared Nov. 20, 2002.)