Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 14, 1993 TAG: 9304140233
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Beth Macy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SORRY . . . NO OFFENSE GUYS, BUT . . .
Don't get me wrong; I like men very much. For one thing, they're so . . . manly.And I can't even begin to write a column about the company of women without first saying that my husband is such a part of me that I don't feel like anything I do is ever really finished until I've told him about it.
I love married life, but up until a few months ago there was something missing from it that surprised me. Kind of like loving a new job, but missing your friends at the old job - it's not enough to lure you back, but you're surprised by how much you miss it.
What was missing was a person like Joy, my friend since kindergarten, my first best friend. She lives in Michigan now, and we rarely communicate except for the obligatory Christmas cards and special-event phone calls . . . someone had a baby, someone got married, someone died.
But when we do talk, it's exactly as it always was: a five-minute warm-up chat, followed by a roller coaster of belly laughs and screaming cackles.
In high school, my mom would know exactly who I was talking to, hidden behind my bedroom door on my telephone, laughing so hard I remember falling off the bed, my clunky rotary-dial phone falling from the nightstand on top of me. For the life of me I can't remember a single thing Joy and I cackled about, just the way my muscles felt the next day, my stomach sore from guffawing, my cheeks tight from smiling.
After college, after my first journalism job in Ohio, there was Margaret, who probably still knows me better than anyone. The telephone this time was the cheap kind you hang up by laying it flat on a table instead of on a base - the kind that easily disconnects mid-conversation when you smush your face against the receiver.
Margaret was still in Ohio; I was on an island in Georgia, at my second newspaper. Being homesick and depressed feels twice as bad on a beautiful Georgia island than it does in a gray, cemented Midwestern city, trust me. Irony underlines pain.
But Margaret was there to calm, to advise, to cough up 200 bucks every few months on an airplane ticket. It didn't matter if it did rain when she visited; talking with her, walking with her on the beach, made the place seem more like home.
Not that marriage makes all that female bonding impossible. It's just that it's harder to get to know women beyond the bounds of "couple" friendships when you only get together in groups of four or six.
I've learned that single women are harder to get to know when you're married, too. Some feel like a third wheel, or that they have less in common with you because you're married.
Or you're so busy "nesting," as one relative observed when my husband and I first moved in together, you don't have the time or room under your umbrella for anyone else.
Nevertheless, when it comes to certain things - there's no other way to say it - women are just plain better.
For example, sympathy. You can whine, complain and worry all you want to your husband, but in return you get rational explanations about why you shouldn't be whining, complaining and worrying. A man's stock reply: "It's not really as bad as you think it is."
And of course he's right. Deep down you know it, too. But the response you want is an ear, a nodding head, a sympathetic phrase like "Is that right?" or "That's awful!" or "I can't believe she said [fill in the blank] . . . "
It's one of life's twists, I guess, that when you're single you bellyache to your women friends about wanting a relationship. When you're married, you bellyache - like I'm doing now - about missing your women friends.
I don't bellyache so much any more, though. I have this friend, Karen, and I talk to her through my new modem-connected, push-button telephone quite a bit. One afternoon in January, I was sitting at my desk here, engrossed in a really deep phone conversation. I was leaning on the back two wheels of my desk chair - too far back - lost my balance, dropped the phone and, well . . . now I know why Mom always told me not to lean back on my chair.
"Are you OK?" Karen asked when I got back on the phone.
I said I was fine. We both cracked up for a minute. And then we resumed our serious discussion as if nothing had happened.
Karen and I whine, gossip, worry, laugh, cry - all things I can and do do with my husband, of course. But somehow with a woman it's different.
Put us in a room full of people, and we could scan the room once and notice the exact same things: the group dynamics, the tension, the cute guy in the corner, the amorous sparks between such-and-such and so-and-so.
No offense to men, but these things strike them like grunge on the toilet bowl - they rarely even notice.
Plus, they're just not as interested in reliving the details the next day on the telephone.
Beth Macy, a features department staff writer, recommends Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand," which explains in detail why men can't talk and read the newspaper at the same time. Her column runs Thursdays.