Please heed this warning: I am going to be touching today on some of the essential differences, as I perceive them, between men and women. This will involve blatant generalizations and unfair stereotyping, and I am sorry for that, believe me. In my head and heart, and in my principles, I enjoy living in the abstract, where everything is fair and equal for us all, where men are sensitive and nurturing and communicative, where women appreciate the perfection of a well-executed hit and run, the Swiss-watch precision of a good pick and roll, or the exquisite marriage of cold beer and hot pizza.

Unfortunately, I have to spend more time living in the world than in my principles, and in my world, the average man is not nurturing enough to keep a potted cactus alive for more than a few weeks, and the average woman is not only indifferent to the hit and run and the pick and roll, but could not, for $1 million, match these to their respective sports (baseball and basketball, respectively, if you‘re scoring at home). How, then, can we expect the women we love to grasp the significance of our team’s closer going on the DL for four months one month into baseball season? How can they expect us to watch Oprah every night, even if they did thoughtfully record it for us on TiVo?

As for communication, I think our paradigms may just be irreconcilably different. I may or may not have learned this from reading John Gray’s famous book, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, during one of my earlier attempts to make it to the light, long before I realized that most of us are destined to live in the eternal haze of dawn, where the uncertain light of male/female relationships reveals only shapes, but smudges the details, enough light to enable us to think we can see, but not enough to be sure. Usually, as we get closer to one another, we realize how wrong we were, how we conveniently filled in the details the damnable uncertain light failed to fully reveal in the first place. So we have to battle, negotiate, compromise, scrap, and claw in order to complete the picture, to understand what we are seeing, if, indeed, we are ever going to see clearly. We are all just trying to make our own light, to seek clarity.

Perhaps an illustration of our dilemma is in order?

Recently, I wanted to call my old buddy, Bill, a good friend I haven’t talked with in awhile, which in guy terminology could mean several months. A brief aside: Guys can go several months, or sometimes even years, without talking, and still pick up the conversation immediately, as if one of them just ran up to Ingles to grab another six pack and was gone no more than 20 minutes. While women tend to communicate with one another in elaborate narratives that require daily, or, at minimum, weekly, installments, men are perfectly happy with the Cliffs Notes version, or even telephone haikus:

“Whatcha up to, bud?”

“Had a baby. We‘re all fine.”

“Don’t say? That’s cool, dude.”

Most women would be appalled at the relative lack of narrative detail in such a conversation, failing to grasp the simplicity, purity, and poetry of our discourse. They communicate in passages reminiscent of Faulkner or Joyce, chapter upon chapter of long, stream-of-conscious sentences pretty much free of periods or even commas, stories spliced to thoughts stitched to feelings, details hanging like Christmas tree ornaments from every branch, in glittery clusters, so many that eventually you can scarcely make out the tree for the decorations on it.

Men prefer haikus.

The efficiency of words.

Get to the point.

So, I’m going to call Bill, but I when I go to fetch his number from the phone book, I see that SOMEONE has gone into my stacks — I have an elaborate system of keeping phone numbers, involving perhaps a dozen phone books dating back to 1983 — and reduced my holdings to a single volume, dated 2004-2005. If I should protest this purge, SOMEONE will say that I should consolidate my numbers in a single volume, or create a database in the computer, or even pick up a Rolodex at Wal-Mart. If I make a peep, SOMEONE will add this chapter to tomorrow night’s installment with Mom, requiring 45 minutes to say the following:

He keeps everything,

He swears he has a system

But I don’t see it.

So I don’t say a word about it, naturally. I may email Bill instead. Or, in a few more months, he will probably call me. One or two haikus, and we’ll be good to go.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at chriscox@prodigy.net.)