Oh, Men, How You Drive Us Women Crazy!

 Randi D. Ward is a retired, 37 year veteran English teacher from Georgia, USA, and a published author.  She was named “Entrepreneur of the Year 2014” in the Education Industry by Worldwide Who’s Who and was profiled in its 2015  calendar. Her other awards include being the 2014-15 VIP Woman of the Year by National Association of Professional  Women, a 2015 Delegate of the International Leadership Women’s Association, a 2015 Top Female Executive, a 2014  Pinnacle Professional Member of Continental Who’s Who, and an elite member of Strathmore Worldwide Who’s Who.  Her current projects in Africa are World Peace Forest (Africa) in Egypt and Africa Nomads Conservation in Kenya.  She  is an honorary president of World Peace Forest (Africa) and the USA Regional Director for Africa Nomads Conservation.  Her book is entitled Because I Believed in Me (My Egyptian Fantasy Came True).

Georgia, US

If we women are honest with ourselves, we know our lives would not be the same without the men in our lives. They do make us happy most of the time.  However, there are those aggravating and irritating things they sometimes do that will drive us absolutely, positively CRAZY.  We start thinking evil thoughts about them and want them just to go away and leave us alone.  But then calmness returns, and we remember how much we love the men in our lives and how we really could not and do not want to live without them. Just for fun though, let us look at some of those things that men do that seem to upset us. 

We women love to shop, but our men seem to think we are spendthrifts. They seem to believe we buy things we do not need. Actually it is true a man may need fewer material things than a woman.  However, a man must remember we are usually the ones who do the majority of the shopping for the entire family.  We shop for food, buy clothes for the children and often for the man as well, and buy other things necessary to maintain the house.  The shopping is not only about our personal needs. Many women actually take over the handling of the entire family budget.   

We women often feel men sometimes take us for granted. We are emotional human beings and need to feel we are still attractive.  We enjoy compliments occasionally and do get upset when men fail to notice a new hairstyle, a new outfit we are wearing, or something we have done to get some needed attention.  We also need for our men to be more romantic. For example, giving us flowers for no reason means so much to us. A kiss and a hug and an “I love you!” will warm our hearts before our men leave for work.  Feeling that they appreciate all we do for our family is very important to us as well.  Sometimes we feel they do not recognize our efforts to be good wives or mothers enough. 

We also are not pleased with the conversations men have about us and with us at times.  We know when men get together with their friends, we are often joked about.  Secretly, we women are sometimes guilty of doing this about our men with our girl friends as well, but we still do not appreciate being made fun of.  We also do not like for men to talk down to us. We are just as smart as men are—in fact, maybe smarter than some men.  When men tune us out and do not listen to what we are saying or choose not to talk to us because they are busy with something else,  this infuriates us. We have important things we need to tell men, and maybe it involves directions on how to help our family in some way which some men tend to ignore. Moreover, if we have spent much effort sharing some information with our men, and then they forget this information either on purpose or because they simply used their “selective hearing” and chose not to hear us, we often feel men are clueless about our feelings or needs. Sometimes we just need to get these pent-up feelings out of our systems even if it is simply to “vent” our emotions.  We listen to men’s frustrations and to their ideas, so we need to have the same courtesy from men. 

However, when men choose to keep their frustrations and problems inside them and do not share these with us, we hate it because our men can become passively aggressive with us and then take out their anger and frustrations out on us. Communication is so important to us women so when men tend not to value it as much as we do, it drives us crazy.

Things men do and not do around the house can drive us right up the wall. Many men consider the TV remote control to be one of their personal prized possessions. They use it constantly and change the TV channels dozens of times as they try to watch several shows all at the same time. We women want to focus on one program at a time so this is so distracting to us and makes us insane. Many men are so obsessed with their technology toys today that they spend much of their non-working hours playing with them instead of spending their time with their women and families. This is becoming a major pet peeve of many women now.  Also, when men are messy, do not pick up their things when they are done with them, and do not clean up after themselves, we women become infuriated.  We live such busy lives so we need our men to help to decrease our housework.  

Many men are also so terrible about putting things off until tomorrow.  We view this as being somewhat lazy and indecisive which makes us women “nuts.” As mothers, we do not have that option to postpone things, such as doing the laundry, cooking dinner, and bathing the children and putting them to bed. We have a very set and rigid time schedule which must be faithfully followed every day.

Fourth, watching a man trying to put something together for the first time can be a crazy experience for us women. Even though we are confident they will succeed eventually, it often takes them so much longer than it was necessary because they tend to think it is not essential to read the instruction manual that comes with the product. We women would read everything before doing one thing. 

We women are overall very flexible and great planners because we have to wear so many different hats. So sometimes, we want our men to plan events to give us a break. However, most men are not willing to do this swearing they do not have time to do this.  They prefer for us to do this. So as women who need to get this done, we make a plan. What really upsets us is when the men find fault with the plan and complain about our hard work.  If the man is not willing to plan anything, then he should not complain.  He should accept it with a smile and much gratitude.

The way the typical man drives his car can really get on our nerves. Many men tend to be more aggressive in their driving styles than we women are. Men love to tailgate the car in front of them, honk the horn and swear at other drivers who upset them, and generally drive faster than we would like them to drive. When we say something about these things, men accuse us of being nags or back seat drivers when all we want is for our men to drive safely and sanely.

The final thing that drives us crazy is the way some men act when they are ill. They suddenly become like small children whining about how sick they are. They expect our full attention to get them well. We women carry babies for nine months in our bodies and then go through child birth. We endure so much during our pregnancies. When we are sick, most of us are not able to go to bed. We are mothers and have family responsibilities. Thus, although we do feel bad about our men being sick, it is sometimes difficult to handle the baby-like behavior when they simply have a cold or allergies. 

Wow! It appears we women do have many issues with our men. Luckily, most of them are not major things we women cannot and have not learned to accept and to deal with satisfactorily after the initial feeling of insanity these male behaviors cause us. God made men and women different in our ways of thinking and dealing with life issues.  This is probably why we are so attracted to them. The unknown of what they will do next is rather exciting and keeps our relationships with our men interesting and never ever boring.