Spouses-R-Us:
The Ronnie-Test
Lord knows I’m not a relationship expert, and I never
professed to be one, but I am never reluctant to comment on what I see as
relationship issues—even my own. Most of my good friends are male, for many
reasons, not the least of which is that men hate drama, almost as much as I do.
Fortunately, however, they have taken the role as “brothers” rather than “boyfriends”.
Brothers I can deal with; boyfriends, not so much. I have a few friends who are
women, the best ones are just as drama-free as I am, and the others turn to me
to dispel the drama from their lives. They bring it, and I dismiss it for them,
sometimes by just telling them the truth about themselves, and sometimes by
just telling them they’re being stupid. Either way works.
The fantastic thing about Ronnie was that he was a
bit of both, a friend/brother and a lover, and there was a reason for it.
Ronnie had four, all-the-way-live sisters, who taught him a lot about women,
and he learned the lessons well. My male friends who seem to have the most
relationship problems are the men who only have brothers. Men, especially men
who are raised in a family of boys, seem to have very little workable knowledge
about women. Part of it is the fact that the only woman they really know about
is their mother (or perhaps aunts and grandmothers), and they either idolize
her or they fear her. At the very least, they learn to dismiss her. Face it,
women. Our sons, who have no sisters to keep it real, are “clueless” when they
leave us and enter the realm of dating and marriage. They have not had the
opportunity to watch their sisters, who are groomed from birth to become wives
and maybe even mothers, grow into adulthood. Barbie dolls really do have a
function, and that is why they are still selling today. They teach women how to
be “girly”, a concept that men have no clue about.
“Girly” girls
exhibit the image of womanhood that men really love to see in a woman. There is
this mystical “feminine-ness” about them that men just adore. I learned about
this (and it’s one of those things that trips me out) when, as a child, my
mother only let me stay outside and climb trees and play kickball for a while,
then I had to come in, get clean and pretty, and sit down and play dolls until
my dad came home. Don’t get me wrong… my dad, who had five sisters, wasn’t
fooled because he indulged my love of doing not-so-girlie things by teaching me
how to change the oil, and to change tires, and to cut grass. Even though he
taught me those things, he still expected me to look and act “girly” at times,
when it was necessary. My grandmother taught me other things about being girly,
but those things relate more to my sensual views (the say no to “no nookie”
things) than to simple, feminine behavior. Consequently, I learned to turn the
girly behavior on and off, a sort of code-switching, which sometimes drives men
crazy, and certainly makes relationships difficult. My “inner diva” likes to do
this, just for the fun of it.
The woman who gets out of bed in the morning is
rarely the woman that men are allowed to see, and for some, the transformation
is phenomenal. It involves not only a “look”, but also an attitude… and men are
shocked to death when they finally meet the real woman. Most of the time, they
don’t find out until after the wedding, though. A guy friend of mine once told
me that he was a groomsman at the wedding of a friend of his. The bride, during
the courtship was always all over the guy. At the wedding, however, as the
groom leaned in for the kiss, the bride hissed through clenched teeth, “Don’t you
dare smear my lipstick!” The relationship went downhill from there. That
marriage didn’t last long enough to pay off the wedding expenses.
If Ronnie were alive today, he would tell you that
the most valuable lesson he learned from his sisters was how to “shop” for the
woman he wanted in his life. Because his sisters were so alike, but so
different, the “shopping technique” he learned was to delve as deeply behind
appearances as he could before he actually made a choice. It is a technique
that everyone needs to learn, but that women, in the past, learned to master
more quickly. Because we played with Barbie dolls, and Barbie had a beautiful
house, a nice car, great clothes, and a good-looking man (Ken for some… my
Barbie had G. I. Joe but that’s another story) that was what we were taught to
look for and work toward. Too many women, however, chose “pretty Ricky” over “rugged
Ronnie”, and ended up with “a mess”. Many others chose “bad-boy Bobby”, who turned
out to be a handsome, selfish abuser, leaving a lot of Barbie’s bitter and abusive
to other guys who try to enter their lives, guys who still believe in “girly”
girls. Unfortunately, guys who believe they only want girly girls cannot be
told, or even shown, that what they really want is a real woman… the kind of
woman they tend to fear; a woman who is always real. She is not bitter,
conniving, or selfish, and she is also not rugged or domineering. She’s just
not “girly”.
Ronnie and I used to always shop together for toys
for the kids, and it was a riot! If you’ve ever shopped at Toy-R-Us, you know
that they have a lot of great looking toys, toys that look like they’d be fun
to play with. The packaging says that these toys do lots of things, have all
the bells and whistles, and are the ultimate in providing an excellent play
experience for the buyer. Because he knew how to shop, Ronnie would insist that
we be allowed to play with the toys before we bought them. More often than not,
the toys that had the most “hype” were the ones which did not stand up to
actually being tested. They would break, right there in the aisle of the store.
If a toy stood up to the Ronnie-test, we bought it. If it didn’t, we left it in
the store. The packaging never fooled him.
Women had to pass the Ronnie-test, too. When Ronnie
and I started dating, I had already been teaching for a few years, and he had
only seen me “dressed up”, looking girly. Not long into the relationship,
Ronnie had a car to work on that required two extra hands to get the job done. I
volunteered to help, and showed up to work in old jeans and a sweat shirt. It
was chilly outside, and he tried to insist that I stay inside, where it was
warm. I went outside because that was where he was. I don’t remember exactly
what the job was, but I do know it involved the wheels, and that the bearings
had to be greased before he could put them in. You should have seen the look on
his face when I dug my newly-manicured nails into that can of grease and
proceeded to work the grease through the bearings like a professional. He was
thrilled. I could go from Barbie to grease monkey effortlessly. I had passed
the Ronnie-test. We got married a few months later.
Too many guys who want girly girls, and girls who
want “Ken”, have been shopping for spouses at Wives-R-Us and Husbands-R-Us…
maybe it’s a unisex store called Spouses-R-Us. As Pete, who says he has no idea
why some of the guys he knows married the women they married, who has been
married for thirty-two years, and who also has a bunch of real sisters (five),
says, “Body by Fisher, Brains by Mattel (I say Fisher-Price)”. Not all of them married for looks, but their
reasoning still seems a little faulty (they married for the wrong reasons). The
real reason for getting married is always to have someone who cares about you,
who always has your back, who loves you, who is always concerned about what you
need and willing to be there whenever and wherever you need them to be, and who
always has time for you, even if they’re not Barbie or Ken…. That’s who Pat
(Pete’s wife) is. If you don’t have that, it’s time to go shopping.
