Spouses-R-Us: The Ronnie-Test

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.