The one thing a woman wants most from a man is what he can't give her - emotions.
A woman can wake up at 5 a.m. and get all teary over the sunrise that somehow reminds her of a day 20 years ago when she was at band camp and went for a morning walk with her first boyfriend. A man wakes up at 5 a.m. and cusses the dog because he's scratching at the door to go outside to do his business.
A woman will cry when you ask her about how she met her husband. She can tell you what she was wearing, where they went on the first date, and even give you a word-for-word playback of what he said to her the entire evening. A man can barely remember their anniversary.
A woman's thoughts are centered around her kids. She knows all about their dentist appointments, romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of short people living in the house.
To be fair, a woman may think that her man doesn't love her or their kids, but that's not true. Men are just wired different than women. Emotions are not something we are very comfortable with. But try telling that to your wife when she comes to you complaining that she's having an emotional day and just needs to be held.
But I think I have found some help for all of us men who want to meet our wife's emotional needs, but haven't quite figured out how to get in touch with our feminine side.
Traditional funerals in Taiwan are emotional affairs, but the problem is that grieving relatives are often times too weary or too numb to shed the required amount of tears needed to show their dear, departed family member the respect he or she deserved. So now they are hiring professional mourners to attend the funeral service and to weep and wail for them.
Liu Chun-lin, for example, offers a traditional funeral dance, plays a mourning song on her bamboo sticks and then launches into a high-pitched, heart-wrenching wailing while pounding on the floor and crawling on her knees to express grief for a dead stranger, and all for just $600 - considered a real bargain with Chinese who are not especially good at expressing their feelings either.
So here's my idea. Having an emotional conversation with a woman can feel like a funeral for a man who has absolutely no idea what to say. So instead of saying something inept like, "Let's look at this situation rationally," or "There's no point in getting all worked up about something so silly as that," and then getting this you-don't-love-me look on her face for the next two weeks, I think men should hire someone to get all emotional over whatever it is that she is complaining about - someone, you know, like Oprah.
It could go something like this: "Honey, I've had a terrible day with the kids and then I burned the dinner and now I just broke a nail."
Normally a man would say that her complaints were no big deal, or that his day was hard too. Don't do it, guys. Instead bring in the emotional hired gun who would tell her what she needs to hear.
"I understand what you're feeling, dear. I would be just as upset as you. Just give yourself a good cry, girl. Now let me just give you a hug to make you feel better."
Or she might say something like this. "I don't know why, but I've been feeling kind of blue all day. You know, just weepy for no reason."
A man's first reaction to that sort of statement from his wife is a blank stare. But instead call in Oprah. "I understand what you're feeling, sweetheart. I get that way some times too. Let's just sit together on the couch and have some ice cream until we both feel better."
But the truth be told, if you ladies want your man to be more emotional, more sympathetic, more attuned to your feelings, then maybe you should apply the Taiwanese model directly.
"Listen, I need some emotion from you, mister. So here's $600. Now pony up some tears."
If I can just get Kathy to do that, I just might be able to cry my way into getting a whole new set of tools for my shop.
John Graham is an Advocate Columnist. His column appears each Sunday in the Advocate. He can be reached at jgraham19@woh.rr.com.
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