It struck me the other evening, while I was driving home from work, that Y and I grade the world using totally different scales. It sounds kind of silly now I type it out, that I only realise this four years into our marriage, but even though I knew we were very different, I’d never drawn the comparisons until that day.
For instance, Y divides girls he doesn’t know into two categories (and you’ll excuse my being blunt here): ugly and pretty. Heidi Klum and other super-beauties aside, the rest of the world’s female population generally tick either of these boxes. I say girls he doesn’t know because once he gets to know a girl, it becomes less to do with how physically beautiful she is and more to do with whether he gets along with her and how much he enjoys her company. So he’s not completely superficial. For now.
Me, I grade the regular guy according to three categories: average, above average and good-looking. Most guys fall into average, some fall into above average and only a handful get to be good-looking in my book. Nobody is ugly. Again, genetically-blessed celebrities do not apply. And I have a bias towards tall men.
I remember having a conversation about this with Y a couple years back and being totally aghast that he doesn’t have an “average” category. There must be some people who don’t fit into either group, I argued. To which he replied, if they’re not pretty then they’re ugly.
Then last week, we were talking about singers when Y said someone we’d heard on the web was bad. I said it was okay. Not fantastic but still reasonably good. He scoffed and said good was what one of our friends could do. I said that in my book, that friend is super-good. And I realised Y doesn’t have that category. He has bad and he has good. I have bad, average, good and super-good.
(Now I’m starting to see why some men might think women are complicated.)
So my question is this: Are Y and I a classic case of men versus women, Mars versus Venus yada yada? Do all men see the world in polar opposites while the womenfolk carefully divide everything into three or more categories? Is Y being overly judgmental? Am I just being weird?
(Oops, that was four questions instead of one. How… girly of me.)
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