“You’ve gotta give for what you take” – George Michael

 

For every married man, nothing is like the old days when he was free to do anything at anytime.

 

By freedom I mean being a bachelor which, most if not all married men consider the most precious thing they gave up for marriage. There comes a time when each married man sits back at the office or in the car or even at home and thinks of those days when he was free and in shape. He thinks of all the places he used to go to and all the hang outs with friends. But these happy thoughts do not last for long as something must happen to bring you back to reality, and wherever you are it will be your wife that will bring you back to reality. If you are at the office dreaming of your long missed freedom then your phone will ring and be sure it’s your wife telling you that she wants to do some shopping tonight. If you are in the house, which is her territory and you are considered a prisoner of war (that’s what men think while dreaming) then you will wake up from that freedom dream to wipe that stupid smile off your face with the first shout from your wife calling your name.

I don’t know why that fantasy about freedom always comes to married men, even those who are happily married and satisfied. But a deep part of us feels we are kept against our will and that we are not on our own anymore. Believe me wives reading this, all married men dream of that even if they do not say it out loud and clear, but we do. I remember how my bachelor friends call me for late-night outings or weekend trips, and then I hear the same question “Are you sure you can come with us, don’t you need to check first?” Is that the way things turned to now? I get to take permission for going out with my friends for some time or go on a guys-only trip for a couple of days like old times?

When a man starts to get that feeling that he is restrained in his house and cannot take a simple decision like he used to do before, with these thoughts going back and forth in a husband’s head, he starts to become the rebel he always wanted to be and starts acting strangely with his wife. She will notice that he has become objecting to everything suddenly just to start a fight out of nowhere (in a way or another, acting like the default female). This will gain the husband some time to make the wife feel guilty for something she did not initiate as it all started in his head, so she will try to make it up to him and agree to let him travel with his friends.

This situation makes me wonder a lot, what makes men choose to get married when they know that by this they are giving up their freedom? It’s all about choices, and surprisingly men think that they hold the upper hand in choices when it comes to marriage.

One of the basic characteristics of females is being very selective, very picky and careful choosers in everything even their husbands. So men live under the impression that they made the choice in marriage when in fact it’s the wife who chose him with her selective sense. A group of scientists were studying the mating behavior of the brown beetles in the USA and found out that beetles gather around beer bottles on the side of the road (originally thrown by truck drivers). When scientists repeated the experiment in the lab, they found that all those beetles gathering around the brown beer bottles are males trying to mate with the bottles taking them for super size females! That is a fact that proves that males judge only by appearance.

It’s most likely that if a man meets 10 beautiful ladies on one day he would love to marry at least 9 of them, while a female with the selective style would watch the males for a long time, trying to impress other females till she finds one that impresses her.

Would one single man be able to handle 9 females or even 2 at the same time? I don’t think so as the first problem would be listening to them all talking at the same time. Sigmund Freud once said “I had some words with my wife and she had some paragraphs with me”, which perfectly describes the incredible talking ability of females! Before marriage, a man could stay for hours listening to females talking as long as none of them holds the title “his wife”  but after marriage this would be one of the hardest time specially having to listen to all that talking around the house. Men tend to solve problems instead of just listening to what their wives are saying. A wife wants her man to just listen, it’s like getting married to a huge ear and sitting talking to it all the time. But we are not good at this as we are so practical and like to offer solutions in a fast way.

My wife always gets angry with me when doing this and the worst times are when I would watch TV and at the same time try to listen to her. She is sitting next to me on the couch and I am watching TV, she starts talking and I am trying to listen but I want to watch my TV. My wife would suddenly stop talking and look at me in anger and say “you were not listening to me” and I sure reply back “sure I was listening”. Then she would look at me and say “ok if you were listening then repeat the last thing I just said” and for sure it won’t be a second till she realizes that I was faking the listening husband face and my trouble starts.

I found out the best way to escape this situation, I would concentrate and listen to the first sentence in her conversation. Then from time to time I would look at her and start asking open ended question that just lead to nowhere like “why, why would you want to do that?”, for example. One of the major risks of this technique is: what would happen if she changed the subject in the middle? I would be asking old questions and back to the initial problem, caught with my hands in the cookie jar, guilty as charged and AGAIN: not listening.