Wallets and Handbags

Wallets and Handbags

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus…Men are like waffles, women are like spaghetti…Men are like knives, women are like forks…

As we moved towards another pre-marital counselling class, thoughts about what marriage really means began to occupy the mind, leading to my own contribution to the ‘Men are…Women are…’ stable.

Men’s minds are like wallets, women’s are like handbags.

Wallets have compartments for everything: for cards, for coins, for cash and other sheets of paper. Handbags have no ‘exact’ structure to them; they just offer a space into which the user can put all the things she considers important. So while items in a wallet may spend their entire existence in permanent separation from their co-occupants, everything in a handbag will at some point brush up against everything else.

In addition, when using a wallet you can go directly to the item you have an interest in, though to access a particular item in a handbag, you may need to make contact with every other item in order to locate it (gives me a headache just thinking about it).

Which is probably why it is possible for a lady to have a disagreement with someone from work at 9.40am and snap at her husband when she gets home at 6.30pm. It is the equivalent of a drink spilling in a handbag; until the damage is dealt with, every item she touches will, through dampness or other damage, remind her of the drink that spilt.

In short, the spilt drink affects EVERYTHING in the handbag, whereas in a wallet, damage could be restricted to the area most exposed to the external influence. So a man could have the same disagreement at the same 9.40am on the same day, decide on a course of action and act on the decision (store it in its ‘compartment’) and by 6.30pm he has forgotten said person exists, let alone the disagreement they had. And so he gets home on the same day all cheerful and goes “Hey love, what’s for dinner?” to which she responds, “Sort your own dinner out. You men think we are here just to do your bidding…”

And he goes back out to make sure he’s walked into the correct house.