Venus, Mars, and the Roman Empire Meme

The last woman I dated in a serious, would-have-married-her way, was so far removed from my orbital path, she being from Venus, me being from Mars, that I had to broom her when ultimately she would not step one single foot into my frame. I’ve begun to see this as a microcosm for a much larger societal problem. The problem with the Venus/Mars meme, and it is an old meme, is that the onus is often placed on the man for his failure to understand women, and it is almost never put on women to understand men, and that is despite the fact that I think the reverse is true, that it is easier for men to understand women than vice versa. Women are easy, to be honest. They care about people and food. Men are much more complex.

This became delightfully clear a couple of weeks ago when in social media it came out that men think about the Roman empire with some regularity. Our culture is so gynocentric, this tidbit of information about men coming out at all was remarkable. Yes, it is true. I think about the Roman empire all the time, and I have scoured the Internet, movies, books, to help me understand it better. I’ve read Gibbon. To understand why, one need only understand that men are evolved to protect women and children, so understanding history, and how that can ostensibly help one recognize patterns and therefore threats to women and children, is useful in that endeavor. Rome fell, you see, and humans have not changed, and these same patterns are repeating, theme and variation. Men are trying to ferret out information so they can act wisely in the present.

That woman I dated, when I would try to talk to her about larger-context things, like history, or science, or really anything external like that, she said to me I sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents to her. She said that exactly. It’s not often that the difference between men and women gets articulated so on-the-nose like that, but these responses from women about the Roman empire meme bear this out. Women don’t think like that at all. All they think about is other people and food. I’m not exaggerating that, or even being mean. This woman, in particular, was continually obsessing about other people, her position in social hierarchies, and where she would score her next Chick-Fil-A value meal. Literally, that all she ever talked about. I understood her completely, as in, every time she opened her mouth she was going to talk about other people, or how she was hungry. I could sometimes toy with that by asking her about other people, and I would pick on her about what she had for lunch, and she never understood at all why I did that. She, on the other hand, never once asked me a question like, “what insights have you had today about world politics?” Never. She didn’t care about that, and she didn’t care about me enough to extend herself in that way. Never. Women do not care about men in the same way that men care about women, and you can’t change that. Charlie Brown’s parents, after all.

You know, all of that would have been fine if she had been willing to come into my frame, even a little. I don’t want the person I’m dating to be masculine, after all; I’m a heterosexual male. We reached a stalemate there. I was already inside her frame far more than I was comfortable with. I attended her church a couple of times, and I’d go to family gatherings, and I befriended her parents, and I took up with her kids. Even though I really despise the entire state of Georiga, I was willing to stay here to make a life with her, and I’ll spare the particulars here and suffice it to say that it wasn’t enough. Compromise was me giving everything, and her giving nothing.

I’d be thinking about ancient Rome, and she’d be thinking about what the woman at work said behind her back, or how she had a coupon for Chick-Fil-A. That’s the difference between men and women in a nutshell, and I’m going to tell you, when all of this comes crashing down, and it will, it isn’t because men didn’t see the patterns and didn’t see it coming. We do. The problem is that in an age of social media-fueled gynocentrism, women will not step inside our frame and listen to us; they do not understand us at all, so when a hard-edged masculine threat comes knocking, women are not going to understand what is happening, and the women are going to bring us down. It is inevitable, and you can see it everywhere you want to look.