It's a Man's, Man's Man's Man's World

Valentine's Day is over. The pressure is off.

Men don't understand Valentine's Day and never will. We barge in and take control of a lot of things but men are content to leave Love in the hands of the women. We delegate Love. Even romantic men, men who are praised as better than the common lunkhead in matters of the heart, don't really understand it. They're just applying the lessons they've learned from experience. "Oh, she likes flowers but hates tickets to the game! Oh, it's better if I write something on the card!"

There was a study done about perceptual differences between the sexes. It turns out that men are a little gradient-blind. Where a man will recognize red to purple to blue, a woman will see maroon to red to lavender to purple to violet to blue to midnight. Why this is, no one can say.

I think the same thing applies to all our senses, and certainly to our emotional lives. Women simply notice things that men don't, because they are more finely tuned. This failure to register is man's greatest strength as well as his weakness. We are able to barrel on through a lot of situations simply because they don't cross the no pain/pain threshold. And love, which is the most complex of all emotions, is beyond our limited perceptual grasp.

This is why men and women don't understand each other - we're looking at the same world, but it's an entirely different bunch of stuff. Therefore, it only makes sense to put women in the driver's seat when it comes to love - the road is twistier than we can possibly imagine. If you want a different metaphor, we give women the remote control to love, because we can only see 20 channels and they can see all 150. You put women in charge of Valentine's day, it's nice. When men run it, it's a Massacre.

Now that it's over, we can go back to steering the world; we'll crash into stuff and each other but we'll get wherever we're going a lot faster.