Driving Husbands Crazy

Simeone de Beauvoir, a French writer, insists that men invented marriage to keep women in their place as the second sex. But why would a man deliberately go out of his way to dream up an institution so shackling to his liberty, so harrying to the wild male spirit and above all so expensive? Maybe, that thing called love made them crazy to invent wives. Maybe they’ve been victims of female legerdemain. Yes, they may have been crazy but these sly wifeys could drive them even nuttier.

Husbands find their wives as real companions: sweet, caring, and oh so useful (specially at home). They do wonderful things for men and provide them their basic needs (free househelp and free sex). But no matter how good, charming and soigne a wife is, she’s not perfect. She could do darn things which could drive her husband crazy.

Dong, a 26 year old salesman, didn’t know whether to laugh or to feel exasperated at his wife when they once had a fight. “The argument was so heated. We were in our room”, he recounted. “When I sensed that the debate was going nowhere, I kept silent. She went on talking until she furiously told me to go out of the room. So I quietly stand up and walked toward the door. Seeing me do so, she seemed to have regained consciousness. She ran and blocked my way, and with tears in her eyes angrily uttered, “What, you’ll really walk out on me?”.

Indeed, women got the capability of making men scratch their heads in muddle. Even the lawyer husband I know is confused of how women are thinking today. One time he had a debate with his also-lawyer wife. The wife told him not to underestimate the female specie for they already got a fingerhand in men’s world. She asserted women’s independence and denounced the traditional concept of the female as the weaker sex. “They want to be treated equal but they curse men who won’t offer them seats on buses”, the husband said finding it farcical. Are our women asking too much?

J.P. McEvoy, a warm-hearted, famous and perceptive writer, said in one of his articles that when he was little, his mother used to go on about “the patience of a saint”, but it wasn’t until he grew up that he learned most saints were never married. So how could they possibly know anything about patience?

“Women”, according to Nick, a 33-year old accountant, “could really be maddening”. He was shaking his head as he said with a smile, “My wife Lizza? Oh she’s very loving yet has her murky moods”. Asked about his wife’s daft acts, he narrates, “She has this habit of starting an argument. She gets angry, then she cries. Sometimes I’m confused and dumbfounded ‘cause I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. But afterwards, she’ll come close and embrace me saying, “I’m sorry hon, I just had a long day”. It started and ended with me not saying a single word”.

Indeed, it may not be easy to understand a woman. And this may be explained by the Indian legend about her creation: “ . . . When He had finished creating man, the Creator realized that He had used up all the concrete elements. There was nothing solid, nothing compact on hand, left over to create the woman. After thinking for a long time, the Creator took – the roundness of the moon, the flexibility of a clinging vine and the trembling of the grass, the slenderness of a reed, the blossoming of flowers, the lightness of leaves and the serenity of the rays of sunshine, the tears of clouds and the instability of the wind, the fearfulness of a rabbit and the vanity of a peacock, the softness of a bird’s breast and the hardness of a diamond, the sweetness of honey and the cruelty of a tiger, the burning of fire and the coldness of snow, the talkativeness of a magpie and the singing of a nightingale, the falseness of a crane and the faithfulness of a mother lion.”

Yes, noble wife is a complicated specie. She may do the darnest things to her dear husband yet deep inside her heart, there’s just a simple longing behind all these nebulosity. All she wants is to be assured that he recognizes her femininity and understands the peculiarities of temperament and mood that go with it. Remember, she is a woman.