The light bulb came on when I learned about honey bees. As we all know, there is a queen bee. The all working bees are female. There are small numbers of male bees, large but not capable to do anything other than eat and sleep. When the time comes, they swarm with the queen for the reproductive purpose. After the queen is mated, the boys die. Frankly speaking, the male bees exist pretty much just for reproduction.
I hope I am not upsetting the male readers. I don’t say boys are living nothing but just for sex. But this ‘bee fact’ made me believe male and female are fundamentally different. There are studies about the difference of the brain between male and female. Being a mother of a boy and girl, I have been convinced they are really different as well.
To begin with, I was fully aware of the cultural difference between my partner and me. Plus we have a fairly wide generation gap. The acceptance of fundamental gender difference hammered it down to me that we are totally different. Nevertheless, I still religiously believed we could understand each other by good communication and respect the difference for a long time.
But I ended up facing to a problem.
If you don’t understand someone else’s logic, values and/or perceptions, you have no idea how to respect it because you have no clue what it is. It doesn’t exist in your world. You can’t evaluate, appreciate or respect something not existing. Unfortunately I have a lot of things that don’t exist my partner’s world. Although I could feel his effort to respect me, I often get frustrated at his insensitivity, ignorance and arrogance.
Don’t get me wrong. My partner is a very nice person. He is a sweetheart. I feel his good heart and love, otherwise I would have been gone long time before. Nevertheless, his logic to argue with me are often quite horrible. Basically he hears what he wants to hear with his extremely quick assumption and unique interpretation, totally ignoring what I literally say and what I really mean. Often I feel I am talking (if you call it a talk) with an alien since he develops the story beyond my understanding so fast.
I was suffering for quite a while wondering why. Why he is so dam irrational and, to make the matters worse, stubborn?
This discouraged me to talk with him. If I don’t start, there will be no pointless argument. But it was also very stressful. Occasionally I e-mailed him to review our argument with additional explanation and cross reference with outer elements, hoping he would see my point after he calmed down. But I didn’t hear back from him at all. I felt I was ignored. Still I felt his love by small actions through our daily life. It was puzzling but I trusted my feelings for him.
One day I thought he is like a child, probably so beyond my expectation as a so many years old adult male with life experience that I can’t begin to understand. So I gave up understanding him. This is a paradox. When I gave up understanding him, finally I felt I understood him.
He is as he is. In my world, he is totally irrational and ignorance, but in his world, with whatever reason I don’t understand forever, it is normal and nothing wrong. So let him be.
Then I realized how much I was trying to train him to understand my logic, my values and my world. I was hoping he understood something not existing in his world. It is probably unrealistic to expect his respect for something he can’t see, feel and imagine.
We still argue. Often our conversation goes a strange direction. But I am getting much better not to be bothered with it. We are totally different, and we enjoy being together, in spite of the crazy miscommunication here and there. But let him be, and simply enjoy him as he is. I do enjoy having him in my life after all, which is very grateful.