I'll Mature When I'm Dead (2 page)

M
y wife has a friend whom I will call Bernice. (That is not her real name. It is not anybody’s real name.)

Bernice is an attractive, smart, funny, middle-aged single woman who would love to be in a committed relationship with a man. My wife knows approximately 1,700 attractive, smart, funny, middle-aged single women who would love to be in a committed relationship with a man. (I don’t mean with the
same
man.) (Although at this point they might not rule it out.)

Several times a week, after talking with one of these women, my wife delivers a rant (it runs about seventy-five minutes, including a bathroom break) about how WRONG it is that there are all these attractive, smart, funny, middle-aged single women out there, and they CAN’T FIND A MAN. My wife has a theory about why this is, namely: Men are idiots.

My wife believes that men tend to have insanely high physical standards regarding the kind of woman they’re willing to settle for. She notes that a middle-aged man can have tarantula-grade nose hair, b.o. that can cause migrating geese to change course, and enough spare tissue to form a whole new middle-aged man, but this man can still believe that he is physically qualified to date Scarlett Johansson.

“What’s
wrong
with these men?” my wife asks purely rhetorically. “Don’t they have
mirrors
?”

It is true that men can appear to be superficial about what qualities they seek in the opposite sex, as shown in this scientific chart:

But does this
mean that men are nothing but a bunch of shallow low-life sex-obsessed horn dogs? Yes. But men have a solid scientific excuse: biology.

As we know from attending high school, the human body is actually made up of trillions of tiny one-celled animals called “cells,” which clot together to form important organs such as the spleen, the jowls, and the goiter. Every single human cell contains “DNA,” which is a special molecule that your body leaves behind at crime scenes so the police can identify you. But DNA has another important purpose: It contains your “genetic code,” which enables you to pass along to future generations your distinguishing characteristics, such as hair color, age, hating the Yankees, etc. There are two crucial facts you need to know about DNA. The first one is:

You may think
you
are in charge, but you are not. Your relationship to your body is the same as the relationship between a coach and a soccer team of four-year-olds. The coach can shout all the instructions he wants about kicking the ball, but if the players prefer to stand around picking their noses, they will stand around picking their noses. Likewise, your body does not do what you want; it does what your DNA wants. This leads us to crucial DNA fact number two:

Your DNA wants to put its imprint on the entire human race, like the Nike Corporation. This goal is shared by both male and female DNA molecules, but they achieve it in very different ways. To understand the difference, let’s take a look at actual photographs of two DNA samples. The first was taken from a woman:

This one was taken from a man:

If we look closely, we can see subtle differences between these molecules, the main one being that the female DNA is more complex. The reason is that in order for female DNA to reproduce, the female it occupies—this is crucial—
has to have a baby
. And even if she starts really early and is a total slut,
she can only have a limited number of babies
. And even after she has a baby, if she wants her DNA line to continue,
she has to nurture that baby
until it can survive on its own, which with modern human babies does not happen until they are in their mid-thirties.

So for human females, reproduction is a very complicated and drawn-out process. It can take her weeks just to find an acceptable maternity bathing suit. Then there’s all the paraphernalia she must buy for the baby—the stroller that costs as much as, but is more technologically advanced than, a Toyota Celica; the adorable little teensy baby shoes; the cute designer baby outfits that the baby will fill with poop.

Now a rational person, by which I mean a man, might ask whether the baby really
needs
all these things, especially the shoes, since the only thing babies do with their feet, once they discover them, is cram them as far as possible into their mouths.

But a rational person is not making these decisions. The woman’s DNA is, and it is taking no chances. For whatever chemical reason, it is convinced that the baby needs cute little shoes, so the baby WILL have cute little shoes, just as the baby’s room WILL have wallpaper festooned with cute little baby animals. If you try to stop a severely pregnant woman from providing these things for her baby, she will crush your skull with a Diaper Genie. This is not personal. She’s obeying her DNA, which is doing what it believes it has to do to nurture her child—or, more accurately, her child’s DNA.

As the child grows older, the woman continues to engage in behavior that may seem irrational to a normal person. A good example is birthday parties. These are considered by most women to be a vital part of child-nurturing, which is why every year, when my daughter’s birthday comes around, my wife becomes—and I say this with the deepest affection—a dangerous lunatic.

I’m not saying our daughter shouldn’t have a birthday party. I’m just saying I could organize one in an hour. I’d order some pizzas, get a cake at the supermarket, organize some fun party games for little girls—“Run Around Shrieking,” “Run Around Shrieking Some More,” etc.—and boom, there’s your party. I’m not saying it would be the greatest birthday celebration ever. For one thing, it would be roughly a month after my daughter’s actual birthday, because I am not good with dates. But it would get the job done.

My wife, on the other hand, believes the party should be along the lines of the Super Bowl halftime show, but more elaborate. Her birthday parties always have themes. One year the theme was
The Wizard of Oz
, and among the props she found on the Internet (including a piñata shaped like a ruby slipper) was a “yellow brick road,” which consisted of a roll of extremely slick yellow plastic, which she instructed me to unroll on our front walk. It was raining, so I pointed out, in a very reasonable tone, that if we put slippery plastic on the already-slippery sidewalk, people could get hurt.

Did you ever see the movie
Species
, in which what appeared to be an attractive woman was actually a camouflaged alien reptile creature who could kill a man by sticking her hideous reptile tongue into his mouth so far that it came out through the back of his skull? When that creature was about to strike, it had
exactly
the same facial expression as the one on my wife when I suggested that maybe we should not put out the yellow brick road. Her view was: Yes, people might get injured, perhaps even killed, but the theme of the party is
The Wizard of Oz
, and
by God we are going to have a yellow brick road
. And so of course we did.

The nurturing instinct is not limited to children. It causes women to engage in a wide range of other behaviors that men find unnatural, including:

The list goes on and on and on. A typical woman’s brain is swarming, night and day, with vague feelings of guilt caused by the nagging worry that somebody, somewhere in her vast complex network of family and friends
needs more nurturing
. That’s why she’s in a bad mood.

Men are a whole different biological story. A man can’t have babies, of course, so the only way his DNA can reproduce itself is if he gets a woman pregnant. The thing is, the man’s DNA’s odds improve if, while the first woman is off buying tiny unnecessary shoes for her future offspring, he gets
another
woman pregnant. In fact—and remember this is the DNA thinking,
not
the man—
the more women the man gets pregnant, the better the odds that his DNA will survive
. He is genetically programmed to attempt to mate with pretty much any available woman or reasonably soft object, then move quickly along.

So to summarize: A woman is designed like a female elephant, with a long gestation period followed by years of mothering; whereas a man is designed more along the lines of a dandelion, which randomly spews large numbers of seeds all over the place, then pretty much forgets about them. Neither the elephant nor the dandelion is “right.” They’re both perpetuating their DNA, but they’re biologically designed to use very different strategies, which is why you so rarely see a meaningful, long-term, mutually fulfilling relationship between an elephant and a dandelion.

This brings us back to Bernice. Remember? My wife’s attractive, middle-aged single friend who would love to be in a committed relationship with a man? We’ll use her as our example of why it’s pretty much hopeless. Bernice is, like my wife, a sportswriter. A while back they were at a major sporting event, and Bernice revealed to the other women sportswriters that in several days she was going to go on a blind date for lunch. So the other women sportswriters wished her luck and went back to work.

Ha-ha! Of course that is not what happened. What happened was, the Women’s Emergency Relationship Support Network signal went off—BWOOP! BWOOP! BWOOP!—and the other women sportswriters immediately ceased sportswriting so they could devote their full analytical and reportorial and Googling skills to the many questions raised by the impending date. Some concerned the man: Exactly who was he? How old? What did he do? What were his prior relationships? Was he cute? Did he have any unmarried friends? Were
they
cute?

Then there were the questions for Bernice, the critical one being: What should she wear? Team Bernice settled on a skirt, but then there was the issue of length. It couldn’t be too short, because then Bernice would appear to be trying too hard. But it couldn’t be too long, because then she would appear to be a nun.

After much discussion, coaching, and preparation, Bernice was finally ready to go on her date. But she didn’t really go alone. She was accompanied, in spirit, by my wife and the rest of the team of women sportswriters. In a way, Bernice was accompanied by all the other women who have ever existed, surrounding her in an invisible scented cloud of supportive womanity, rooting for her to find a suitable mate and settle down and replicate and nurture her DNA.

Now consider the guy. Let’s call him The Dandelion. I don’t know him, but I guarantee he did not have a team of guys behind him. And I doubt he did much preparing. Probably fifteen minutes before the lunch his BlackBerry beeped, and he thought: “Whoa! I have a date!” Then he tried to remember if he was wearing the underwear without the ketchup stains.