With certainty, Mary loves her husband Phil, but there are a few things about him that drive her nuts. As they walked the Mall recently, it seemed to her that other women dazzled Phil as much or more so than the holiday lights in the brightly lit stores.
On more than one occasion, she caught him turning his head to follow some nubile young woman, his eyes dilated in obvious pleasure and his face shadowed in a wry smile.
Then there was the “refrigerator channel” at home. He would stand for long minutes in front of their aging Amana refrigerator staring. “Where IS the Mayonnaise?” he would ask in frustration. The answer was always the same. “It’s on the top shelf, right in front of you. If it had teeth it would bite you,” Mary would answer.
So why would a man who could pick out a semi-hidden State Trooper vehicle a half-mile away, and follow women around the Mall, not see something that was right in front of his nose?
Maybe they should put boobs on the Mayonnaise jar Mary reasoned. He would find that all right. And just maybe marketers were on to something when they created the squeezable hourglass-shaped Catsup bottle that mimicked a woman’s figure. Ergonomics be damned, Mary thought. It was about sex after all.
But not so science tells us.
The answer lies in one of the not-so-obvious differences in the way men and women are hardwired. A throwback to his ancestor’s days as a hunter roaming the wilderness in search of fresh meat, a man’s vision is wired with a narrow focus but with a deep field of vision, creating a kind of tunnel vision. This gained him an advantage when sneaking up on watering herds and remains true today when ferreting out distant police vehicles.
Yet it remains a disadvantage for him to close up. Whether in front of the refrigerator and particularly in those Mall encounters where he has to noticeably turn his head to view the opposite sex, Phil is utterly helpless.
Mary’s vision is the opposite of Phil’s. Although her spatial abilities are less than Phil’s, she has a wider peripheral vision, one far greater than Phil’s, but with a shallow field of vision.
It was a woman’s lot in life to keep everything they loved and nurtured close to them, keep them with eyesight so to speak. Car insurance companies tell us that statistically women have far fewer side impact accidents than men and that little girls have about half of the bicycle mishaps of their male counterparts.
And despite Mary’s fussing about Phil’s female window-shopping habits, she ogles too, preferring men with small butts, only she thinks she’s smarter than her husband because she doesn’t get caught, but that is a story to be told in a future column.
Love Handles is dedicated to understanding the differences between men and women in the hopes that greater understanding leads to more vigorous relationships for our readers.