The Grass Is Always Greener

I think most of us are familiar with the expression, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.” Somebody with way too much time on their hands, and probably a whole lot more federal grant money than they should have been entitled to, did a study on this a few years ago and determined that, when one is standing in one’s own yard, looking down, most of the grass points pretty much straight up, so one is able to see between the blades of grass, and see the dirt, which makes the grass look less green. If one looks into the neighbor’s yard, though, the angle is different, and one generally just sees the grass, and not the dirt. I couldn’t tell you who thought this was worth the effort to investigate.
Really, the expression has little to do with grass. It’s easy to look at what someone else has, or what someone else does, and think, that must be nice. We don’t see the whole picture in someone else’s life. We don’t see the dirt between the blades of grass, so to speak. Sometimes it isn’t even so much that one person wants what another person has, it’s just that sometimes one person would feel better about himself or herself if they knew that they could have what the other person has.
I have heard from more than one married man that, as soon as he put on that ring, suddenly he was irresistible to women that would not have given him the time of day when he was single. It isn’t that these women wanted to be married to him; they just would have felt better about themselves if they could have broken his commitment.
Of course, the man in question doesn’t have to be married. Joseph had a commitment to God that Potiphar’s wife was jealous of. She knew that what she wanted was wrong, and yet she pursued Joseph relentlessly. Eventually, she managed to corner him, and put him in a position that made it look like he had broken his commitment. That was enough for her, and it was enough to have Joseph sent to prison. Of course, if you know the story, you know that God parlayed Joseph’s prison time into a position as Pharaoh’s most trusted advisor. So God rewarded Joseph for his integrity, but what did Potiphar’s wife get out of it? Hopefully a guilty conscience… Certainly not what she wanted. Perhaps it made her feel better about herself that she was able to convince so many others that Joseph was willing to sacrifice his integrity for her, even though she always knew that he never did any such thing.
It’s interesting to note, too, that men have traditionally allowed ourselves to be laid low by women. Adam had his Eve, Samson had his Delilah, David had his Bathsheba… And it isn’t necessarily that women are evil (Eve and Bathsheba certainly were not), but that we allow ourselves to be unduly influenced by them. If you consider the situation that I outlined above: a married man, and a single woman who considers his commitment to be a challenge, rather than a boundary. If he allows himself to be tempted into breaking his marriage commitment, one of two things will probably happen: she will leave him, and move on to the next ‘challenge,’ or they will get married, and she won’t understand when some other woman does to her what she did to his first wife.
Sometimes it works the other way, too. Sometimes a man will tempt a woman away from the things that she considers important. It comes down to the same thing, either way; one person is ruining another person’s life just to stroke his or her own ego. Whether that’s a man or a woman that’s doing it, that’s wrong. At the same time, we should be aware that such things are happening, and not fall into that trap.

New Clothes

I was reading about this new idea: the butt cam. The idea is that this camera is mounted inside the dressing room at a high-end fashion store, with a viewing screen, so that you can try on expensive jeans, and see how you look from behind. In some ways that seems like a good idea (although the paranoid part of my brain wants to know who else can see what I see when I'm checking out my butt), and it certainly seems like it should eliminate that pesky question, "Does this dress make me look fat?"
It won't, of course. That question is unavoidable. The thing is, men like things to be simple. If you ask me, "Is the ceiling white?" I can answer yes, if it is, or no, if it's not. Even men understand, however, that the fat question is not what it seems. If it were, the answer would be easy: "No, the dress does not make you look fat." What the wearer is really asking is, "Do I look fat in this dress?" except, of course, that she's framing the question in such a way that I'm supposed to believe that if she does look fat, it's the dress's fault. So I am now expected to evaluate the way that you look in that dress , and find a tactful way of suggesting that maybe that dress isn't something you should buy if it doesn't hide the extra pounds that you have put on. I am also expected to do this in less than twelve microseconds, since any hesitation longer than that is enough to hurt your feelings, since, in your mind, I should have been able to answer 'no' instantly. Of course, if the extra pounds are just in your imagination, then my job would seem to be easy, but I'm still going to try to figure out why you're even asking me this.

I read something the other night that gave me some insight into the problem. In the September Reader's Digest, somebody wrote that women think they are fat if they can't fit into the jeans they wore in high school; men think they are fat if they can't fit into a foreign car. The bottom line is, women tend to be very insecure about their own appearance (years ago, it occurred to me that I should have gotten into women's hair-care products. Between black women buying relaxers to straighten their naturally curly hair, and white women buying home perm kits to curl their naturally straight hair, there is a fortune to be made!). This can be hard for men to understand. Don't misunderstand me, I know that some women are not at all insecure, and some men are very insecure, but generally, women need that reassurance that they are attractive, and men don't.

So, now we're getting deeper into this question: women ask this question wanting to be reassured that we still find them attractive. For some reason, the fact that we have not kicked them to the curb and gone out in search of a prettier companion isn't enough. When you stop to consider, eating disorders are almost exclusively female problems. Every once in a while, you hear about a teenage boy with anorexia nervosa, but that's very unusual. If a guy gets an eating disorder, it's that he eats fast food at every meal and has his first heart attack before he graduates high school...

The real irony is that women have long joked about the fragile male ego. To some extent, they're right; men do tend to have fragile egos. Just not nearly as fragile as women do.