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After many, many years as a wife and mother, living with an adult (at least adult most of the time) male and raising children of both sexes, I often question how male and female humans can be the same species — and I find it astonishing that they can live together peacefully.
Of course, as any marriage counselor can tell you, the number who do actually live together peacefully is far lower than even the high divorce rate suggests.
The countless ways in which males and females differ shock me constantly throughout each day, but recently I have received an unexpectedly high number of brain smacks from a new activity in my life. This new activity is gambling. Of a sort.
At the risk of propelling the vice squad into action, I must confess that one of my friends has organized a monthly ladies’ poker night. Every time we play, I cannot help but notice how different our poker nights are from the poker nights my husband has been sharing with a group of men for many years.
The differences start with the preparations. As a host, my husband believes it is enough simply to shovel the debris off the dining room table and chairs. As he sees it — and, given the males in my life, I have every reason to believe he is right — most males are completely oblivious to dirt, so there is no reason to clean for them. In fact, he has always argued that there is no point in cleaning before any kind of party since people are just going to make a mess anyway.
Women, of course, feel the need to clean every area of the house that a guest might see; thus, any room without a locked door needs to be de-cluttered, and any area the guests will actually pass through must be cleaned. This is done despite sincere protestations by the female guests that there is no need for cleaning — protestations that men would never even think to utter.
When it comes to preparing the food, my husband feels it is sufficient to rip open a bag of tortilla chips and pick up a bucket of chicken wings. In contrast, the women feel the need to prepare an elaborate spread. Needless to say, the foods chosen for the two groups also differ significantly in that the men are clearly carnivores and would not think of having a poker night without some sort of meat to gnaw on.
In contrast, the women feel no need for meat, but the notion that they would set the party table without cheese, or, even more important, chocolate, is simply laughable.
For the ladies’ nights, if a natural theme presents itself, then the preparations revolve around this theme, such as Christmas for our poker night in December. For the men, the idea of wrapping the evening around a theme is totally alien. It would be difficult to describe the expressions on my husband’s and sons’ faces when I returned home from my December poker night and reported that we had used playing cards shaped like Christmas trees — which is, admittedly, a ridiculous shape for cards.
On the other hand, the men would say that the women do not understand the concept of playing poker. It took a while for all of the ladies to come to grips with the prospect of taking each other’s money. The natural inclination of the women is simply to offer their winnings to the hostess — to put toward all of the chocolate consumed.
Of course, none of the women are winning large quantities of money because we do not want anyone to be upset at the end of the evening, so we play for very low stakes. The guys would never consider walking away without their winnings. Their testosterone would not allow it.
I do not know whether it is because there is real money on the line, or whether it is just the testosterone, but the men’s game is much more serious than the women’s. They never have music playing in the background, and if they did, they would certainly never break into song when a favorite golden oldie starts playing. The women just cannot help themselves sometimes.
Even without the music — and the singing — the men’s game is much quieter than the women’s. As you might guess, the men’s conversations (and I use that word loosely) tend to focus on poker, although every so often they will branch out into sports talk. At the end of the evening, anyone listening would have no way of knowing anything personal about any of the players, including what I consider to be the basics, such as marital status and number of children. In contrast, the women shared the essentials even before the first get-together, and conversations range over every topic possible, except for poker — and sports.
Indeed conversation flows so freely that we frequently forget where we are in a game, or even what game we are playing.
All in all, I would have to say that the men may flush with pride when they win, but I have to hand it to the women for being more suited to being real cards. And you can bet on that.
Deborah Waldner of Greensboro has a doctorate in developmental psychology and is the mother of three children.
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