The Difference Between Men and Women ...

My dear husband and I have had many conversations about directions. Specifically, my lack of any reasonable sense of direction. I am NOT proud to confess, I have gotten lost WITH a GPS. OK, I've gotten lost with a GPS TWICE. What my DH and I didn't realise, I think, was the fundamental difference in the way we navigate.

Skip to Friday. DH and I were catching up; I'd spent the day pushing files and being put on hold by insurance companies. (Did you know how many insurance companies have names that start with "American"? A LOT.) My husband had spent the day preparing to start classes at DMU -- which meant, among other things, getting his hair cut. Being the interested spouse that I am, I asked him where he'd gone. It took us about 5 minutes, but we finally established that there is a hair place beside Wal-Mart, across a road that runs next to Wal-Mart, but NOT, at least according to DH, "across from Wal-Mart."

So this is the amazing insight we discovered:

MEN (or at least my man) locate things by a fixed set of directions / standards / whatever. So a shop is only "across the street from Wal-Mart" if it is across the street that Wal-Mart is facing. WOMEN (or at least me) see things relative to their position to other things.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but it honestly didn't occur to me that there was any other way to define something ... We probably spent WAY too much time thinking about how to describe the location of a hair salon, but in my short experience, I can definitely see a pattern that extends to more than just how men and women find their way from point A to point B.

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The Difference Between Men and Women, Part II
(because no blog post of mine is complete until it takes three scroll-downs to read)

DH wanted me to share another example of the different way we navigate. We shop at Aldi (FANTASTIC store, I love it!), but since the machines there don't read my debit card, I have to stop at a bank and withdraw cash before shopping there. We like to go to Great Western Bank, because we can do ATM withdrawals free there. I told Dennis that there was a Great Western "right across the street from Aldi."

Apparently I should have been more specific. There is a Great Western across the street from Aldi, but not across the street Aldi faces--across the street we turn off of to GET to Aldi. Also, there are two or three shops in between the street and Aldi.

I still think that qualifies as "right across the street." Those other shops? Not important--we had no interest in fast food or dollar toys.

Well, at least I knew what I was talking about.