By Tom “relaxed fit” Waters
Apri1
, 2004
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Like
most men, I’m like a covert government operative when I need to
get something from a store. I’m familiar with the primary points
of entry and exit, I know where my target can be obtained, and
I neutralize the target and move out.
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The difference between men and women can be deduced
by their shopping habits. Now that I’ve been in a relationship for awhile,
I can make such a statement. Shopping is the basis for a number of the
fights and tantrums that have popped up, and it’s really neither of
our faults. We’re just hard-wired differently. With men, shopping is
an objective; for women, shopping is a past time. Arriving at this conclusion
has given me more gray hairs than I’d care to mention. Thankfully, I’ve
torn a lot of said hairs out over this activity.
I don’t enjoy shopping. I’m really good at spending
money, exceptional at finding things that interest me, and extravagant
and lavish in my tastes, but I don’t like to shop. Like most men, I’m
like a covert government operative when I need to get something from
a store. I’m familiar with the primary points of entry and exit, I know
where my target can be obtained, and I neutralize the target and move
out. I don’t dilly dally. If I go to the mall, I’ll find the closest
possible entrance to the item I need to purchase, storm in and have
it in my car within five minutes. This is normal.
The trouble starts when we go out together. If it were up to my
girlfriend, we’d spend the entire day shopping. One errand could turn into a
fifteen
store sweep within a sixty mile radius. I’ve tried to explain on numerous
occasions how little patience I have when it comes to exposure with the general
public. If at all possible, I prefer to avoid it or keep it to a minimum. I
have a thimble-full of patience at the start of every day. When I go shopping,
that thimble drains faster than a chess clock. After an hour and a half of
traffic, line waiting, and spending time in the company of idiots, I need to go
home and refuel.
She likes to window shop and look things over. If I walk into
a store, I’m spending money. There’s no two ways about it. She could spend
a weekend in the Mall Of America and walk out without one bag. This drives
me up a wall. In my estimation, it’s a waste of time to go to a store without
buying something. Life is too short to look at crap that you aren’t even
going to buy. She gravitates to any bright fluorescent or blinking signs that
have the words ‘sale’ or ‘clearance’ on them, no matter what’s at the
display.
I tend to see what I like and buy it regardless of the price. Sales don’t
influence me. If there’s a special on whatever I’m buying, so be it. It
makes
no difference. Women are great shoppers and bargain hunters. They’ve had
more practice. I’m incapable of fawning over porcelain figurines, buy one get
one free handbags and spring halter tops. Sue me.
Errands are exhausting. Most days off, if conditions are idyllic, I will
spend the majority of my time at home reading, watching tv, writing, playing
games, or noodling around online. Like women, I’m great on the phone. I can
talk on the phone like nobody’s business. I’ll call people for no reason
and talk for forty minutes. With the shopping, though, I’m no good, and I’m
not changing. I don’t see it as a couple’s activity. I’m not going
without a
fight.
I snuck off the other day to get clothes. I buy clothes about as often
as people spot Haley’s Comet, and didn’t want unforeseen complications.
Unlike the fairer sex, I wasn’t interested in ‘trying everything on’ or
‘finding
the best value for my dollar’ or ‘checking out the weekend sale at
fill-in-the-blank’. I was down to three pairs of work pants and jeans, so
this was a
matter of necessity. I wear my clothes until they fall off and decay through
the process of entropy or until the holes, tears and stains become so obvious
that it’s embarrassing to wear them outside my house.
I’ll be a J.C. Penney’s man for life. I love khakis and slacks.
Can’t
get enough of them. I don’t go to the fancy stores with tailors and
comfortable carpeting. I don’t flutter through multiple shops to find a great
price or
see what the new fashions are. I’ve maintained the same sense of style, or
complete lack thereof, since I was sixteen: the sloppy conservative look.
Button down shirts and slacks. Casual shoes and a lot of beige. It works, so
why
fix it? If I find a nice looking pair of pants, I’ll buy thirty different
shades of them so I don’t have to shop for another five years.
Thanks to the constant nagging of many women in my life, I tried one pair
on. Trying things on is over-rated. My weight yo-yos, but for the most
part, I’m a 36-33. Tall guy with a fair gut. My shirts are XL, in case you
want
to buy me some shirts after reading this. And unless I start mutating, my
feet will always be a foot and an inch (read: size 13). I got two pairs of
pants, another pair of jeans for backup, a belt, and two pairs of shoes. I went
to
another store and got two shirts because they were near the exit. The entire
outing took an hour.
Last week, the wife wanted to know if I was interested in going to the
book store. It sounded like a good idea at the time. I like book stores. Book
stores don’t have purses or vitamins or diet bars or a lot of the other
things that I could care less about and find catatonic ally boring, so I agreed
to
go. Little did I know that I was being hijacked, and wouldn’t see my home
again for two and a half hours. Statistically speaking, that’s approximately
one-fifth of my day off. We went to one book store and I was doing great. No
obnoxious loud mouthed idiots, no kids, and an abundance of taste. Barnes &
Noble is my favorite bookstore, hands down. They’re classy and quiet and I
like
the chairs and classical music. There were plenty of things for me to look at
while she thumbed through stuff at her own pace. After a half an hour, we
left without buying anything. I didn’t have any money, and there were at
least
a hundred dollars worth of books and magazines that I would have purchased if
I did.
We went to the mall and entered through a department store. She homed in
on no less than ten sale displays. Purses, perfumes, shoes, etc. I looked
around in shock and tried to fix my eyes on something masculine or something
that would hold my interest. She showed me an orange hand bag. As a
professional wiseass, my brain processed multiple punch lines, one liners, and
quips. I
held them all back and remarked that it was really nice.
After that, we went to another bookstore that rhymes with balls and
hooks. I used to work at the same location, and it’s sad to see the state of
affairs that they’re in these days. At the risk of digressing for pages on
end,
half of one wall was converted into a romance section and there was no
literature species. The shelves were cut in half since I’ve worked there, and
it
looked like the store bent to the demands of changing tastes and the diminishing
attention span that popular culture has imposed on the lowest common denominator
of the reading public. The store sucked. I paced around a bit and looked at
the bargain section. They had no short story collections and a stack of
Stephen King’s last fifteen books. I paced back and looked at the humor
section,
which I used to be in charge of. There wasn’t a lot to look at. I asked the
clerk about the new David Foster Wallace book. They didn’t have it. I
located my old lady and she was sitting on the floor leafing through a medical
book.
We left without buying anything. Again.
I try to be a good boy, I really do. Relationships are all about
compromise and patience, so I was willing to meet her half way. We walked into
a
furniture store whose contents were more expensive than my immortal soul. I
couldn’t afford the welcome mat in the front of the shop without a mortgage.
We
looked at end tables, couches, tea cozies, and coat racks. The salesman
rattled off his introductory spiel to me and offered his services. I worked
very
briefly in carpet sales and I was good at picking up on guys who didn’t want
to
be there. I wish that this sales guy was comparably receptive because he
would have saved us both five minutes. We left without buying anything.
By the time we reached the athletic shoe store, I was in melt down mode.
My patience was gone, my attention span was missing in action, and I wanted
to go home. The ball and chain was shuffling jerseys and cross training
sneakers and checking things out in the mirror. I was thinking about which time
s
lot of the Simpsons I was missing. I sat on a bench and tried to teleport to my
house. It didn’t work. After ten minutes, I told her I wanted to leave.
She groaned and said that she wanted to go to a few other places, but we could
go.
All of this could have been avoided if a) we just went to one bookstore
and left, b) we went to one bookstore and I got dropped off at home, c) she
went shopping and left me at home to loaf constructively, or d) I removed the
reasoning part of my brain with an ice cream scoop before leaving the house.
Men
and women are no good at shopping together. We’re built differently, and
it’s not going to change. I’m good at buying comic books, cds, movies,
books,
magazines, and games. She’s good at buying clothes, groceries, silverware,
and
everything else in the free market that I don’t buy. There are about four
heterosexual men in captivity who enjoy and excel at shopping and I’m not one
of
them. At best I can fake it for up to an hour.
