Spiderwebs & Women's Web of Relationships

A husband and wife are out for a rare, intimate dinner when the wife's cell-phone buzzes (she has been considerate enough to turn the phone to vibrate).  She tries to ignore the phone but grows anxious.  She finally pulls it out of her purse and looks at it and puts it back in her purse.  He seems visibly bothered and stops talking.  Before long, things have deteriorated and they finish their intimate dinner talking about how he is being unreasonable and he complains that she can't even put things aside for one evening to devote herself to him.

I believe men and women often have enormous difficulty understanding some fundamental differences between the sexes.  Women arise in the context of a web of relationships.  Their identity is tightly connected to the relationship environment in which they develop.  For many women, their sensitivity and awareness to the web of relationships is extraordinarily well developed.

It is like a spider on a web.  If something tickles some distant part of the web, even one in the periphery, the spider is immediately aware.  It demands the spider's attention.  That is how women feel ripples in the web of their relationships.  So when the phone rings it doesn't matter that they have a responsible babysitter, she has felt the ripple.  Maybe it is the kids.  If she tries to ignore the buzzing phone, she feels a gripping degree of agitation.  She has to check what is disturbing the web.

Now men do not arise in a matrix of relationships.  Men are encouraged to believe that our identity is crafted from distinguishing ourselves from others and sometimes by outright opposition.  Men are very adept at isolating one relationship from another.  The interconnectedness of their relationships is often not as inherently relevant to a man.  So when he is with his wife for their intimate dinner out, he is not as aware of the vast web of relationships in which his life exists.  His resentment at his wife's need to check her phone fails to appreciate how embedded his wife is in her web of relationships.  His wife is likely to misunderstand that her husband experiences her checking the phone as and either/or phenomenon.  When he has her attention he is reassured that he is of central importance.  When she checks the phone or attends to any other ripple in the web of relationships, he may feel he has been displaced, or cast out to the periphery of her web.  Men have enormous trouble understanding that in a web, every strand is, in a sense, connected to every other strand.

If a man can remain mindful that his wife must attend to the entire web of her relationships.  And a woman may benefit from remaining mindful that her husband wants to be assured that he is at the center of her world, even if just for a moment.  And both men and women will benefit by accepting difference as inherent.  If a couple can do this, they may be able to develop effective ways of honoring their differences and perhaps learn from one another.