John Cheese: The Real Reason Why Men Screw Up Relationships

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Allow me to quickly describe a scenario, and feel free to skip a couple of paragraphsahead if you already know how this story ends. For the six of you who haven't experiencedthis yet, pay attention because this is stuff they don't tend to teach in high school.You've had a long day at work, and all you can think about is bursting throughyour front door, stripping down to your underwear, decapitating a beer bottle, and sinkingso far into your couch that the material wraps around your back and touches both of yournipples. But just as you check off step three and start sprinting for home base, yourwife/girlfriend appears from the bedroom.She's in her "I think I'll order thelobster" dress and fastening the back of her good earrings -- the ones with gems thatdon't start with the word "cubic" -- and before you can get past "oh" and right into"sh*t," she shoots you a look that you've only seen in movies just before the guardsattach the anti-bite mask. Today is one of those "special" days, but dear God,which one? Is it your anniversary? No, you remember it was hot the last time youcelebrated it because she was in a bikini. Is it her birthday? It has to be. It's sometimein February, right? Toward the end? Sh*t, this week is the end of February. And beforeyour mind even has a chance to switch into emergency excuse mode, she knows. Worse, shepredicted it:"I knew you'd forget, you inconsiderate ass! You don't evenremotely care about me, do you? How hard is it for you to remember one measly date?" And therein lies the misconception: that we forget because we don't care.It All Comes Down To Monkeys

To understand why we are what we are, you have to go back about six million years, whichis roughly the period that chimps and humans branched off of our common evolutionaryancestors. Over the course of the next 5.5 million years, we developed a very specific setof behaviors that dictated our survival as a species, and that was pretty set in stone bythe time modern man evolved, half a million years ago.The behaviors and roleswere pretty simple: the male was the hunter, protector and general "problem solver." Heprovided strength and physical safety to the family. The female was the gatherer, childbearer and general caretaker of the household. She provided stability and growth. Overhundreds of thousands of years of rinse-and-repeat actions, nature has a way of saying,"OK, that's been working for quite some time, and I'm sick of repeating it, so instead ofhaving to learn this every time a new generation springs up, we'll just include that lineof code in the DNA. It's now a part of your operating system."Here's wherethings start to screw us over as guys. Our brains were pretty advanced back then comparedto other animals, but they weren't very efficient by modern standards. So to conservespace, we were programmed to tackle problems in a linear fashion. "Wolf attack family.Kill wolf. Eat wolf. No more wolf bite. No more hungry." Then we'd move on tothe next. "Cold coming soon. Build shelter. Keep cold out. Keep warm in." In other words,we learned to operate in the present and the near future. Anything from the past thatwasn't vital to our survival was sort of just pushed out of the mind because there was noneed to have that information taking up space.Solved problems were filed inthe "safe" folder and forgotten about. You don't worry about hunting when you're in themiddle of eating your kill.Wait, It Gets Crazier

Now, consider the amount of time we spent with those sorts of lessons and roles infusedinto our genetic makeup. These weren't suggestions or "good rules of thumb to consider."They were hereditary laws. Now, with that six million years worth of reinforcement inmind, consider the fact that we've only been in our current intellectual and civilizedstate for a few thousand years..05% of our entire existence.That'simportant because evolutionary changes in complex life forms such as humans happen overtens of thousands of years. A couple thousand is obviously not enough time for ourphysical building blocks to adapt to our present mental expectations. Continue Reading

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