My friend who assumed all women were beauty bloggers read a book around the time he got married. Once he finished reading it, he was all praise for it and recommended it to me. It was titled, “Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps,” by Allan and Barbara Pease. Now while I can read maps quite satisfactorily (I can’t drive, granted; but I can read maps), I must admit this book was quite a fun read. It was a hilarious take on the differences between men and women. Nowhere does it say one is better than the other; but it analyzes the traits of both the sexes. Since I finished reading this, my friend and I often have discussions about how men and women react differently to situations. But one thing that my friend keeps reiterating is, “Men do not take hints.” Every time I say something like, “Yes, but from what I told you, couldn’t you assume –" he would cut me short and say, “No, we don’t take hints.” It’s almost like a refrain now, for half of the stories that I tell him. Which made me think – do men give hints? To give that question more thought, let’s look at the Calvin and Hobbes strip above. I always imagined Calvin and Susie would eventually fall in love with each other. Call it the whimsical fantasy of a hopelessly romantic mind. And I always feel good when I think Susie and I share the same initials (SD). We often look for our parallels in fictional characters, and I for one have imagined myself to be one too many characters; Susie Derkins being one, of course. From the comic strip, what we see on the surface is Calvin asking Susie to drop dead on Valentine’s day. Afterwards, we see a punched-in-the-face, lying-in-dirt, but ecstatic Calvin thinking, “She noticed! She likes me!” (She's thinking on similar lines too) Calvin has at multiple times ridiculed Susie Derkins. For various things. But were they a cover-up for what he really felt for her? Were they all hints? A little Googling might tell you that they probably were. But we will never know for sure; because if they indeed were hints, then Susie probably didn’t get them. Copyright Petrichor and Clouds 2013 at petrichorandclouds.blogspot.com Please do not reproduce the material published here.
