Friends. Everyone has some. How good are they?
Scene in our bedroom, my wife recently got her hair colored... She had some friends come visit after her surgery who will be named Diane and Ellen to protect the innocent and not so innocent.
Diane: oh, you got your hair done...
Wife: yeah, Wednesday night.
Diane: its really red.
Wife: it is, but Scott doesn't like it.
Me: I just think the shade is a little too red, so it's not my favorite.
Ellen: Scott! You're supposed to tell her it looks great!
(ok just realized that it sounded like my wife's hair coloring was surgery... No she is not Medusa)
I was lucky in high school having the friends that I did. There was never a moment when I was lied to. Thus is the nature of guys, I think. We are always happy to tell our friends how stupid their decisions are or how ugly they are.
Girls appear to be just the opposite or at least partially.
I get it. There are the very small white lies where you tell other people niceties to encourage them. And then there is the other end of the spectrum where you have interventions for drug addicted or similarly problematic friends.
So that begs the question of when you tell the truth to your friends. What are the hot-button issues separated from the mundane?
Zits. We've all had them, some more recently than others. You have one on your nose. Girls have pity and try not to look. Guys are gonna get all up close and say things like "nope it really IS that big up close!" and the obvious Santa / Rudolph reference all the while thinking if the one on your nose has a matching partner on your tush.
Does this dress make my butt look big? Why do you women think you're getting any answer other than no? Guys ARE thinking we'd be happy to review a with / without the dress scenario.
Body odor. You gals would be mortified if you smelled like anything but lilacs. Believe it or not smelling like you bathed in the meadow isn't any better than post-basketball man stink. Nobody is going to admit that to you. Guys would abuse each other over our smells, but frankly we can't smell it. And we have farting competitions, duh!
Bad breath - holy halitosis batman. Everyone has morning breath, get over it. Girls simply avoid eating things that will produce breath like that. Guys don't have that much self-control. I'm not getting into the varieties, because it is late and we don't need to go running out for cheese-steaks, oh damn!
So why am I writing this particular blog? You could call it a double-dog dare, but really it was just a promise to immortalize a reader.
But seriously, don't bet I'm going to let you walk around in a fat dress, smelling like steroid meadow, eating onions there Rudolph! If you are a girl, don't think that because when you ask if you look good that you couldn't look better. Your friends aren't going to tell you. You should offer choices. "does this dress look better than my blue one?" "is this color better for me than the last one?"
Unless your friends are raving about your new sweater, they might not think it is as grand as you do.
I still maintain that a sane man, one who would like to sleep in his own bed instead of on the couch, should never tell his wife he doesn't like her new hair color, hair cut, dress, etc. You're just lucky she was drugged up from the surgery and foggy on the details that night. Review that conversation, you'll notice I didn't say it looked great. I said you shouldn't say you don't like it. I believe it falls under the heading of not kicking someone when they are down or in this case, laid up from surgery. She's already hurting, why make it worse by saying that her colorist went overboard with the red. She has eyes, she knows what happened to her head. My point was she didn't need your super honest, super insensitive opinion right at that moment. A point I emphasized with a Gibbs smack to the back of your head (a detail I notice you omitted from the story). - The immortalized Ellen
ReplyDeleteLol, sorry Ellen. I did omit the Gibbs smack.
ReplyDeleteShe also knew it wasn't a color I liked since she came home and told me I wouldn't like it. We had that conversation prior to surgery. I didnt say anything about it post-surgery, other than the conversation where she brought it up.