In my last article, I said that men do not change. So by now, you may be asking yourself why I feel I am qualified to dole out relationship and other advice to women. The answer is simply this: I did not learn my lessons by reading them from a textbook nor do I claim to understand what everyone who reads this may be experiencing.
I have certainly consulted professional help from a therapist or two in my time, mostly because it is far easier to pay someone I do not know to listen to me bitch and moan than it is to whine to my friends until they are sick of me. Another plus is that you can walk out of a therapy session without feeling guilty that you just dumped all your problems on a friend who probably already has enough of her own!
If I am desperate, however, I grab my cell phone and call one of my closest friends. It is a good thing I got a great plan with lots of minutes and text messages. Check it out.
However, no matter how many degrees people have or how many letters they may have after their name, there really is no substitute for practical experience.
Here is an example of what I mean. When I was pregnant with my son, one of the biggest anxieties I had as I got closer to delivering was how much pain would I be in and what did labor pains REALLY feel like? I had watched A Baby Story on Lifetime for several months and saw all different types of women going through it, some screaming and writhing in pain and others who preferred to endure the pain more quietly.
I asked my OB GYN (who was a man) what the experience would feel like and how would I know when it was bad enough to request the epidural I had planned to use in the event it was excruciating.
As he prattled on, attempting to describe what I could only imagine was going to be the worst possible scenario, it dawned on me: how could someone who had never actually experienced labor pains describe it to ME? Even more troubling was the fact that, as a man with no uterus in the first place, he really could not know WHAT it would feel like.
He had never had menstrual cramps as a teenager that were so severe he was lying doubled over on the floor in pain for four days straight. This was alarming to me. Everything he knew about the subject he had either learned in medical school or by watching what his patients went through, but he did not “really” know.