Saturday, January 30, 2010

another way men are like shoes

The national divorce rate hovers somewhere around 50%, give or take a few points. I'd like to know what the dating break-up rate is, if there is such a statistic. Some human relationships end for valid reasons; others because the hearts involved simply give up. They give up loving, give up caring and, most detrimentally, they give up trying. I purport that if women felt toward men more like how they relate to shoes, we'd see a national decrease in relationship failure. Let me explain.

Most women have a life-long, on-going affair with shoes. (If you happen to be one of those women who do not, forgive my stereotyping; it's fundamental to my theory, though.) We can fall in love instantly with a sandal. And the x-chromosome has, on occasion, gone feral when two women want the same pair of size-8 Jimmy Choos. (I have never personally fought for a shoe, though I have had friendships fill with tension when the other girl feels the same way about a guy as I do.) Once the shoe is ours, we spend the next month in new-shoe inebriation, intoxicated by the leather or giddy with how feminine and delicate it makes our foot appear. Whatever the drug, we're high on it. All because of FOOTWEAR.

Now suppose a girl gets a pebble in that shoe one day. No girl in her right mind would return home and toss that shoe in the trash because of a tiny stone. She'd recognize that the pebble wasn't a reflection on the shoe--how it fit, how it made her feel, her level of adoration--but on the kind of ground she was treading--obviously rocky.

And so it is with men. A pebble interrupts the relationship's journey, and people quickly want to call it quits, throw away the shoe. That shoe is the same one you lusted after when you saw it in the magazine (the analogy fits uncomfortably well), fell in love with at the store, handed over your credit card for and mentally paired with all your favorite outfits. The shoe hasn't really changed--the ground has. Of course, shoes do eventually age. Threads start unraveling, and soles become slightly less supportive. But a lot of the time, even when those shoes are out of fashion by two whole seasons, they're still the favorites. We seem pretty devoted to our shoes; shouldn't we be even more so to our men?

I'm a relationship newbie, and my boyfriend and I don't really fight. We have the run-of-the-mill disagreements, and we don't see eye to eye and nose to nose on everything (in part because he's 6'2 and I'm under 5'5), but we don't fight. As much as I like it this way, I'm not naive enough to think there won't come a day when we temporarily don't like each other. But I hope neither of us wants to give up because of a pebble in the road. I like my shoes a lot, but I like my boyfriend more.

[Photo thanks to http://life-o-life.blogspot.com/]

1 comment:

  1. Excellent. And so true.

    Another point I thought of while reading this: Sometimes, at least in my case, the shoes that I've worn the longest are often the most comfortable, my go-to shoes that are always guaranteed to fit perfectly. They're the shoes that don't let me down. I think that applies as well:)

    ReplyDelete