That's my future wife! She's loverly!
She looks surprisingly tall too!

*Kristin's Mom's Quote*
 
I am still cracking up over Kristin's retelling of your lecture on transitional phrases. I laughed so hard I cried. She says that you don't understand why I never taught the girls the importance of transitional phrases.

Silly man. WE are females. WE do not need them.

You know what's really funny? When she was telling us all this, three of us (I think it was three) said that very thing at the same time- 'but we're girls, girls don't need them.'

This brings me to the mind-reading issue. The truth is that girls are just better than guys at reading tiny facial cues and body language. And we find it pretty simple. We don't want our guys to read our minds. We simply want them to cherish us so much that they also can read these tiny cues. After all, WE could, so we don't see why you can't. It requires maturity and the ability to see things from another point of view and really grasp the differences between girls and boys in order to understand why what looks like normal discernment to us looks like requiring mind-reading from you.

We could have another long conversation about the things guys do that girls just don't get, but that wouldn't be nearly as fun.=)

*My Response*

*If I understand your statement correctly that girls are more keyed into reading guys TINY facial cues and body laguage, then why would you be upset when we have a hard time reading those signs, something you have admitted women are much better at doing than men?
*If I understand the statement that women want men to CHERISH THEM SO MUCH that they also can read these TINY clues, then what it would seem is that if we don't see these tiny clues then we don't cherish women so much. . . disappointment will ensue.

To illistrate my point, (Transitional Phrase) I will tell you my theory on why men are not as good at Cherishing women as much as women cherish men.

*Back in the garden of Eden, I think we can both agree that Adam and Eve had a wonderfully easy life. They walked around the garden with God and had a wonderfully intiment relationship. However, (Transitional Phrase) when they were thrown out Man had to work hard for his food. This meant that we did not have time to think sensitive and long, convoluted thoughts. Girly man thoughts, there wasn't time. When we saw a deer, we had to make a decision on how badly we wanted our family to eat. If our family needed food we killed the deer. We didn't think about the deer's family, if the deer had just had babies and now those babies are going to stave to death or be eaten by another animal. We only knew that we were hungry and our family was also hungry. Women, on the other hand, (Transitional Phrase) were to take care of the family and love, and nurture the children and are designed as more sensitive creatures. In conclusion, (Transitional Phrase) I don't think we can fight the tides as much as women would like men to understand them and CHERISH THEM, (Reading those tiny clues), and men want women to understand them more and nurture and respect them more. It's a constant struggle but the thing that I have to remember is that it is a DESIGNED STRUGGLE! God wanted it this way. Well. . . he didn't want it this way, he wanted to be like Adam and Eve had it but then they messed it up and He had to design a different way. Which He did. 

*Some of Kristin's Mom's Response*
I didn't think you sounded like a jerk, I thought you sounded both hilarious and exactly on target. I think it's hard, in these egalitarian days, for many young women to realize just how different men and women can be. It's ingrained in them that the sexes are equal, meaning the same, and whenever they aren't, it's now common to see any difference as some sort of failure on the male's part. Girls do need to learn that the sexes are not the same and that this is not a design flaw or a failure on the part of the men, and it requires a certain level of maturity or being able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes for them to do that (it helps if their mamas understand that, too, which I did not when the girls were little, but I hope I've figured it out by the time they were old enough for it to matter to them). 

Your deer analogy is so true, and it cracks me up. When we lived in Nebraska and LJ was a nursing baby (a newborn) our Mother goat died, tangling herself up in fencing and strangling herself. She had two nursing kids. I cried and cried, thinking of those two nursing kids and how miserable they must be and how awful it must be for them- it was really pretty silly. They were goats. They were not emotionally attached to their mother goat. I couldn't believe NOBODY else in my family was as heartbroken as me. I will say that new baby plus the first couple weeks of nursing does play havoc with the tear glands and hormones, and looking back I am embarrassed. When I say I cried, I mean I was sobbing inconsolably and utterly desolated by the death of that mother goat. Very silly.

I think Kristin's mother is very wise. Of course because she agree's with me and so does Kristin which is one of the many reasons I am marrying her. She doesn't expect me to read her mind nor would need to.