Love

Ships: The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly–1

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Today I want to talk about the internet phenomenon known as SHIPS.

At least, if you watch YouTube.

So, for those of you who don’t know, ship is modern slang for “Thinking two characters on any given show/movie/ or book series, should be together in a romantic relationship, thought the rare person may use the term for friendships also.” (Personal definition.) It’s relationship  mayhem in some places

Usually shows are the worst for shipping. Too many diverse characters who may have a heartfelt moment or two per season, and it can get pretty annoying trying to figure out if the show actually intends for them to be together. Even harder when often show writers are swayed by fan reactions.

Shipping is the bane of some internet surfer’s existence online. And with good reason, I’m not against shipping, but there are huge problems with it.

You might ask why I’d even bother writing about something so stupid. And my answer would be, shipping can be stupid, but it also tells you a lot about what people take seriously, what they look for in relationships, what’s on their mind 24/7, and what kind of standards they might have, particularly in their viewing pleasures.

You cant ell some people who watch porn are the ones leaving shipping comments.

Also, gay and lesbian ships have become unavoidable. Even when each character in question is confirmed to be straight, in a different relationship, and perfectly happy. Shipping is not rational for many people.

The problem is, we can all laugh when it’s a show (or roll our eyes) but unfortunately, people often are irrational in real life as they are online. Many people date with about as much discretion as they ship. So I think shipping may tell us plenty about what passes for romance nowadays.

Lewd humor and jokes and porny comments are hardly a new form of substituting for romantic love. IT’s as old as the hills. (Read any Shakespeare Romantic Comedy if you don’t believe me.) However, thanks to the internet, you can now find people like that mixed in evenly with people who are just genuinely having fun and enjoying the content. I’m starting to think some shippers just don’t enjoy anything till they sexualize it.

Aside from being gross, it often disrespects and minimizes the message a show may be trying to communicate. It often saddens and disgusts me to see a heartfelt scene between friendly characters, and to find it reduced to sexual subtext by fans. Fans, who quite frankly, couldn’t care less if they ruin the video for anyone else.

Now, the simplest solution is not to read the comments, but many people read comments to ask questions, and see some interesting feedback or innocent humor. Also to communicate with the channel host, which there may be some good reasons for. Yet they’ll see this other stuff too, and some of it is hard to forget.

I won’t give any examples here for that very reason, I’m sure you can fill in the blank form experience.

Some people just don’t give a rip whether you want  certain ideas in your mind or not, and they can be the most infuriating to encounter, that’s in real life too. It’s like how some people don’t care if you want them to cuss in front of you or your kids. An attitude of consideration for other people would, if adopted by everyone in the world, wipe cursing and inappropriate humor off the face of the earth.

Shipping can reveal the worst in humanity, and how shallow we can be. And how corrupt. It’s not all that uncommon to see people shipping siblings with each other…or people and animals…yeah….

I really don’t know what more to say on that, except that if this is becoming acceptable, even in fiction, what have we lost?

I really think as far the porn part of this goes, anyone using fictional characters for that is taking them way too seriously. And yet, not seriously enough.

If all someone’s honest art means to you is a sex object…why even watch it? And I have a hard time believing anyone who justifies that kind of attitude really treats real people with much more respect.

What you think, and what you imagine, it is not separated from your character. You are what you think, and what you dream, as much as if not more than you are what you do for a living and school.

One might wonder why I don’t talk about how unrealistic shipping can be, since fictional relationships are famously portrayed as better than real life. My answer would be: Not in this case.

In the case of YouTube shipping, no, it’s never better than real life when it’s what I’ve been talking of. In fact it’s much, much worse, than many people’s reality would be. I’ve seen people endorse a sadistic, abusive relationship…I guess they get a kind of pleasure out of it.

The problem worsens because the more of that you see, the more you find it enjoyable, and not horrifying. The whole trap of using art to change minds is in what it makes look appealing, even if the real life experience would not be so.

And guess what, it’s not usually the victims whose minds are influenced by this, it’s the perpetrators. It’s far easier to be deluded into thinking something is natural and pleasurable when you’r the one doing it to someone else, not when it’s done to you. Isn’t that just the way with human beings?

Stealing might look admirable until you get stolen from. Punching looks cool until you get punched.That’s not the worse of it either.

And I couldn’t close this article without saying something about the HATE wars.

I don’t take what people say to be online to be particularly serious. Good or bad, they know nothing about me. But some people do take it seriously, and others will still let out a lot of venom and aggression toward people that seems unhealthy at best…and out of control at worst. 

It’s pretty dumb to tear someone down over a fictional relationship. To have a “one true pairing” that you will not give up on, even after all’s been written and done. As much as I hate some ships, I don’t want to destroy the people who support them.

I find it odd that anyone takes it seriously enough to do so. However, I do really like some ships, And I even think they can be beneficial, for reasons I’ll expound upon in part 2

Until next post–Natasha.

We don’t understand Death.

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My cheerful topic of discussion in class yesterday was Death. What is it? Why do we avoid it?

I’m starting to think the curriculum was designed to hit close to home for me since I’ve lost some people recently and been pondering the subject of death. As I wrote about in my last post I am a fan of Resurrection.

However if we go by what my classmates seemed to think, it doesn’t look like most people see much sense it the idea of resurrection. Many people embrace the idea that death is the end, and we should just accept that.

Everywhere from real deaths to fictional ones, I find this. Some folks are still holding out for their favorite character to come back to life, the soul crushing response by some other fans? “They’re dead and gone, deal with it.”

Well, ouch.

Seriously, is that really the most sensitive thing to say? Don’t stomp on my hopes.

Characters dying never bothered me too much as a kid, usually they were the evil characters. Of course I didn’t like Obi Wan Ken-obi, but then he comes back. And it’s sad in other stories too. Not a lot of examples come to mind. There’s Beth from Little Women, but I stayed away from sad books as a kid.

As for real life, I’ve only known four people who’ve died. Known them well. I remember my first brush with losing someone was a nice woman at my church who died. I didn’t know her very well, I just remember her always smiling at me. My mom told me she went to heaven. I believed it, and I still do, so I wasn’t bothered.

However since then the people I’ve lost have all been ambiguous at best, I’m not sure if they went to heaven. A few I really doubt.

It’s the worst part of being a christian, having to believe that not everyone gets to live happily ever after, and worse, that they could have if they’d opened their hearts. Rejecting God is a choice.

Yet Death is one of the things that makes it hardest to accept God. Especially a loving God. Though we all intellectually know death happens and the world goes on, when it happens to us it’s still a fresh shock. We are suddenly unsure f ourselves, and that makes us unsure of what we believe. This doesn’t happen to everyone. Some people handle death with peace. But they are the exception, not the rule. Most of us are left feeling uncertain. Some never recover from that, most of us do, but we never feel the same.

That’s not to say we are the worse for it. Death, like other ills, is a matter of how you handle it. It can make you stronger or weaker.

In my class my teacher brought up the idea found in some poetry on the subject, that love ends with death. There is no love between the dead and us. We love them, but it’s not a living, growing thing.

I’m not sure that’s true. Many people continued to feel connected to their dead family or friends. I don’t really myself, except at certain moments. The interesting thing about love is that it preserves your memory and therefore a little bit of yourself. When you’re gone, you’re not entirely, if someone loves you. A part of you, not your own consciousness, but your memory, stays with them.

It’s something science hasn’t been able to explain. Loving our lost ones is not biologically helpful to most people. yet we still do.

I am not sure that the dead no longer love. I believe that those who go to heaven love even more, but from afar. We can’t hang onto them, because they have no need of us anymore.

Most of grief isn’t really coming to terms with the dead, but with yourself. Asking how you can deal with this, how you can go on. Some decide hey can’t, but that’s not the right choice.

I think because we’ve removed the comfort of religion and core values, death has become too much for many people. Now  they have nothing to make it seem less terrible.

And the answer most come to is “We don’t know.”

There is no faith in saying “I don’t know.”

I’ll admit, I don’t know what happens to every person everywhere who dies. OR even to the ones I know. That’s my uncertainty, and that’s my grief. Not knowing.

But what I do know that I know that I know, is that Jesus is real. And that he is love. And though God does things I don’t understand, there’s a reason He holds the keys to life and death. I  know that I’m alive now in a way I never was before knowing Him. I know that He changes lives. I know that He enables people to die with courage.

You might wonder, why does God let people die at all if He really conquered death? The Bible says in 1 Corinthians that Death will be the last enemy to be overthrown at the end of time.  Why is this?

A couple of reasons might present themselves. If we never died our bodies would be pretty useless. At old age, death is a mercy if you will be transformed.

More than that, if death was overthrown now, all the evil people in the world would never die either. Can you imagine that?

Even more than that, God wants us to trust Him with our lives. It’s what sets us apart form nonbelievers. If we didn’t die, there would be no need of trusting Him.

We are promised the fruit of the tree of life when the new heaven and new earth are made. We will be eternal then, in fact we already are, in our spirits.

That sounds nutty to many people. The things of God are foolishness to the world. What else would you expect?

My conclusion: Either I believe the Bible, or I believe nothing…and that doesn’t seem to work out too well.

Until next time–Natasha.

The Resurrection Arc.

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Hey fiction buffs! You’ve heard of character arcs before, but did you know there’s different kinds?

Yeah, probably if you read or watch any TV show that’s fictional, you knew that. I’m simply being dramatic.

You might know of arcs (and for you non-buffs, an arc is how a character or plot develops from one point, usually an immature one, to another, usually a better, wiser one. Typically the arc is what shows us the point of the whole story, but there are negative arcs that show one good guy turning bad, or a good guy slowly giving up on their cause. These are the bad example arcs that are meant to be a warning.) But have you heard of a Resurrection Arc?

Most arcs follow a pattern and this one does too. It’s actually pretty widely used, but since it is often misused, and people are now knocking it, I thought I’d write a defense of it.

All arcs are meant to change the characters and show them something they did not see before. Some arcs are a part of the plot and the characters learn by dealing with the challenges of that part. That’s what category I put a resurrection arc into.

A lot of things kick off arcs. The most famous is getting a challenge like being chosen for something, or the sadder common catalyst is a character losing someone close to them. Sometimes just witnessing a tragedy is enough to do it, other times the character has to lose their soulmate for their arc to begin.

However, there’s another really cool thing that kicks of some arcs. And it’s a resurrection. A resurrection can happen one of two ways. Either it’s a character literally coming back from the dead, or from being almost dead, or they just thought they were and it turns out they weren’t; or something else can be restored to a character that they felt they lost. In fiction especially this can mean a gift or power, or it can mean a belief in something they had lost faith in. It’s popular now for a memory to also be something that helps a character in this way.

In older stories resurrection is often just straight up someone’s coming back to life. This theme appears in fairy tales way more that we realize. Often it’s intertwined with redemption. Many of Anderson’s lesser known stories involve resurrection, and even his most famous ones that have had those elements removed in the retelling.

In modern fiction Death has an oddly compelling presence. Take “The Fault in Our Stars,” or almost any dystopia fiction now. Death is everywhere, often very young people are obsessed with it. (Funny that it’s often older people writing this stuff.) I always loved life, I was happy when nobody died. I considered “The Lion King” a sad movie, (and that part still is.) But of course, Mufasa isn’t really gone, and that can be part of a resurrection arc. Realizing that death isn’t so powerful. It’s why you won’t see this arc in the death-shadowed stories I just mentioned, unless it’s in some twisted, unholy way. Frankenstein’s monster is no example of resurrection, just to be clear.

Life wins out in the end, and love. That’s the message of resurrection arcs in a nutshell. But the complaint, which I’m sick of hearing, is that they don’t create lasting stakes.

Since the Avengers franchise took off, fans have been growing dissatisfied with happy, everyone’s alive, stories (like they don’t all hate it when their friendly neighborhood Spiderman gets knocked off, please.) While I find the constant whining about it to be stupid, I do note that there’s something to be said for making things a bit more realistic.

It’s not that no one dies that really bugs me, it’s that no one gets hurt for very long, no one loses anything in their lives, and no one seems to be affected for longer than two films by any traumatic experience. Also I fail to see character growth even when they are.

In truth, whether characters live or die has nothing to do with depth. Action flicks that kill off henchmen by the dozens aren’t known for being deep. And Chick flicks that don’t kill anyone, or else do it in a more drawn out, romantic way, aren’t necessarily shallow. The Notebook is dumb for most of the movie, but the ending always gets to me because it is saying something profound about love.

That said, I think people who knock resurrection arcs are missing their potential. It’s not always a cheap cop-out to have a character not stay dead. In fact, often it’s a very good catalyst for growth in both them, and everyone else.

When a characters is resurrected, everyone has to reconsider what life and death means to them. They have to ask themselves what they are willing to sacrifice, and what they aren’t. But most of all, it changes the dynamics of how they see the antagonists. Maybe there are things more powerful than whatever the evil stands for.

As for the character who comes back themselves, they get a chance to change things about their lives that maybe only losing them gave them the clarity to do. Or they impart some wisdom on the other characters that they couldn’t before. Resurrection means restoration.

If we no longer like that, it is because we have grown more hopeless. It’s more cool now to just accept the crap in you life and deal with it, then it is to hope for a change. People encourage you to give up on hoping for others to change, for things to turn around. Be the force, they say. Well, that’s fine in its place. But what about when your force isn’t enough?

What about when all the kick-rear skills in the world won’t save you? What about when you’re losing heart and nothing else will help? What about when someone simply can’t save themselves?

Resurrection is what solves this, and nothing else can. It’s a restoring of life and hope and faith to someone who had lost heart. It’s the only thing that makes redemption fully possible. Because though a death may redeem someone, it only sticks if life comes out of it.

Resurrection, in the end, is what breeds humility. What engraves the inevitability of our own need for someone to intervene on our behalf into our souls. By overcoming mortality, it reminds us of it.

It’s not cheap. It’s often the hardest thing to do well.

I for one will never get tired of this arc, until next time–Natasha.

What really matters.

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Well it’s been quite the week for me. On Sunday my grandpa passed away. Now this weekend is his funeral.

I  never knew that loss felt cold before. But it does. I felt cold after I heard the news. I’d expected it for a while, he was not doing well right before. He hadn’t been doing well for a decade. Especially the past four years or so. In fact, that he lived as long a he did was a mystery to his doctors, and my family’s opinion, it was a miracle. He lived off prayer, so many people prayed for him.

The show I mentioned before, RWBY, has a song about loss titled “Cold.” It’s pretty sad. And pretty accurate. When someone dies, do you cease to love them? No.

To me it’s more like a connection was lost. Like your spiritual cellphone now is out of service. But I know some people don’t feel that way. They still feel connected to people they’ve lost. I’m not sure why that is. Losing people has not made me an expert on it. C. S. Lewis wrote about feeling his wife’s nearness in “A Grief Observed.” He knew she still continued to exist.

Some folk think you can talk to the dead and they’ll hear you. I don’t think that, but I understand the need to have final words. So few of us get to be with loved ones when they pass on. I felt like if I had had the chance, I would ahve felt better. Though I did get to see him the very day before, so that was a mercy.

I don’t have a lot of very close memories with my grandpa, he had such ill health, and lived too far away, and he was not very good at connecting with people. But I did get to go out with him on his boat once, which was fun. And he took us around museums and a fishing expo once. I think we went to an aquarium once also. Before his health got really bad. He also paid for my braces, so I owe the fact that I have good teeth now to him.

He was always kind to me. As I got older I found out he was not perfect. None of my grandparents are of course. But I always chose to think of him more as how he was to me. His best self. I prefer to see people that way.

I notice that families like to dredge up old stuff. And I’ve been there, and I’m getting really disillusioned with it. It’s such a waste of time, as my grandmother liked to say. We all do dumb things when we’re young and immature. I’m fortunate to have realized this now and not when I’m 80.

What really counts, as a couple of good songs I know “It happens in a blink” and “Give a little love”, both point out, is not the dumb things we’ve done, but the things we did to love other people. The Bible says that some of us will do little, some of us will do none, and some of us will do much. The parable of the Talents, or when Paul speaks of our works being tested by fire. The point really isn’t how much we do, but that we do things out of love.

Whatever else anyone could say of my grandpa (and all of us could have plenty of things said of us that we wouldn’t like, couldn’t we?) he did love me and his other grandkids and he did things for us that we couldn’t pay him back for. He did help out my parents when we were down on our finances. He did try to take care of my grandmother. And that’s what we’ll remember more about him, or at least that’s what I want to dwell on. No human being is perfect, if we focus on our mistakes, that’s all we’ll ever see. If we focus on the things we did right, at least there is love.

 

 

 

Until next time–Natasha.

Pure Love and the human condition.

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Hi, sorry I’ve neglected you guys. I was not feeling good this week and I had a lot of homework to catch up on. Thankfully my books arrived!

I’ve had the time, however, to get hooked on a new show, it’s called RWBY. I don’t often say this about anime anything, but I recommend it a lot, though it is not finished yet, and if you watch, be prepared to wait a few years for the conclusion because each season takes about a year to come out.

But two seasons was enough to sell me on it, season 3 ripped my heart out, and seasons 4 and 5 continued to blow my mind. Season 6 comes out next month.

A little summary before I get to my real point: RWBY is basically a superhero team set in a fantasy world with heavy spiritual undertones. Or even overtones sometimes. It features a host of likable, deep, smart, and none cliche heroes who you actually want to imitate though you wouldn’t want to be them per sec because they have problems. Not petty issues, but actual life challenges. I’m pretty sure this show is aimed at older teens. The show features villains who you will utterly despise even though their motivations are explained to you, which is a plus in my book since I never liked sympathizing with evil characters. They are not two dimensional, but the show makes it very clear they are evil and you do not want to be like them.

But that’s enough about the show. What I really want to talk about is the contrast between the show’s view of human nature, and the one I’m getting in my Critical Thinking Class. I don’t know who picked my curriculum, but it’s been the most depressing stuff I’ve read in a long time. and I just read Fahrenheit 451. Each short story or novella has featured the theme of human nature, I guess it’s the point we’re focusing on for these weeks.

According to these authors, human beings are cruel, unfeeling, ungrateful, willing to abandon loved ones as soon as they become an inconvenience, and on the brink of insanity constantly.

I know some cynical person might look at that list and say “That sounds about right.” Yeah, that person might not like what I’m going to say.

THIS IS WRONG! WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

I won’t name all my sources here because I think you’re better off not reading them, but the highlights are a story about a man turning into a cockroach and becoming a monster to his family; a woman killing her boyfriend and committing necrophilia; a man with a mentally disturbed employee who starves himself to death after becoming a nuisance to everyone around him; and a man who removes his wife’s one blemish because he can’t bear imperfection and kills her by doing so.

Now if all those sound like something you’d never want to read, be glad you aren’t required to for the course. I actually enjoyed a chapter about straight logic more than I enjoyed any of those.

I do come up with dramatic things when I write my fiction, but I stick mainly to what I’ve seen on TV, or what I observes in the spiritual way of things. You could argue the case for all the above stories having spiritual connotations, but they aren’t ones worth being talked about.

The Bible says of the corrupt that it is shameful to even speak of the things which they do in secret. I don’t think it means that you never expose wickedness. But you should be really careful what you talk about just for the sake of conversation or discussion. No one should bring up the darkest parts of humanity for table talk.

By contrast, RWBY, unlike all the stories I read, has the bad and good sides of people both. It’s most notable example is Pyrrha Nikos, who is hands down one of the best characters I ever saw on a show. Pyrrha demonstrates something that I have seen in stories I’ve read by C. S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, and Francis Burnette (A little Princess and The Secret Garden.) Stories like Heidi, The Enchanted April, The Bronze Bow, Anne of Green Gables, or even comics like Mr. Miracle and Spiderman, all contain exceptional people. People who, as George MacDonald would say, demonstrate “the common good uncommonly developed.” It’s my rule of thumb that if you find no true love in a story, then you find no truth. You’ll never separate those two things with any degree of honesty. You have to search for that one character or theme that demonstrates love, pure love.

Pure Love is an ideal for human beings. While it is possible for us to have it, it takes much growth and much sacrifice on our part. It is true that few of us are willing to undergo that kind of suffering. I could describe Pure Love as a concept, but I prefer using characters. Characters work better than real people in this case because unless you’re fortunate enough to know someone like them, most of us haven’t met anyone who exudes that kind of love all the time. A character is someone all of us could potentially see and hopefully understand.

Pyrrha Nikos struck me because I could never catch her doing anything selfish, no matter what scene she was in. All she ever seems to want is to connect with people and help them. I have seen a few characters like that, but they got ruined in the end by irresponsible writing. Surely I am not the only one tired of show writers growing cynical about their own characters and dooming them by violating the characters own convictions for the sake of the plot…ick.

The point is Pyrrha and the others stand up for what is right and don’t want to just stand by and let bad things happen. And I believe there are people like that in the world.

You probably won’t find them on TV all that much because unfortunately, the reason these stories are on my curriculum is because as a culture we have turned to the dark and the depressing, the antihero and the straight up bad guy. Our world is sick. But, that does not mean we do not have the healers in it. I don’t know anyone who always radiates love except Jesus, but I do know I want to be that person. I have a long way to go. But because I believe God transforms us, I believe I can get there.

The short stories made me feel like garbage, selfish scum of the earth, and that was not based in any reality or likelihood that I would do what the people in the stories did. I can honestly say I wouldn’t. But these stories don’t make me sit back and ponder my life choices as much as they make me think “people suck, at least the ones who wrote this trash did.”

RWBY shocked me with it’s real look at what it’s like to be in a war against evil, but that shock made me remember values I’ve been forgetting for some time now. And it made me want to live up to them again. A part of me was beginning to think having pure love was impossible, but I was reminded that I sure as heck should keep trying anyway.

It’s a pretty pass when an internet show has a better grasp of reality than literature in a Critical Thinking Class, but one cannot disregard humble messengers. Oddly enough, people who expect to be taken seriously the least can often put out the most worthwhile material, because who do they have to impress?

I guess my closing thought is, surround yourself not with what seems the most hard look at life, but with the one that strengthens your values and makes you want to be a better person. That’s the stuff worth engaging in.

Until next time–Natasha.

The difference between men and women-1

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I’ve spent years trying to figure this one out and I finally have my answer: I don’t know what it is.

Well, I do and I don’t.

I can’t understand why people ever started saying men and women are equal or the same, and I really don’t know why they say “a girl can do anything a boy cand o.”

My dad always responds to that by saying “except pee standing up.”

Guys laugh at that and girls roll their eyes.

I could think of a few other things men can do that women can’t…and vice versa.

You’d be surprised how many men don’t even know what a menstrual cycle is, other than it makes girls super emotional.

And not all girls, and not all the time, I only get emotional sometimes. Other time sI hardly notice.

You know I find that if I pick any one trait and think “men are more this than women” I immediately have a few examples come to my mind of men who defy that generalization.

My dad is by far the most emotional person in my family, my mom might go through a whole week or month without yelling more than once or twice, my dad can rarely go through two days.

My mom is one of those people who smile more than laugh, my dad laughs all the time even in negative conversations.

Men are supposedly better drivers and better at math, my mom beats my dad at both those things.

My parents are both exceptional anyway, but that’s just the two of them. I know other boys and girls who defy stereotypes. I know guys who like to knit or sew or cook. I know girls like me who prefer self defense to ballet. That’s not so uncommon anymore.

The point is, if I pick any one thing, I can’t generalize. Both men and women participate in every activity you could think of. From the best things to the worst. Some things it would be nice to rule men out or women. It would be nice if it was true that women don’t sleep around and go from man to man like they were sampling them, and that men are never emotionally needy and clingy. But it’s not.

If I listen to any given conversation around my campus I’ll have proof of this. Boys can be just as emotional and annoying about it as girls, and girls can frankly be just as inconsiderate as boys are more reputed to be in relationships.

And boys can be sensitive and caring,  I don’ know why every genre except chick flicks and the rare kids’ movie seems to not get this. In some cultures a man might be more likely to cry than a woman in some situations. It used to be unladylike for a woman to demonstrate too many motions in public, now it;s weird for a man to do that.

Social fads never mean much anyway, people are too diverse.

I can’t trace he difference between men an women to any hobby or personality trait in particular. Humor can be one consistent difference, but not always. I laugh when people get slugged in movies if i feel it was merited. Even though violence isn’t supposed to be funny to girls.

Sometimes I wonder if I am mannish because I like things girls aren’t supposed to like that much. But I don’t consider myself odd given that I grew up with no brothers and a father who’s main way to enjoy playing with his kids was to buy them war and weapon themed toys. When you’re a girl and your dad is into very masculine stuff, you adapt and become flexible.

Now, true to the expectation, my mom couldn’t care less about that stuff, so I ended up with diverse interests. I am one of many girls or boys that did.

It’s not like boys never learn to do more homemaking stuff from their mom, or even their dad.

This isn’t about what we do, really, it’s not about how we feel. Men and women feel pretty much the same about things. The only difference I notice, and this difference is slight at best, is men seem to feel embarrassed for feeling as much as they do and they deny it, giving the wrong impression that they don’t care.

While girls only feel embarrassed about certain feelings.

Guys will downplay excitement, enthusiasm, sadness, and compassion into “guy” terms. Actions, and short sentences. (Usually, but you’ll have your Shakespearean poetic fellow now and again.)

Girls tend not to downplay positive feelings to each other, they might around guys. But they will downplay negative feelings a lot of time.

I think being bubbly and glad is perceived as a girly thing, so after a certain age most men drop it and hide their good feelings, while women only bring out those feelings, or else resort to being business like.

Again, this is still subject to personal choice. There are exceptions. That’s the only general rule I’ve seen to really apply however.

I will give men a tip here, with girls if you don’t express positive feelings she’s going to assume you feel negatively, or worse indifferent. Indifference is worse, at least to me. If you’re negative I can fight with you at least. Anything is better than stagnation. Guys usually think women are reading into it when they assume the worst, but that’s imply how we communicate.

Conversely, I’ve learned that if I have a spat with my dad I’ll fix things a lot sooner by doing something then by just saying I’m sorry.

I think this boils down to women wanting to know you feel remorse, and men wanting to know you’ll actually take responsibility for your actions.

However, I still say we all have both, it’s just which one it takes to seal the deal that differs.

That said, the real difference between men and women isn’t something you can diagnose. And people are trying to diagnose it so they can cure it.

I don’t care if men are different from me, if they’ll just stop griping about it. I’d hope they feel the same way. God made us different.

You see, our differences are something in us grater than the sum of our parts. It’s not whether you wear make up or wear cologne that makes you a man or a woman. It’s something in your soul.

One reason i don’t believe that people can be transgender. As I just said, emotionally you cant’ really pinpoint the difference between the sexes, it’s soulful, or spiritual if you will. We kind of just sense that it’s there. If you interact with a man or a woman for nay length of time, you’ll feel the difference.

Ironically gay people may actually be more likely to realize men and women are very different, they’ve just decided they don’t like one or the other.