Month: January 2009

For some reason unknown to modern scholars, men have always liked to fix things. For example, a man will show very little interest in a coat rack until it is reported to him that said coat rack is broken. The man will then immediately proceed to spending as much as an hour of his time trying fix it. This time can be doubled or even tripled when said coat rack is owned by a woman.

If a man finds himself unable to fix something at first, he will become frustrated. This frustration varies across the spectrum of men, but it is usually pungent enough to keep him from allowing other men to take a crack at fixing it, or even to help. This is due to the fact that if another man could fix it while the first man couldn’t, then he’s obviously better fixing things. As men tend to refuse to let others be better than them until about age 72, this is unacceptable, and a man will try to avoid this outcome at all costs.

Strangely enough, a man can find himself more insecure about his coat rack fixing ability than about his actual job. If he can’t fix it, then in his mind he may feel as if he is not needed or important. When you encounter a man who is suffering from this, you may want to distract him with a broken object that is easy to fix, like a click-pen, or a high light bulb that needs changing. Or you could just remind him, “Hey. Get over yourself. It’s just a coat rack.”

Most men like tend to fancy themselves as reliable, able to be trusted, and able to get the job done. In order to reassure himself that he can actually get said job done, he will usually cite his frequency of being at a certain place when others expect him to be.

A man’s attendance record is often more important to him than his actual performance record. A man may fail at doing just about everything else, but about half of all men value showing up so much that they will tolerate any ineptitude in themselves so long as they know that, at the very least, they had perfect attendance. These men will often try to make up for lack of consistent talent, strength, or other measure of manhood by being consistent in the only thing they really can do, and that is arriving.

This can be misleading, because this only covers half of all men. The other half like to consider their abilities so effective and so reliable that they don’t even need to be present in order to succeed. When these men show up for something, they would like for it to be an occasion. The lower these men’s attendance while still accomplishing their goals, the more satisfied they are at their success. This is not to mention the time they save by not showing up can be spent on other priorities, like working on their jump shot, or naps.

Whatever the case, any man that you run into almost certainly thinks he is reliable and will reference his attendance somehow to prove it. If you let him know that he is unreliable because of his attendance rate, he will almost always argue that he is reliable because of the exact same attendance rate, so the best bet is to just tell him that he is doing a good job at the kind he is failing at. If you’re lucky, he will get confused and try to excel at both, which, when done right, is what you probably want anyway.

When it comes to expressing their personalities, men like to go for the biggest bang for the buck, and there isn’t a place that he can get a bigger bang than Facebook. While he could use his Facebook status message or notes to express himself, it generally won’t convey that man’s sense of who thinks he is very well, unless he feels he is exceptionally good at writing. For everyone else, the profile picture is their best bet.

There are several ways that a man will use his profile picture to express himself. The first will be to show that he owns something. This is used most frequently with women. If a man feels his relationship with a woman is strong enough and that she is pretty enough, he will include her in his profile picture to show his fellow men that he has a girlfriend, and is thus better than those who don’t have women in their profile pictures. If a woman is not an option, he can use a picture with something he owns that he particularly likes, such as a car or alcohol.

The level of silliness is also an important part of the profile picture. The more silly a man acts in his profile picture, the more secure he wants you to think that he is. This picture, however, is almost always taken posed, and then chosen specifically by the man as the defining picture that you will see when you enter his Facebook page, or when he writes on your Funwall. By choosing a silly picture, he can communicate that he doesn’t really care what you think of him, which is exactly what every guy wants everyone around him to think. This is because real men don’t care what others think, unless it’s that he has a pretty girlfriend or that he doesn’t need anyone’s approval to be secure.