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Relationship Female Adda
1 year ago
Just Let Go
A couple of years ago, a guy stole a parking space from me in Hartford, Connecticut. He was actually hogging half of two spaces, making it impossible for anyone to park in either of them. When I asked him to pull forward a few feet, he refused and walked away. I could have let this pass. But then I spotted a hot dog vendor on the other side of the street. So I bought a sausage sandwich with extra onions, smeared it all over his windshield, and left him a note reading: "How's your day working out now?"

My wife and 22-year-old daughter think it's idiotic when I do this kind of stuff, but my 20-year-old son thinks it's fabulous. That's because he understands that men cannot — and will not — let things go. It would ruin our lives if we did.

Tense Present

Women have a different relationship with grudges than men do. They have a hard time letting go of things in the past, while men have a hard time letting go of things in the present. Women remember missed anniversaries, insensitive comments, personal slights, appalling gifts, dreary vacations. They're famous for exhuming old arguments, for reviving debates that their male counterparts thought were dead and buried years ago. When women refuse to let it go, it's usually because the offending party — a spouse, a boyfriend — is guilty of a crime suggesting a serious flaw in moral character. The only way to prevent these failings from reappearing in the future is to continually remind the man of his crimes in the past.

While men may not dredge up the past as women do, we often refuse to let an argument go until our position is vindicated. Men want women to admit that getting off I-84 and taking local roads to Boston is a stupid error in judgment, an error compounded when she later takes 295 instead of I-95 to Philly. Men want women to admit that recycling newsprint makes no economic sense, that Alan Alda is a dink, that True Romance is one of the 10 greatest movies of all time, that the infield fly rule is not impossible to understand.

Men are forever willing to risk life, limb, and ridicule in defense of a dubious principle. My daughter's boyfriend once returned a rental truck to a dangerous neighborhood in the Bronx at 11 o'clock at night just because he was furious that the company had lied about being able to drop it off in a safe neighborhood in Manhattan without paying an overnight rental fee. My daughter was in the car at the time. She thinks he should have just let it go.

Men are particularly implacable when the argument involves something unimportant. I once forced my wife to watch the closing credits of the tearjerker Brief Encounter just to prove that it was not Raymond Massey playing Trevor Howard's best friend — that the very suggestion was ridiculous. I did this because I felt that such a reproof would deter her from subsequently asking, "Was that a young Billy Crystal playing Sonny Corleone in The Godfather?" But this approach never works, because my wife does not care about being wrong, especially when it involves somebody named Billy. Or Sonny.

I recently asked a group of male friends to provide examples of things they could not let go of. In almost every case, the men found it necessary to defend some imaginary principle, while the women were content to take the path of least resistance and get on with it. "My neighbor hires an army of workers to blow leaves during the week when I'm trying to work," reported one self-employed friend. "So every Sunday night, I cut my lawn at dinnertime. Sometimes I wait till my neighbor's getting settled in his hammock before turning on the weed whacker. My wife hates the idea of pissing off the neighbors, but I enjoy it."

Feel-Good Moments

Here we come to a key point: When men refuse to let go, it is generally because we derive pleasure from it. I recently read somewhere that a staggeringly large number of men engage in punitive behavior on the highway, going out of their way to even the score with drivers who cut them off. This is the way we are. If cut off, we retaliate. If jostled, we jostle back. We kick the seat in front of us on airplanes when the passenger suddenly jerks the seat back. We will not tolerate disrespect, even when no disrespect is intended. Given half a chance, most men would behead another man who jumps from the back of one line to the front of a new queue when the innocent cashier opens the register and says, "Next customer, please."

The problem with this philosophy is that it makes life complicated. My wife is constantly pleading with me to let things go, if only for logistical reasons: The number of times a guy encounters other guys who annoy him means he faces confrontations a dozen times a day. The pig who steals his parking space. The bike messenger who nearly kills him. The bozo ranting into his cell phone an inch from his ear.

To avoid spending our entire lives retaliating, we sometimes develop elaborate coping mechanisms, a la my sausage-smearing incident. By doing this, I built up a tidy psychic reservoir that let me ignore the next five guys who stole my parking space because I'd screwed one guy really good. Subconsciously, a lot of men let things go for a while and then wreak all their vengeance on the 10th guy to mess with them. The 10th guy is often a hapless geek.

I would love to believe that men will one day master anger management techniques and learn to let things go. But the truth is, guys like getting in each other's faces. I thoroughly enjoyed confronting the four frat boys who spilled beer on my son's pants at a Rolling Stones concert last fall. And I enjoyed telling a short drunk at another Stones concert: "I wasn't actually seeking any input from the Hobbit community."

Last fall, I nearly got into a fistfight with a nitwit at a field hockey game. The man was standing right in front of me. When I asked him to move, he shocked me — and his far more intelligent girlfriend — by calling me an asshole. He immediately regretted it, and even though I knew he regretted it, I had to get right in his face and tell him menacingly that in the future he should choose his words more carefully. Why did I need to do this? To humiliate him? To emasculate him? No, I was motivated by pure altruism. If I let this ninny call me an asshole, he might say the same to an even bigger guy, and then he'd get his lights punched out. In other words, I was doing him a favor.

The very notion that a man would think he was doing another man a favor by threatening to kick his ass provides a pretty clear idea of how twisted we are as a gender. We cannot let things go, even when there is good reason to, because we are biologically programmed not to let things go. For the clearest illustration of the difference between men and women, you only needed to study the facial expression of the woman accompanying the jerk at the hockey game. Her expression read: Yes, he was an asshole to call you an asshole. But you're an asshole to treat him like the world's biggest asshole just because he called you an asshole. Why can't you assholes just let it go?

Maybe it's because we're assholes.


Joe Queenan lives in Tarrytown, New York, where he's been having the same feud with a local merchant since 1987. He has no plans to let it go. Ever.
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