Simple Needs

Last week I had dinner in a small, crowded NYC restaurant next to a group of very outspoken women, who didn't seem to care that my friends and I could hear every word of their conversation. One lady “Jane” had a fight with her husband earlier in the evening and proceeded to start the dinner off with a bang. “Men absolutely suck. If they were erased from the planet, we’d all be better off.” "Jane's" friend chimed in, “They’re not so bad, they’re just complicated.”

At this point, a few of my friends decided to engage the women and see if they could convince them of the value of our lesser sex. However I zoned out for a few minutes and thought about that last comment. Now I’m not sure if I was more offended by the attack on our gender or the fact that the women didn’t acknowledge our existence when discussing the matter. But as they went on to discuss the enigma of men, I zoned out for a few minutes and thought about that last comment. Are men really all that complicated? I didn’t offer any opinions (nor were my opinions solicited), but I believe that men are actually very simple animals. I’ve heard it said that every decision a man makes is driven either by the desire for sex or the fear of death. (Please note that I have absolutely no sources for this claim -- but for the sake of convenience, we can assume Freud said something that resembled this concept.) I’m no Freud, but that doesn’t sound so complicated.

The simplicity of men was fairly apparent in tonight’s episode. Take Marcel and Curtis. Here are two men with seemingly nothing in common. In spite of their obvious differences, they’re able to play a round of golf together, as if they were old friends. In the end, once you remove all the noise, Marcel and Curtis are not all that different. Like the rest of our gender, they are fairly simple beings. They are driven by the same motivators: sex and death. Now if I can be so bold as to put my own spin on this psychological assessment of men (an assessment which I may have just invented): Men may be driven by sex and death. Or (and this is a brilliant spin) they may be driven simply by sex. If I’m being honest with myself, Marcel and Curtis didn’t seem all too concerned with the whole death thing. On the other hand, they clearly couldn’t get sex off their minds. When Curtis was told that Jennifer would have to wait six weeks from the delivery date before she could engage in sex again, he didn’t miss a beat. In a less than delicate manner, Curtis implied that he had no intention of waiting six weeks, because he could always use the “back door.” And how about Marcel. During an otherwise peaceful yoga session in the Dominican Republic, Susan has to tell her husband repeatedly to stand down because he is using the session as an invitation to fondle her.

I have no doubt that Curtis and Marcel will make wonderful fathers. I also have no doubt that, if they focus on the lessons learned with Rosie and her team, they will have long and fruitful marriages. However, these two gentlemen may be very clear evidence that men are really not that complicated. As Freud may or may not have said -- Men, at best, are driven by two variables. And if we’re honest with ourselves, it may just be one. This all begs the question:  Why do women think we're complicated?