What’s up with women and anniversaries, anyway?
Sunday, April 6th, 2008I was recently talking to a fellow who was befuddled by the female habit of going berserk when a man forgets her birthday, an anniversary, or Valentine’s Day, even if he was great to her every other day of the year.
I realized that, as a female, I was also befuddled by this. It really doesn’t make a lot of sense to get cheesed off at your man in these circumstances.
So what’s up with this behavior? I decided to put my noodle to work and see if I could figure out what the basis of this behavior.
It’s my experience that if you want to figure out the reason behind anything that people do, the best place to start is at the base instinct level. Even though we’re smarter than, say, a cat or dog, we’re basically running on the same software engine. We all share the same primal desire: survive and make more.
Now, humans are social animals by nature. Social animals depend on cooperation for survival, but there is also compromise and competition. In the case of human females, there is competition for males.
Natural selection favors the female who can keep her male’s attention, and by extension natural selection would also favor a female who is attentive to signs that her male’s attention may be on other things, enabling her to take action and do something.
Now, here comes the next part: social conditioning.
Most of us are conditioned from childhood to expect gifts on certain days. This practice has a positive effect: it reassures us that our friends and family care about us. (Care and cooperation is a big thing in social creatures.) If abused, however, it can leave us expecting a bit too much… but that’s another issue.
When someone gives us a gift, we often conclude that they care about us. When someone fails to get us a gift when we know from conditioning that they’re supposed to give us one to show that they care… well, what’s the first conclusion?
Now imagine yourself as a child. Your father has promised to bring you something that you really wanted when he comes home. Yet when he gets home, it turns out that he has forgotten about it. You feel hurt. By not delivering on an expected positive affirmation, he has delivered a negative affirmation.
The same type of thinking is likely what gets women so irritated when their significant others fail to deliver. By failing to present a positive affirmation when he is expected to, he unwittingly delivers a negative affirmation.