What do you think of this video?
I saw this video floating around on Facebook with the caption:
After being married for 30 years now, take my word for it … this is an excellent video. If you’ve been married for any length of time, you’ll get it!
We’ve all heard this kind of thing, from movies to off-handed comments from family members. How do you respond?
Not only do I think this video relies on bad gender stereotypes, but I also don’t think it’s even a good analogy because the nail imagery is just so exaggerated that the whole thing ends up insulting to both parties in the video.
What do you think? Are real marriages like this? Are you really only interested in fixing?
If you agree with the video, what conversations do you often get trapped in that mirror this example? If you don’t agree with the video, if a friend showed this to you, what would you say in response?
[Via: Facebook]
By definition stereotypes are true if oversimplified. This is my marriage, and the problem is sometimes that solvable to me, though not to my wife as she doesn’t have the same experiences I do. I don’t take problems to my wife unless I want her input. By contrast, 80%+ of the problems she brings to me she doesn’t want any input from me at all and that drove me batty. We spent the first couple years of our marriage working out a system where I would hold my tongue more often, and she would accept my advice without getting upset… Read more »
I think its funny. The people in it strike me as caricatures, and so I wouldn’t quibble with the gender stereotypes, which are obviously there.
I think it can be understood beyond the narrow and frankly overdone “men fix, women bond” stuff. Often there’s a solution to a problem that no one wants too look at. We’re so used to priding ourselves on seeing complexity and therefore demonstrating that we’re not simple minded, binary thinkers, that we sometimes fail to see the obvious black and white answer.
I think people get offended too easily by things like this. It’s funny. How many times have we listened to a friend go on and on and on about a problem when the solution was so easily obtainable? It’s not about men and women… it’s not even about fixers and listeners… it’s about people so self-obsessed with their petty dramas that they can’t see the solution staring them in the face… or hitting the nail on the head! I think at some point we have all had the nail, and also been the one pointing at the nail.
You don’t have to be married to appreciate this. Just observing a lot of interactions between male and female friends would be enough to spot this as a common pattern. I started to notice stuff like this as a teenager, which didn’t really help me navigate adolescence at all, but I did notice it.
My wife and I both got a big kick out of it. We used to have some conversations just like that, though sometimes it was me with the obvious practical problem. As a husband, I liked the video. My wife liked the video as a physician. A lot of doctors are in the position of the husband in the video….
*yawn* Spidey 2 depicted the perfect “male” fantasy about not reeeeally needing to listen. MJ complains that Peter isn’t listening, and then the car spinning thru the air whips into the window and Spiderman gets to save her life. She’s left dumbstruck and grateful, her complaint completely forgotten. Stupid MJ, wishing Peter would just listen to her.
I’m sorry the video insulted you! I’m sorry you had a negative experience from it. For me, this is what the video represents: There is masculine energy and there is feminine energy; we all have both and express both. Men tend to express more masculine energy more of the time, and women tend to exprss more feminine energy more of the time, but again we all have and express both. What I’ve observed is that the masculine energy is attuned to action, solution, and producing results; and that the feminine energy is attuned to feelings, connection, and being heard. Very… Read more »
I thought the video was funny. Obviously it is a stereotype, but it’s funny to people because it has a grain of truth from our own experience. I have certainly been in situations where I wanted to emote endlessly about a problem whereas my boyfriend wanted to respond by making helpful suggestions, which irritated me. The video helps me see his point of view, which is that talking about solutions may sometimes be better than ruminating pointlessly about my feelings. I’ve also learned over the years that it is often a bad idea to try to engage with men emotionally… Read more »
“The video helps me see his point of view, which is that talking about solutions may sometimes be better than ruminating pointlessly about my feelings.”
Hallelujah. Amen. Thousands of dollars in couple’s therapy saved in one sentence.
Yeah, I agree with you two. It was funny and it was funny because there was recognition – actually I know that frustration of feeling “well I want to offer solutions” and being forced to just listen when you think you have something useful to contribute is very frustrating.
Actually now I’ve read all the comments it seems only the author of the article didn’t find it funny.
As I interpret it, this video isn’t intended to be a serious comment upon the general character of male-female interactions. Rather, it is a representation of how the world looks through the eyes of those of us who are ‘fixers’, a type that is predominantly, but far from exclusively, male in my experience. Those of us who are fixers laugh because we have had just this conversation many, many times before with friends (usually female) who are looking for a ‘listener’, rather than a ‘fixer’. This is a sort of conversation that doesn’t usually take the same form with a… Read more »
You make a very good point. The fixer personality may be more common in men (maybe!), but it’s not exclusive to men. There are fixers and listeners in both genders. The biggest gender difference may be in the kind of fixer approach that men tend to use versus what women tend to use. In my experience, it’s far more women than men who have told me, basically, “don’t feel that way” or “just stop feeling that way.” Come to think of it, maybe they weren’t really interested in fixing anything after all….