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We have a male rabbit named Fez. Fez is a wonderful pet, easy to care for and loves to sit in your lap and have you pet him for hours on end. After five years as a bachelor, Fez seemed happy enough, but rabbits are social animals and are happiest living in pairs. In their natural environment, they live in communities of as many as one hundred rabbits; they are not meant to live alone. Although the arrangement was working fine for us, clearly, Fez needed a partner.
We took Fez to the House Rabbit Society to find him a girlfriend.
Although rabbits are pair-bonded animals, they can be quite fussy about choosing a partner, and the courtship is not always easy. After trying Fez with several available ladies, he and a younger rabbit named Mila seemed to hit it off. We took Fez and Mila home with us together and that’s when the learning really began, for them, and for us.
Mila had been raised in the shelter with other rabbits, so she had a lot more experience in relationships than Fez, who had been raised essentially alone. Mila immediately began approaching Fez and initiating courting behaviors, which essentially meant that she pushed her head under Fez’s chin and waited for him to groom her. Poor Fez was clueless. He had no idea of what was expected of him, and he basically just froze. Mila didn’t waste much time expressing her desires. As soon as it was clear that Fez wasn’t going to respond, she bit him, and little bits of fur went flying in the air. It went on like this for a few days. Fez gradually got the message, and began to understand what was expected of him and began grooming Mila whenever she approached him, eventually even initiating the grooming himself and receiving grooming from her. Since Mila taught Fez how to be her partner, everything has been fine.
They lie together, cuddling in the sun light for hours on end, and are happily mated together.
Sound familiar? Do you recognize your own internal Fez or Mila?
I’m guessing that a lot of women reading this column are shaking their heads and identifying with Mila, resenting all the hard work they’ve had to do to train up their partners and teach them how to be in a relationship. I’m guessing that a lot of men reading this column are identifying with poor Fez, remembering all the times that their partner “bit” them for not knowing what the hell they were supposed to be doing.
We start out in mixed-sex peer groups, boys and girls playing together. At some point we separate by gender, because the girls aren’t very interested in the games the boys want to play and vice versa. The boys split off and practice conquering the word; they play sports and games that focus on individual achievement and competition, which prepares them well for the world of work they are expected to enter. Meanwhile, girls play games that are more collaborative, such as playing house or school, preparing them for the world of relationships.
This works pretty well until puberty.
All of a sudden, the boys start to get more interested in the girls again. The boys are not particularly interested in the updated, more real-life versions of the relationship-focused games the girls are playing; they’re just interested in the girls.
Unfortunately for men, when they want to get with the girls, it’s going to be on the girls’ turf, which is relationships, and the men are at a significant disadvantage. While the girls have been essentially practicing, almost rehearsing, for this moment for years, the boys haven’t been giving it much thought, much less preparing. I had one woman tell me that she spent hours as a girl practicing kissing the back of her hand, teaching herself how to kiss her imagined future partner.
Things go well in the courtship when both the man and the woman recognize the truth of the situation and can be generous with each other moving forward. This is one of the reasons that courtships best take place in private: because if the new couple is over-exposed to peer pressure from their own group of friends, it makes it more difficult to make the required compromises.
Men need to accept the fact that they are on unfamiliar turf, that they know significantly less about relationships than their new partner does, and have the humility to allow their partner to teach them, sometimes lead them, and occasionally even tolerate a little nip and some fur flying. Women need to remember that underneath all the posturing and bluffing that men do, they want the same yummy closeness and intimacy in the relationship that women do, but it can require a whole lot of patience to get down to that well-protected core in some men.
Fez and Mila are getting along famously because Fez let Mila teach him how to love her, and Mila was willing to help him learn, understanding that in exchange for a little training and a lot of patience, she would get an eager partner for life. Every once in a while, though, Fez’s mind wanders and Mila gives him a little nip. He doesn’t seem to mind.
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