Learning from Adam

@wwaycorrigan
Very often the best, perhaps only, way to solve a problem is to go back to its roots, its origin. Arguably, one of the most challenging issues for man has been his never-ending battle with the opposite sex. You might call it a constant clash due, mostly, to misunderstandings, one in which there is seemingly no solution.

However, in line with the opening sentence, perhaps the fix has been under our noses all this time, it’s just many of us have been too engrossed in ‘the battle of the sexes’ to notice it. Credit in showing me the light goes to the unlikely source of a Canadian born-again Christian friend.

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of reading largely fiction-based works, but it seems the good book part one, the Bible’s Old Testament, provides the answer to man’s great problem. It has been said many times before that there are lessons to be learnt from history but too often we ignore them. We could do well, however – as pointed out by my born-again Christian friend – to learn from the fatal mistake of our forefather Adam, the biblical first man.

His error? Listening to and then acting on the advice of a woman i.e. Eve. If he had at the very most just nodded and agreed but not actually followed through on eating the forbidden fruit, things could have been so much different for us all. So one version of the story goes anyway.

The ‘not actively engaging or listening’ strategy is one that our Canadian friend started to implement during the latter weeks of his time with his wife here in Bogotá. And he felt it paid dividends; in one ear, out the other. The fact that he is now back in his home country while his ‘other half’ has quite literally been left holding the baby was nothing to do with his new approach. There are other factors for that, honestly.

Before I’m accused of being a misogynist, I must state that very often the best ideas come from women (or so they tell me). What’s being proposed is something like one of the scenes from the 90s British sketch show, The Fast Show:* Outwardly pay no heed to what a woman is saying, but act on it if it happens to make sense. She can at least take private satisfaction in seeing her way being implemented. Everybody wins, right?

If you’re not in agreement, best advice would be to just let it go. As a wise man once opined, “There are two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither works.”

Indeed many a man who has been in a long-term, ‘happy’ marriage or relationship has said, privately if not publicly, that the key to its ‘success’ was ear muffs; or at least some equivalent, real or imaginary.

So in a modern word full of newfangled ways to communicate, perhaps we could all, both men and women, benefit from a bit of disengagement every now and again. From the man’s perspective, learning from Adam, we ought to do it a bit more systematically in our dealings with women.

Something to ponder over as we fast approach Colombia’s day of love and friendship.
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*As well as the Fast Show hyperlink above, this following link from a similar sketch show, Harry Enfield, should also prove ‘educational’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w.

For a little bit more on this general theme, one place to start is Colombia and Ireland – a tale of two old Catholic countries.

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