Book excerpt: The Lost Dialogues of Table 18

“Here you go,” I said. “How about if we put the popular thoughts up and lace them together. Bill Cosby said, ‘The problem with women is that they are always ‘c’mere, c’mere, c’mere, get away, get away, get away!’ Then the Venus/Mars dude said just that; we’re from two different planets. He also said men favor their ‘caves’ for retreating to during arguments, in order to figure things out, while women want to solve it right then and there. He said women are vocal creatures… wanna talk about any issue, all the time, right away when it happens. Men, he suggested, needed time and space to figure out anything related to the relationship and other issues, really. He basically said that men do not do dialogue to solve problems. And to be honest, we don’t.”

“The dude was right,” he said.

“He must not have included guy-on-guy dialogue though because as far as I can tell, you and I are solving the problems of the universe, right here at table 18, are we not?”

“No, not really. He was right. Guys aren’t constructive with dialogue; we have merely found ways to entertain ourselves with it.”

“Deep, bro. Seriously.”

“That guy did pin down some truths, though. Especially the cave and the dialogue,” he said.

“Yeah, but that was only a couple of ornaments on the real tree of man v. woman. Plus I think he ended up getting divorced. How about the old saying that if you put a nickel in a jar every time you have sex in your first year of marriage, or, in more modern realities, the first year of your relationship, then you take one nickel out every time you have sex after your first year of the relationship, you’ll never empty the jar?”

“You paid for sex?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Not directly.”

--The Lost Dialogues of Table 18, Ch. 5, "Men and Women"