Surprises About Men: Unexpected Lessons from the Other Side
By Garret Freymann-Weyr -- Publishers Weekly, 5/7/2009
Garret Freymann-Weyr's novel After the Moment, about a teenager haunted by a past relationship and the events that drove them apart, comes out this month from Houghton Mifflin.
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Garret Freymann-Weyr. |
The guy I was writing about was neither. He was thoughtful, but not brilliant. He simply got up every day trying to figure out how to do the best he could. I started to read memoirs by thoughtful men about what life was like when they were boys. I was reassured that, yes, thoughtful boys exist, always have, still do. But I hit a wall when it came to boys and sex. A wall no amount of reading could fix. So, I located my bravery (it was next to a pair of old ballet shoes), and went out to talk to those on the other side of the wall.
Here are some fun things men told me.
1. Having sex for the first time does NOT stop you from thinking about it so much. The first thing you want to do after having sex the first time is, well, have it again.
2. If you ask a man why he wants to have sex, he will look at you as if you are speaking a different language. Ask your girlfriend that question and you will hear words like Intimacy, Connection, Expression, Pleasure, Joy, Love. The closest answer I got from men was Because. I began to suspect it was like any habit: you bite your nails, you eat sweets, you want to have sex, you adjust your glasses, all without thinking. Probably without noticing. Just because.
3. Boys move around. A lot. It’s not just the jocks. Young men work stuff out in movement. No one said this to me flat out, but most of the men I spoke with (not to mention the brave, horrified teenage boys whose mothers pushed them my way) reported an adolescence lived in motion.
4. They LOVE having a car. Oh, my God, do they LOVE having a car. Who knew? I grew up hailing cabs, but my male counterparts tell me they LOVED that first car.
5. They fall in love for the first time when the girl with whom they want to sleep (or with whom they already are sleeping) grabs their attention in some non-physical way. Now, maybe I wanted to hear that, and maybe I talked to an odd bunch, but in the things they said, and how their faces looked when we moved from the topic of sex to that first time love struck, led me to this conclusion. As one gentleman succinctly put it, “Wanting her was a given; thinking about her was a shock.”
I would hasten to add that that all of these “lessons” were gleaned by my highly subjective brain as I listened to men talk. A different woman might have learned different things. No one is an expert on gender. But most writers spend their lives observing others. We live for—and through—what we see. And if we don’t think we’re seeing clearly, we try to see from as many different angles as possible.
