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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Six Word Saturday - Starbucks Eavesdropping

In Emotions vs. Logic, who wins??


"I'm very pro public scenes..."

This was the line that initially caught my attention.  I had been trying to get some work done at a Starbucks downtown, waiting to meet up with my cousin after work.  It had become almost impossible to stay focussed on my own laptop while the angry vulgarities of what I can only assume to be a woman once scorned flew out from behind her MacBook and landed squarely between me and my mine.  She seemed to be one half of a problem-solving (or exacerbating....you be the judge) session with a friend who was on the other end of the phone call.  I couldn't hear the specifics of the issue they were discussing, but what I could hear piqued my interest.

"He's all about talking in private.  He won't say anything in public.  He'll just sit there and stare at his laptop, shaking his leg, but when he get's home he f***ing rips you apart on Facebook."

I had to look up. Ooh...she's gesticulating!

"I don't want to tell you what to do....because I'm a woman who likes to be chased.  I like a reaction.  If I'm mad and you don't give me the reaction I want, I'm gonna just keep poking at you and keep it up until you react. So, I don't want to tell you to do something and then it ends up being bad advice."

The first rational thing I had heard all conversation.

20 minutes later she had moved the conversation out of earshot, but not so far that I had lost sight of waving arms and pacing around the general vicinity.  She was amped up.

This isn't the first time I've experienced first- (or second-) hand, the emotional response to conflict that is often stereotypically attached to the female approach.  Men are logical. Women are emotional.  This is what we are often socialized to believe....and there are definitely individuals who fit the mould.  (I'd like to submit the raging Starbucker as Exhibit A) A lot of my male friends have attributed this emotional lens as the source of much conflict and stress within their relationships.  It got me to thinking about the bar fights, basketball court fights and hockey fights men get into with each other and I realized that it isn't that men aren't emotional, their emotions just come out differently.  The Starbucker's conflict wasn't that her friend's partner was unemotive, it was that he chose to emote in a virtual public forum instead of an actual public place.  What initially seem to be a lack of an emotional response (perhaps even logical) was just a delayed emotional response.

So are men really all that much more logical, in general?  Are we all just emotional creatures with feelings manifesting in different ways at different times? And when it comes to the battle between logic and emotions, in the end do emotions ever really win??

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Play alongs with Call me Cate and all her friends each week as we embark on 6WS....hop on over to her blog. (She'll tell you how to get in on the action!!)

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