An Educated Guess

I have to say that I agree with Wole Oguntokun in that what women want, or more specifically what women want from men, is a man who will enable them to be what they want to be. Unfortunately for both sexes, neither of us quite knows what that is until well into adulthood.

You see I have a theory. My theory states that no young person knows exactly what they want. Where young loosely applies to anyone of age 25 or below. We don't know what we want from life. Let alone what we may want from another person and yet we think we do. We think we do because our backgrounds, environments, early experiences, personal tastes, and even the media have fashioned out a template for what the perfect guy or girl should mean to us. A template that to the untrained eye may seem complete...

Usually this template is quite detailed, and may contain terms such as funny, taller than me, good [insert your religion here], muscular, shapely, and so on. This template is what we young ones like to call "our type". Sooner or later, many of us find out that "our type" is not necessarily what we are attracted to. Girls who thought they wanted a prince charming find themselves in and out of relationships with bad boys and boys who thought they wanted a Halle Berry find themselves making out with the awkward nerd.

Thus begins the process of reconciliation between what we think we should like, and what we actually like. Our once pristine template soon becomes full of conditionals, additionals, deletions, and optionals. We find out that things we like, we only like up to a point and things that we thought bearable must never occur. We begin to prioritise attributes, reorganise hierarchies, include dependencies, and define ambiguities.

For every good relationship we make some additions, and for every bad one some restrictions. Such that where you once said I want to marry a good Christian, you now say I want to marry a man who knows the Bible well. Where you once said your girlfriend must have T&A, you now say tits most definitely but ass I can manage without. Those things that you thought would make or break your relationship become less and less critical, while other things you had never considered begin to surface.

The entire process takes such a heavy toll on our hearts and our minds, that none of us ever quite completes it. That is to say, we never leave it with a complete personification of our soulmate. We all just drop out. But no matter at what point we drop out, the partner we leave with is always better than the one with which we started.

Now even though we leave the process with a better personification of what we want, the fact remains that we leave as dropouts. We have no degree to show that our personification is any better than that of the 15 year old who has never been to reconciliation school.

Just like them, our girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and wives, are nothing but an estimate. A guess at the personification of a soulmate. But unlike them, our guess is more defined, more informed, and more likely to be accurate. Because our guess, is an educated guess.

So next time your partner starts misbehaving, just look them lovingly in the eyes and say "My dear, our entire relationship is based on the educated guesses of two dropouts. If you keep this up, it may be time to guess again".