Reality Check – Face to face

It all started with Sesame Street. Learning used to be something we did systematically, with the aid of books, a straight-laced teacher wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and a ruler across the knuckles if all else failed.

But Sesame Street promised to make learning fun! Letters danced and sparkled. Numbers exploded! Cool.

Thus learning became entertainment, and soon entertainment became everything. Our society is addicted to entertainment, and not the kind that was once derived from sitting out on the wrap-around porch with your neighbours and a bunch of banjos, if such a culture ever really existed. No, it’s the entertainment you experience on the new iPhone I bought my husband last Christmas, which not only makes calls and plays YouTube videos; it also has its own fake “lighter” application, should you ever find yourself at an impromptu concert. How fun is that?

And while men are busy with their new gadgets, women are typing frantically, finding new ways to keep up with friends in 140 characters or less. Technology is now our entertainment and our social outlet.

Unfortunately, technology got women all wrong. We may broadcast on Twitter to everyone we’ve ever known, including some guy we dated for three weeks in Grade 11, that last night’s extra cheese pizza gave us heartburn, but that doesn’t build the connections we really need. You can’t cry on someone’s shoulder on Facebook. You can’t pat someone’s hand on a blog. Most of all, you can’t look someone eye to eye and read the heart, because there is no face to face.

We women need that face to face, which is why we get so ticked off when we’re trying to talk to the men in our lives and they don’t look up from the video game. We like scrutinizing our loved one’s faces, watching their laugh lines, even seeing ourselves reflected in our guy’s eyes. When we see eyeballs, we figure ears are listening, too. Without eyeballs, we figure we’re being tuned out. And since we’re missing the face to face in the rest of our frantic lives, we especially need it from relationships.

Men aren’t built for relationship in quite the same way. A man can watch a football game with a buddy and come away feeling that they have experienced something together. A woman watches a movie with her guy and, while she may have had fun, she often feels somewhat unfulfilled.

Men operate side by side; as long as they are experiencing something with someone else, they tend to feel empowered. It hearkens back to the days when men were hunters, trekking out with their buddies. Requiring eye contact to have real conversation would have been a huge drawback when a sabre-toothed tiger approached. Men had to be able to scan the horizon while still debating about whose campfire was bigger last night.

Yet though men are comfortable side by side, it is with women that they experience the true intimacy of face to face. Just because that’s the potential of relationships, though, doesn’t mean we’ll always achieve it. Humans are intrinsically lazy, and it’s all too easy to ignore our deepest needs and focus instead on the immediate, the flashy, and the fun, even if it’s shallow. With all these new gadgets, we’re filling our lives with pseudo-relationship and pseudo-intimacy.

So here’s a little pointer if you’re wondering why you’re not getting anywhere in your relationships. Put the iPhone away and go for a coffee. Sit at a table and look into someone’s eyes, whether it’s your spouse, your child, your sister, your friend. Then just talk. It doesn’t even matter what you talk about! Just spend some time not being entertained by anything except another’s stories. That’s a special kind of fun, and it doesn’t need batteries.

You can find Sheila at http://www.SheilaWrayGregoire.com.

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