What Do Men Talk About?
by Diva Rebecca
I couldn’t believe the luck I was having. There I was, sitting quietly on my front porch in the wee morning hours, when I heard a rambunctious group of guys gabbing away with each other in front of the hotel next door. The guys had been out partying and were now hanging out, enjoying their buzz and cigarettes. The young men thought they were alone. They could not see me, nor my house, which was so well hidden behind a common line of trees and bushes. And it was in this moment when I realized I had been given the rare opportunity to listen to what guys REALLY talk about when no women are around. I had official front row, yet invisible, tickets to the locker room!
I didn’t intend on spying on anyone that morning. I was just having another late night with a difficult newborn. He had finally returned to sleep and I was taking in some fresh air on the porch. When I heard the men talking, I couldn’t help but focus my attention on them. They were loud and boasting. You could tell each one of them was under the influence of alcohol. From the looks of them, they were a traveling team, possibly a college lacrosse team. They were making so much noise it would have been hard not to notice them. I might possibly have ignored them, but when I heard what they were talking about my ears instinctively homed in on their direction. Girls. Not the game they just played earlier in the day. They were talking about girls.
Like most women, I always imagined guys talking about cars, jobs, bosses, sports, dogs, money, wrestling, motorcycles, whatever. Especially when they were drunk. I actually thought girls would be the last thing they would discuss in such a gregarious and masculine situation. I know men talk about women, but I didn’t imagine them doing so in this type of atmosphere. I had to giggle. You could only imagine my delight to have stumbled upon something so surprising. For me it was a break from an old stigma.
As I gleefully tiptoed closer down my porch and strained my ears I accidentally laughed out loud when I realized I had just created my own little covert surveillance situation. Thankfully they didn’t hear me. It was a long conversation and I couldn’t pick up every word, but I learned enough. The entire discussion centered around girls. Apparently the guys had run into a group of attractive single women and the two groups had mingled. A few of the guys had hit it off with a few of the girls and one or two had more of a difficult time. And it seemed that at one point one girl had left the company of one of the guys to flirt with another guy in this group. The guy who she left was wondering why he couldn’t hold on to her and "seal the deal". The conversation rolled into examinations of other dating experiences and meetings with girls but the theme remained the same: girls – and how to successfully pick them up. I should have stepped off my porch and referred them to a dating coach. But no doubt, if I had made my presence known, their conversation would have quickly switched to something else.
So the myth of what guys talk about is completely blown. They do talk about girls, and they probably talk about them way more often than most women think. That doesn’t make them less manly, it just makes them more human and a little more compatible with the female variety of their species. It sort of made me feel a little better too. I love guys (most people know that about me already) but there is always that tiny gap of interests and emotions which culturally separate men from women, and this experience managed to close that gap just a little more for me.
