Women and men are obviously different, but they are different in the ways that men do not fully understand or appreciate especially over time. These subtleties of women may be suspected, but are not often understood well because a guy does not watch carefully over time. Some of this lack of understanding is in the way both men and women grow and develop after the age of about 20 or 25 onward.
A guy is like a beer. A beer is brewed and can be consumed as is whenever. Beer just has to be cooled, poured, and slammed. It is good now and it is good later. Beer is beer. It can do age; it doesn’t have to be aged. It is the same today, the same next year, and the same in ten years, 20 years, and 40 years. Of course the beer can just sit around in the wrong conditions and it can get stale over time. I guess over a long time all beer does get old and stale eventually. Guys alike a beer, ready to drink about 20-25 and the same at 30, 40, and 50. Sure they may get a little stale as time goes on especially if conditions aren’t right, but most guys don’t much care, their tastes aren’t that highly developed and tailored. Over time a Bud guy drinks his Bud and as it gets stale he just gets use to it and that is the way it is, just a little stale no big deal. Coors, Miller, and
A woman is like a fine bottle of wine. When it is first made it is ok to drink and has a particular flavor, aroma, color, feel on the palate, and complexity to the finished. It goes well with some foods and not so well with others clashing and conflicting if the palate is in tune with nature of the weave of the flavor of the meal. A good aging wine may be high in acid, high in tannins, have a bit too much sugar at the start and some flavors and aromas that are or seem a bit “off” when young. The color may seem a bit bold and the overall complexity may be a bit weak. A person looking for a good aging wine will understand all of the components that make a wine age well and know that all of the qualities in a wine will change in certain ways and blend and smooth and come together in a particular way to make a symphony in the nose and on the palate and to the eye given enough time. Most people have no idea about wine, or about women, and how they age and change, especially men, especially young men choosing mates for life. Most young men just drink the beer in front of them and ask if there is a “Bud” or a “Coors” in the cooler and if not, then they settle in with what they have and continue drinking. This is who they are and how they were raised in this country.
Most men have no idea what to look for in a woman or how men and women differ. The young guys are like novices trying to impress others at a huge wine tasting party with their supposed knowledge of the subject, too embarrassed and too ego-driven to ask for help or instructions and just blundering ahead. They stumble from one sampling to another with out rhyme or reason for approving or disapproving one over the other except the most superficial criteria: “it tastes good!” “It is sweet.” It is bright red.”…. Finally they may take a bottle or two home to try with some food to see if it is compatible because they have heard that is what they should do. The food they choose to taste test the wine with is their mama’s spaghetti with the sauce that she always burns and the noodles that are over cooked that has been sent back to the bachelor apartment in a Tupperware container then heated up in a filthy microwave served on a plate that has laid in the sink piled high with dishes for two days, still crusted with fried egg on the rim because it wasn’t quite cleaned with the paper towel and cold water. The wine is carefully decanted into a tall 12 oz tumbler that had held rum & coke, melted ice, and three cigarette butts just minutes before, was rinsed out in the sink and is still opaque from grease and scum . The glass has lipstick on the rim and greasy fingerprints, hopefully on the outside of the glass when the first of the wine is poured into the tumbler. The biting acid and the dry tannin of the too young wine on the first huge gulp are quickly blotted out with a large fork full of the over cooked twice heated pasta with the burnt sauce. The next gulp, which nearly polishes the glass off 12 oz. tumbler, is not quite such a bitter pill to swallow and brings a bit of a smile to the face of the lad and warrants a refill. Soon the bottle is gone, the spaghetti is gone. Friends are called, a beer is cracked open and the party is on. The next day when the empty wine bottle is found, the memory lingers, and sure enough that bottle is put on the list of the good ones. A found memory of the wine is fixed in the boys mind based on the overcooked pasta, burnt sauce that is comfort food of his moms and a beer party with friends after consuming the whole bottle of wine not yet mature: he has chosen his mate for life. This wine and his mom’s cooking a good match. He expects his lady to be like this bottle of wine and stay that way forever and ever until death does them part or whatever the expression they choose. He chooses her based on the initial indications and the warm fuzzies he has at an early age without real regards to much more because his palate and nose is not up to discriminating any different. He cracks a beer and gets back to being a guy.
Getting hitched is like buying several cases of that special wine. The guy settles on the wine he remembers as the one of his dreams he had that night with the over cooked pasta and he sets aside his case to age. These should be consumed throughout the course of the couple’s life together. If he is smart he will start by drinking a bottle of this wine often to remember the taste, the aroma, look at the color and enjoy the complexity and see how it is developing over time because the wine will change. The change is a factor of the grapes and the blending and the aging process and all the components that go into growing of the grapes and the harvesting then the treatment after the harvest and finally the brewing. No one can say for sure how it will age, so it can only be sampled to tell for sure. If the couple drinks from a bottle year by year they will grow together knowing the changes and realizing the complexity of the development as time goes on, but the guy has no idea of this because he drinks beer which is the same today and tomorrow and next year.
If the guy is normal he will just be swigging his beer and late in the relationship take a bottle out from the cellar, pop the cork and drink a glass. That will blow his mind when he tastes it because it will be so different than the glass he tried so many years before. The bottle is the same. The grapes in the bottle are the same, they came from the same vineyard, same vines, picked by the same people in the same year, brewed by the same people in the same way in the same place in the same barrels. The cork, the label, almost everything about the wine is the same as it was when it was purchased. What has changed is the way the components have come together in the wine to work in different way. Now the acid has mellowed to add a flavor of the grape leaves after a spring rain and the earth in a forest and the vines in a blackberry bramble after picking the sweet berries. The dry tannins have mellowed to contribute to these flavors and add to the aromas of bouquets of roses about to opens from young buds and lilies and some other field of wild flower you can’t quite place from memories in the far past. The sweetness that used to be there has become a richer background to these components and is just a hint to give more fullness and body and a lingering on the palate. There is the reminder of the oak barrels that once held the wine, but also a pleasant hickory nut taste finish to the oak. The color of the wine has changed from the bold bright red to a deeper denser red of velvet found on a gown of a Middle Age queen eating at the head table by candle light. When the wine is swirled in the glass it clings to the glass crawling up high releasing its bouquet into the air and showing its color thick and creamy. The taste lingers on the palette changing and developing leaving memories of love and life and warmth and outdoors afternoons with friends, evenings with lovers. The experience is so rich and complex it defies a single description. The aromas produces another symphony of experiences that transform from one fine delicate floral qualities, to the bolder fruit leaves and finally the spring time earthy grass and forest and the oaken barrels of the birth of the wine. Another taste is another world of experiences different from the first, but somehow similar. A fine bottle of wine. Ages well and continue to add complexity with age, all the ingredients that were there find there place and seem to work together better and better as time goes on. This is a woman over time. Many beautiful elements coming together to weave a whole woman that encompasses the nature of humanity at its best.
Faced with this incredible difference from the first glass consumed so long ago when wine was young and youth was the judge, a typical guy is afraid that he has either grabbed the wrong bottle of wine, bought the wrong case, the wine has gone “bad”, or something else is terribly wrong. Most guys will just put the bottle aside, hope that they have made a mistake in grabbing the wrong bottle and the right bottle is still on the shelf and they will get back to it later. They swear they will go back to the wine cellar and get another bottle, but they don’t do it. They don’t want to find out they are wrong. They are afraid of what they might find. They go on drinking their beer, living with their case of wine in the cellar still maturing. If and when they do check on their wine again and find that it is indeed very different and has been aging and changing in the bottle all along, getting even more complex and more aromatic and tantalizing, they may not know what to do. The man has not really changed and knows it and does not know what to do about it at this point in his life. His beer is the same and he wishes his wine was the same. It isn’t. His taste has changed a little bit, but not much. The guy is the same but his bride has grown up and matured. The two, the husband and wife, are essentially the same people they always were or so the guy thinks. Here they are in a relationship the guy is thinking. He thinks he is still married to the same bottle of wine he married back years ago and yet she has aged over the years and he has not kept up with that. When, after years of ignoring the cases of wine in the cellar he tastes it he realizes that the case in the basement and the wife in the bedroom have changed in ways he has never noticed and he has stayed the same as the beer he is drinking he is frozen in his beer drinking lounge chair and does not know what to do or who he is hitched too.
Guys marry women and women change over time. Women actually grow up, mature, and get wiser? Well, they change. Not all get wiser some turn to vinegar and we call them bitches. W
Women take all of the attributes of womanly charm and beauty they start out with at about 25 and they rearrange them to make more sense in their world, to answer more questions, to solve more problems, to live in the world more compatible (well, maybe not that last one, but maybe so). As women grow and change somehow, they sort of think or expect that men do to the same, but men don’t change much except out of necessity. A guy gets a heart attack and quits smoking. A guy has liver problems and quits drinking. Those are the changes a guy makes. If a couple does not stay in contact over a marriage they will always grow apart like the guy who stashes the case of wine in the basement for a decade or two and then samples a bottle expecting the acidic, tannic, over colored, youthful wine consumed with the over cooked pasta and burnt sauce so long ago in his youth to be just the same and it is not. Now the wine has changed subtly day by day to make it something quite different over time. If the guy had been taking a sip all along and enjoying the changes all along he could have enjoyed these changes or at least become aware of them a little at a time and been ready to do something about them.
It does need to be said. A few women do have their corks a bit lose. When they age they turn to vinegar. The older they get the sourer they get. Some get bitter and rancid. Some peak at twenty-five and are down hill after that. More often than not, the wine just gets better with age and the guys just don’t understand those changes as they occur.
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