Who’s the man?

Cracked open the new bottle of a very fine single malt that I had bought off the reserve stock of a Scottish distillery a couple of months ago. I had been saving it for a special day, and after all your best friend making his engagement announcement would qualify as such an occasion. After a drink or two, out came the turntable with the Frank Sinatra L.P.’s that I had inherited from my uncle and the Cubans that someone had picked up at the duty free. And while the mood was set and everyone wanted to talk about the wedding that was to be, the conversation abruptly moved to the subject of the role of men and women in the household. 

“She’s the man of the house”, someone exclaimed, referring to a friend of mine who had been married for 4 years now. And while some people were amused to see how she had been the dominant one in the relationship and continued the conversation to talk about how decision making was a “man” thing, I wondered if it was really the men of the household who have been making decisions all this while.

The truth is that the notion of the man being the decision maker of the household is so old that instead of recognising that a woman too can be the one to call the shots, a woman who openly determines what to do is called the dominant one and the “man” of the family. But if the same woman influences the decision of the “man” by behind the scene tactics where the man is lead to believe that the decision was actually his, he remains the “man” and the woman remains the “woman”. In either case it was the will of the woman which was being done, in the first case she was open about it and in the second she was the perfect politician.

So the question really is that do you want love or politics in your relationship? If it is politics that you seek, “be the man”; and if it is love that you want then “let the woman be the man!”