Whenever I think about the differences between men and women, I think of waffles and spaghetti. Why? Because of a class I attended several years ago that has always stuck with me.
This class was based on a book called “Men Are Like Waffles—Women Are Like Spaghetti.” I have never actually read the book but the concepts taught in this class were life-changing for me.
Men are like waffles because they put things into boxes. There is a separate box for every area of their lives. Think of a waffle and picture all those little squares. Men compartmentalize things. Work fits into one box. Fishing into another box, parenting into another and the list goes on.
The thing about these boxes is they don’t intersect. When a man is fishing, he is enjoying that and usually doesn’t think about other things.
Now women, well we are like spaghetti because everything intersects. Think of a heaping plate of noodles. They are all mixed up and touching one another. We connect various areas in our lives to other areas. We don’t separate things. We tend to look at what is happening in one area of our life as something that impacts other areas.
We can focus on the huge pile of laundry, the note we have to write to our child’s gym teacher, what we are going to fix for dinner later on and the phone call we need to place to a friend.
When I really got a grasp of this concept, it changed the way I saw my husband. Instead of seeing him as someone who doesn’t connect, I saw he just deals with things differently. It helped me understand myself better as well.
If you are trying to figure your husband out, maybe this book would help. We aren’t made the same way so we can’t expect our husbands to think of things the way we do. After all, they are waffles and we are spaghetti.
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