What an ass hole. I would of said, that damn motorcycle want start.

I've had a few women act the same way he acted quite a few times. It's not a gender thing. It is a communication thing. Talking is not necessarily communication.

Oh man. Yeah. If I've got something like that on my mind, I keep working on it in my head. It's really difficult to turn off. There's a machine that broke at an old job of mine. Like 6 jobs ago. It still bugs me that I couldn't fix it and I still wonder what the hell I missed. The life of a tinkerer sounds fun until you run into a problem like that.

Well we men are pretty simple, and usually, that is about as complex as our emotional landscape is. I don't think this means that women overthink more necessarily (it certainly doesn't suggest that men never do), but it does mean women are usually far more concerned with communication and the state of the relationship on a realtime basis and far more aware of connections.

I heard someone (some fairly famous self-help guru, can't remember who) explain the difference this way. We men have a mental box for every topic and issue. When we discuss something, we take out that one box, open it up, look inside, and then put it away and we're done. We are very careful when putting the box away, that it doesn't accidentally touch any other box.

We also have a favorite box, and it's empty. We often open this box and gaze into it for long periods of time. Women don't have an empty box, so imagine all sorts of things about what we're thinking or feeling when we have this box out. Often, it's literally nothing but the sound of one hand clapping; we're not thinking about or feeling ANYTHING. This is the fabled man-cave, where we go to just get away from life and catch our breath.

Women on the other hand have wires connecting all the boxes in their head, constantly buzzing with interconnections. So very often they are talking about box 247, mixed with feelings from box 492, with comparisons to 994 and 326 -- but it's really box 882 that is the key to the whole thing. This is why when the women in my life start talking to me about a particular topic I seldom believe that this is what it is really about. Sometimes, at all. I always say to myself, "what's this REALLY about?", particularly if the topic came up out of nowhere or seems out of phase with their emotional state. The canonical example might be taking up offense about something you just [failed to] do when the REAL problem is that it's at the end of some complex causal chain connected to something you [failed to] do three weeks ago and that's been bugging her ever since but she just isn't aware of anything but the continuum of emotion that extends from that event through others to the present, and the similarity to what she's ostensibly talking about is almost entirely a very general emotional one (she was super annoyed then, she's mildly annoyed now, but she's connecting her super annoyance with what just happened).

The problem is, no man has ever figured out the formula for sorting this out. It's like the old Gary Larsen cartoon with a couple of dog scientists in lab coats trying to understand the Doorknob Principle. The key to what women want in any given moment is simply beyond our ken much of the time, and even if we knew where the key was, we aren't equipped with the mental and emotional equipment to actually pick it up and use it.

I generally consider myself lucky if I can just get through a given day without pressing the wrong buttons in my relationship. Your mileage may vary. Mine does too, on different days. I have literally (from my point of view and awareness, anyway) done the exact same things in the exact same ways on two different days and gotten completely different results. Up to and including being demonized and hated on one time, and lauded as the Perfect Man the other.

This is in no way to suggest that my wife is irrational, crazy, or flighty. If she were any of those things it would just be whole other levels of mayhem on top of what I'm talking about. That would have described my FIRST marriage.

From a man's point of view, interacting with women produces intermittently random outcomes. And it isn't just one's spouse. For example we visited my daughter last week. When she was a child, we were very close, and things just flowed, and I was on the typical Daddy pedestal. When she hit puberty, some other being took up residence in her head and there followed a 30 year period of floating resentment in which she was bitterly disappointed in me for reasons she couldn't articulate. Throughout this period she wanted vague but urgent things from me -- in the form of inappropriate financial assistance, something she referred to as "being there", as if I were hiding from her, and some other stuff pretty much involving rubber-stamping the brilliance of every idea that entered her head and never giving her fatherly advice of any kind, however restrained and appropriate and even asked-for it might be, unless that advice was what she planned to do in the first place.

I never had this difficulty relating to my late son, and when he passed, it felt all the worse because in some ways I had already lost my daughter years before.

Now suddenly on this trip the little girl I used to know seemed to push the three-headed alien out of her skull and she was warm to me, we had some quality time together, and she nearly brought me to tears by thanking me for how I handled the divorce from her mother, my 1st wife, and how many men would have just left her and her brother with the mother and taken off instead of becoming a single parent with sole custody. She actually recognized that I made the right choice for once, that it cost me something, and she actually appreciated it.

There was a time in my life when I would have spent hours scratching my head over WTF happened over the past three decades, what brought it on, and what fixed it. These days I just accept the current situation and work with it the best that I can, and let go of the past and don't worry about the future. Which, come to it, is pretty good advice in general, I suppose.

Ladies, there are times when we men are just exhausted by you, truth be told. And certainly times when we are utterly baffled by you. Handle us with care, as we are emotional simpletons by comparison. In some ways, not as tough, more easily hurt. And we're socialized not to show it. Because that wouldn't be manly. Maybe that socialization is why our boxes aren't wired together; we couldn't handle the cascade of feeling from that. We can barely handle how much we love and care about the women in our lives as it is.

The first thing I would need to check is the kill switch. Does it turn over? If not, it could be a flat battery.

He really should look at this problem systematically and if he can't do it himself, call out his favoured recovery service.....

I think there are communication issues. Would it have been helpful had he mentioned his motorcycle issues.

That is not overthinking. It's a woman reading the verbal and non-verbal signals of her partner. Her partner is the one who is at fault; he seemed to be deliberately not communicating or responding to her obvious attempts to establish a connection with him. Frankly, I think he was being an azzhole. And, given that this type of behaviour is quite often indicative of trouble in the relationship, I think she was right to be concerned.

A good way to avoid is to communicate positively. State your needs clearly.

Her: "I need more attention tonight, as I am feeling lonely."

Him: "I am preoccupied by finding a method to repair the motorcycle."

Either statement would easily move into a usefull communication.

Anyone, man or woman, can get caught up in emotional thinking like this, the best way to avoid it is to get out of your own head.

This is totally true, it happened to me all the time, I can become so focus onsomething that I am trying to solve that I got accused of being upset at a women all the time.

Guys, don't answer..... it's a trap !!!!!! ?????

Disconnected. A bad relationship at best

Lol

Men's and women's brains are different and they work differently. It isn't sexism. It is neuroscience. In a good relationship they complement each other. I've never been in a "good" relatonship.

Sometimes, it really is that simple.

Silly ... just silly.

Hahahahahahahaa....

No.

I think women can have a tendency to overthink things and men can have a tendency to be loners. A good man would let her in on what’s going on. A good woman would understand that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Not all women. Some of us really just don't give a fuck. Talk, don't talk. Whatever.
I'll ask once. That's your only opening. Work it out yourself.

Lol! Sums up my last relationship perfectly.

And he couldn't just tell her what the problem was? What sort of relationship is that? No one is mind-reader.

If I had a nickel for every time I was told I overthink things, well let's just say, I would be a very rich woman right now. We are hard wired differently, we all know this. Some women are more deep thinkers than others. Just like there are men that overthink things too. But generally speaking... if we care, we will overthink into things more so than other times. That is just my humble opinion. I can't speak for all women.

See, this is why I live alone.