AMY KIRK: Understanding the way a woman thinks

• Amy Kirk

Amy Kirk

Talk about it

Women have a reputation for forgetting where they left their purse or where they set down their car keys or cell phone. And according to men, women also have a reputation for bringing up stuff from the past.

To understand why this happens, think of the common junk drawer. What’s in a woman’s mind is similar to the things that are in a junk drawer — lots of miscellanea, anything that needs fixing, and general clutter that gets shuffled around in a drawer. It’s a designated spot where stuff is stored that isn’t necessarily ready to be thrown out yet or you don’t know what else to do with it. Regardless of what gets thrown in a junk drawer, it’s usually saved for a long period of time.

Practically everything in a junk drawer has a purpose and might come in handy, but for some of those things you’re just not sure what.

A woman’s mind is like a catch-all for things that need to be dealt with at some point and information she doesn’t necessarily need to incorporate right away but could come in handy later. Her mental junk drawer is where a lot of things she picks up in conversations and experiences are stored for future reference or getting back to later.

Junk drawers typically hold a lot of little stuff so it’s oftentimes hard to find a specific item. Once something gets tossed into a woman’s mental junk drawer it gets mixed in with all the other little things shuffling around in her mind. This is why a woman struggles at times with remembering where she put down her personal items. When dealing with several other things in her mental junk drawer something is bound to be forgotten and it’s usually a purse, keys or cell phone because they’re not stuck in her head like thoughts are.

As can be found in your average junk drawer, so too in every woman’s mind there will always be something in there that baffles you. Something you’re not sure why it’s been saved or what you’re supposed to do with it but are afraid to disregard it because you hope it will make sense later.

Women’s favorite mental junk drawer items are things that need fixed or worked on. We’ll call them “issues” — a relationship problem that a woman feels didn’t get resolved so she puts it in her mental junk drawer to fix another time. When a woman stumbles upon this kind of stuff she tries to discuss it with her husband but it usually just confuses him and she gets mad. He feels sandbagged because it’s usually something that happened in the past — because he put it there, forgot about it or disregarded it and moved on.

A woman never discards any relationship issue until she feels it’s been resolved. If she gets frustrated trying to fix it or the issue gets dropped, it goes back into her mental junk drawer for safekeeping until another day. Anytime something triggers the issue, she digs it back out again and tries to work on it some more until she’s confident it’s been “fixed.”

So if you don’t want to have to keep dealing with the same junk, then don’t let it get put back into the junk drawer.

Amy Kirk and her husband raise their two kids on a fourth-generation cow/calf operation near Pringle. She blogs at ranchwifeslant.areavoices.com.

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