Asking for 'permission'

It's been a long while since I've written a piece for men explaining women's behaviour but after a conversation in the office this week it occurred to me that after all the years experience we've had dealing with the opposite sex, we're all still clueless on how to deal with each other.

This particular mystery came up in the form of a discussion on asking permission to go out.

One of our male members took the view that if he wanted to go out with his friends then he was going to tell his girlfriend what he was doing and she would just have to deal with it. His theory being that he should be free to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and that he didn't need permission from his girlfriend to see his friends.

Plain and simple logic in theory but there's nothing plain and simple about the way us women think (well, not to you men anyway, even though it all makes perfect sense to us) so it's no surprise that myself and another female colleague looked at him as if he had two heads. How has a fully grown man not yet worked out that it's not what you ask but how you ask it?

Almost any women out there will tell you the same thing.

If the man they are in a committed relation with came up to them and announced they were off out on a boys night the hackles would shoot up faster than you could get the sentence out. Not because they are going out but because they told you instead of asked.

I know to a man that seems like a silly distinction and in order to maintain your macho feelings you need to exert your independence, but again it's not about WHAT you do but HOW you do it.

Asking permission from us isn't really asking permission at all, simply the appearance of asking permission, or, to put it another way ... asking with the presumption that our answer is going to be yes.

If you have a half decent woman, she wouldn't dream of saying no but the very fact that you put your request in the form of a question, instead of a statement, makes all the difference to the situation. A simple: 'Baby I'm going to go out with the boys tonight if you don't mind' should not only get you what you want but earn you brownie points for being so thoughtful.

Those four little words tacked onto the end of the sentence tells us that you care about how we feel about what you're doing and nine times out of 10 break down any resistance you might encounter. While to you telling us you're going out is simply telling us you're going out, to a woman being told, rather than asked, means that our opinion is irrelevant and that we're not important enough to you to take into consideration.

At the end of the day, we both know that you're going to go out for that boys' night out; we just like to pretend that you're taking our feelings into consideration in the process. It sounds complicated but it really is simple.