That thing where men can't find things...

[Lakesfun]

I'm on holiday with newish BF. I.e. our things and finances are comletely seperate, if his stuff is lost it's entirely his problem, there's no "we" to replace it.

He has a fancy sports watch, which is important to him. He's been saying for two days that he took it off in the car and it's disappeared. He's been to look several times and getting increasingly bothered by it.

I have left him to it, thinking I'll have a look when I'm next in the car, which was this morning. It was literally the first thing I saw when I opened the door, in the passenger footwell. Found in less than a second.

There was no benefit to him in it being missing, and he definitely cared about it. What is it that makes them "all" so useless with this stuff?

You would think that in the last tens/hundreds of thousands of years since we lived in caves, we would not only learn to talk and invent things, but that having a penis wouldn’t be a bar to finding things

In our house I trade. ‘Ok, so you’ve looked in x, y and z places, right l’ll look too and if I find it you can do ‘x’ (Usually do some chore on my behalf) for not doing a proper job and leaving it to me. This usually results in him having ‘one last check’ and actually finding it. If not, I get the thing I wanted.

Like you would teach a child?

< snorts >

Would any man admit to that though?

That's absolutely not true. I have worked with numerous men who used strategic incompetence as a career development tool. Sad thing is it works too.

My husband is prone to this, I got utterly sick of it. Always losing his phone , earbuds and keys and asking me where they were, so I said I’m not helping uou anymore. It was daily.

i now sit there and go nope, not helping, i get the can you at least call my phone then, i say nope use your other phone, call it yourself. I simply do not get involved at all. Or use your phone to make a sound on your earbuds, I’m not getting involved.

it infuriates me and I don’t understand how he misplaces his stuff so much, sine I stopped the instances have reduced right down though.

Actually, one of my pet peeves is how often men at work seem to expect everyone else (women) to be the repository of all knowledge and to "find" things for them....

"Do you have that logo" [that was sent round to everyone at the point at which it was created and/or that is available via the intranet]
"Can someone send me that sales deck" [that they've had access to from day 1]
"Can you Mary organise the online collection for Paul's leaving because I don't know how to do it?"

blah blah blah.

Presumably because they know they can. Of course it’s pathetic.

If they asked other men to help then I have no issue.

I do know a ‘boy mum’ who insists on running round after every man they know and it’s ridiculous.

If someone can’t find something (after asking if someone else knows where it is) then they have to get on with it.

I’m shit at finding things - if I lose something then I have to deal with that accordingly.

My husband and boys do this 😂 girls, absolutely fine

My DH can (and frequently does) look directly into a cupboard, move things around looking, and then confidently declare that we don’t have any xyz (eg ketchup) - and I look at the same cupboard and there it is RIGHT THERE. This all over the house - raincoats, glasses, everything.

Bodes well for future partners

I have the cure for this ! In my house I will find the thing that DH or DC have lost but when I find it I am allowed to bump them gently on the head with it, saying ‘thickie, thickie, thickie'

I don’t get asked much…..

I have an even easier cure - ‘I don’t know where it is - find it yourself’ 😬

Ah, but was he just looking around the driver's seat?
You've approached from a different angle and it was just there?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1041608008001246

Actually there's lots of evidence that women are genuinely better at finding things (and not just round the house where they might put more effort in). Lots of theories as to why this is (eg women evolved to be gatherers so are good at spotting things, from having to spot berries on a bush, although I think that's been largely debunked).

How did men engineer and design all this amazing ‘stuff’ but can’t find where the sellotape is kept.
I saw a great segment from King of Queen once where the wife is asking the husband…
What if I died in the night, how would you find the scissors?
Then she added…
I am tired of being a tour guide in my own home.
A lovely very single guy did some decorating for us last year and he told me…
Petula all this effort you put in choosing carpets and cabinets and all this stuff.
Men are basically happy to just live in one room with a pile with all their shit in the middle of the floor and to just dive in when they need something.
An education.

This week
<opens the fridge> “where’s the cucumber?”
middle shelf. The shelf that has nothing else on it BUT a cucumber

But that makes no sense in the situation does it? That’s the point sometimes it does just seem like Will incompetence but when it’s actually making life difficult for them, it makes no sense that they would do that. He didn’t have the watch for all that time it was fretting so I very much doubt that this was an intentional lie to get someone else to do the work

But why do you all put up with it (and quite indulgently in some cases?)

Well of course we should continue to do it then.🙄

We may be ‘better’ at it but that doesn’t mean possession of a penis makes it impossible to find things.

How do you think men who live alone manage?

A stereotype.

One man’s laziness shouldn’t mean all men are lazy.

When I worked in M&S for a summer as a student, our first training day,
we were told the menswear, was always at the front of the store as men
will not walk through to look for what they need
Store layouts are different now but that information stuck with me at 18.

My mum also said, men (my dad) will not lift anything to look underneath.
So when his clothes and shorts were laundered, she would lay them on
his bed, he put them away, no excuse for not knowing where anything was.
She would torment him too with car keys, lay a newspaper over them knowing
he wouldn’t even raise it to look.
We watched Grumpy Old Men (or was it Women?) showing this phenomenon.
such fun
it was helpful for me, married with children, the unremitting chorus of Mum,
wifey, where is my.. or even, where have you moved…
it’s a man thing, they all do it
especially if you are sitting down, on the phone, in the bath, happily relaxing…

There is actually an evolutionary basis for this:
There is a scientific reality that men and women naturally process visual information differently. When men are actively searching for an object, they tend to use laser-focused, "binocular" vision. This causes a form of tunnel vision where they can literally overlook stationary objects in plain sight.

The reason this happens comes down to a mix of brain structure and evolutionary biology:

• Focused vs. Peripheral Vision: Studies show that women often have a wider field of peripheral vision, allowing them to take in a broader picture at a glance. Men are generally wired for focused, long-distance vision and depth perception, but their brains can "irise-out" the surrounding area when they are hunting for a specific item.
• Motion Detection: Evolutionary theories suggest male vision is highly tuned to detect rapid movement which makes stationary objects blend into their background. Conversely, women's historical roles required identifying stationary, color-coded objects, leading to better recall of object locations and details.
• Single-Tasking the Brain: Research in indicates that when concentrating, men tend to focus brain activity into one specific area, while women use their brains more diversely. This single-minded focus contributes to the phenomenon known as "attentional blink," where a person misses things right under their nose because their brain is not switching between visual tasks.

we are just wired differently. Not all men have the problem of not seeing stuff in front of them when looking and some women face the problem but generally, it is a thing.

much like many other forms of brain processing that is seen more in one sex than another

I play this with my ds17. It goes like this.

Ds " mum, I can't find my swimming pass"
Me " it's on the sofa"
Ds "no, I've looked and it isn't"
Me "look again"
Ds "it definitely isn't there"
Me "check under the cushions"
Pause
Ds "it's not there. I've lost it. I'm going to be late"

Me, walks to sofa, removes cushions, pulls out swimming pass. Ds blushes 😁 His df is the same. I think it's genetic

What on earth are you talking about? Nowhere did I say women should do it.