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?

I don't think anyone's suggesting that men are incapable of finding things or that women being (on average) better at it means they ought to do it, any more than the fact that men are (on average) stronger would mean that no women should ever pick anything up.

It is simply interesting (to people who find evolution interesting) that this is an area where there are clear sex differences.

It’s one thing to find it interesting on an evolutionary level but quite another to use it to excuse laziness.

Sure, but nobody has done this as far as I can see.

It’s just adding more weight to the ‘oh bless them - men, eh!’ attitude on the thread.

I think you may be reading that in.

Plenty of people on this thread will excuse the laziness in the male members of the family by any means necessary. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

I don’t know whether being needed is the motivation behind some of it. I just think this indulgent attitude to men and boys does nobody any favours.

The being accused of having moved, tidied up or thrown away specific important documents makes me rage.
Of course I’d do that.
Its deliberate incompetence, added to zero organisation and indolence

I think it’s similar to the “have we got any …..?” Question they ask.
Eg “have we got any cheese?” As though I have a permanent stock list in my brain of everything that’s in the fridge on a minute by minute basis!

I can tell you how my husband copes. If he can’t find something within what he considers a reasonable timeframe he will use an alternative, move on to something else and forget about it on the basis that it will turn up eventually, or in extreme cases just buy another one.

Or one hundred as he did when he couldn’t find a pencil.

The availability of same or next day delivery has a lot to answer for.

Could just be that he looked from one side not expecting it to be in the other.

Or maybe the light was different sun vs cloud or the angle at which it was viewed the light caught it better.

Or maybe it was under the seat and moved forward under braking, or rolled over and became more visible.

Some peoples eyes are just better at discriminating things against particular backgrounds, to some people they stand out well, others not so well. For example people genetically have different receptors to colour in their retinas. There are loads of eye tests where people view patterns of colours differently.

Or maybe one of a hundred different things.

No need to make a big psychological men vs. women thing out of it. It's more about people in general and maybe their approach to searching as well as physical constraints. Unless of course you want your partner to act in exactly the same way when you make an obvious screw up about something you care about.

It's not rocket science though, is it? OP says he's been out to the car several times to look for it - yet he hasn't even done the most basic step of checking any of the other seats other than the one he was sitting in? It's not like she found it in the garden.

But look at the posts on this thread about ‘well women are just better at it’ and ‘man look’. It becomes a man v women thing

It's not just men. My wife does this CONSTANTLY. Most recent was she was asking where the grass seed was, I said it was in the shed. She opens the door and immediately says she can't find it because she doesn't know what it looks like 🤦🏻....it's a box with 'grass seed' on it?! I peeked around the door and immediately located it. Honestly, it's infuriating!

I read once it's because men who were hunter/gatherers were supposed to scan the horizon for potential threats. Women are supposed to look more closely for more immediate threats to their offspring.

Whatever, I used to 'hide' chocolate and nice cheese from my ex husband in the fridge by cunningly placing it out of sight (at the back of the shelf). He NEVER found it 😌😜

Well, my ex's mother was definitely not like that - at all.

But he still couldn't find things or see things that were right in front of him. He once asked me where his brown shoes were, and I laughed, thinking he was kidding on - nope, he was perfectly serious. He was looking straight at them - they were on the floor right in front of him, nothing else round about them. Brown shoes - right there!

But the thing is - they're not lost. They're right there - in plain sight!

H and I overheard a female supermarket assistant say to her male colleague “ You need your lady eyes” as he was looking for something. We use that term all the time now and it is true.

‘Lady eyes’? WTF? Pathetic.

I just reply
"No idea, it will be where you left it"

This is about " brain borrowing" where they would rather you used yours
Ditto
Whats the time? look at your fucking phone
Whats for dinner -check the bloody board
What,where, why , when

My reply is always " no idea"

It’s lighthearted, I think you’re taking this thread too seriously tbh

In our house when someone cant find something, i say does it need a "mummy look" .
If i lose something I'm fucked because im the only one that properly looks for things!

If DH asks me if we have got a certain food item, and we are not in the kitchen, my answer is always, "I cant see from here."

Weaponised incompetence. My mum does this when she can't be bothered to do her own admin stuff and rather than ask, she plays up to being older and unsure how to use the websites properly.

Doesn't stop her sending me conspiracy stories over Whatsapp though.

Why? Because I don’t find the weird parent/child dynamic funny?