Getting Off on the Wrong Track

When I was a kid, I thought my dad was the only man on earth who was afraid to ask for directions.

No matter how lost we were, no matter how much my mother urged, “Just pull over and ask for directions,” he'd always refuse.

“I know where I'm going,” he'd insist angrily, cursing under his breath.

As I grew older, I began to notice a similar pattern with my boyfriends; they too were afraid to ask for directions.
“But why don't you want to ask for directions?” I'd ask.

“Because I know I can find it. See, it's just around that corner,” my boyfriend would say, turning off on to some dirt road and inevitably running into a dead-end.

Then, he'd insist on taking another look at the map for the hundredth time. I never understood that, since if you don't know where you are, then how can you figure out where you're going?

As a woman, my philosophy has always been to just ask somebody for directions the moment I realize I'm lost. I'd much rather look like a fool to a stranger than to drive around, cold, tired, hungry and anxious to use the bathroom.
Any boyfriend I've ever had has always insisted he has good reasons for not asking for directions; he knows where he's going and any minute he's going to get there and besides you can never trust anyone on the street anyway.

“But the truth is that it's male pride,” a male friend once confided in me. “We don't want anyone to know that we don't know where we're going. It's an act of weakness.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “Why should a man care if someone else - a complete stranger—knows that he's completely lost?”

My friend didn't have an answer. But as I thought about it, this is what I came up with: Men are essentially hunters and women are nesters. Back in cave-man days, women cared for the kids at home and gathered vegetables and fruits while the men would go out to hunt.

Since the animal was in hiding, it was the man's job to find it; i.e. to know how to read tracks in the dirt, using trees and rocks, etc for landmarks. It was the man's job to know where he was going. And many men still think it's their job to know where they're going. That's why the equivalent of a modern man asking for directions while driving around lost in the city would be almost the same thing as a cave-man asking another cave-man, “Where's the animal?”—which would have been a humiliating and unthinkable thing to do.

In cave-man days, man's ability to stay lost for days on end was considered part of the job. Some men, it seems, actually like getting lost. It gives them a chance to stake out new territory. And many men, can in fact, be quite adept at covering up the fact that they're lost. Just look at Christopher Columbus who set out for the West Indies, accidentally discovered America and covered up his mistake by calling the local people, “Indians.”

But because we live in the modern world these days and most men don't have the luxury of being absent from their jobs for weeks or months at a time, eventually the modern man has to pull over to ask for directions. Or, his wife has to ask for him.

So, when I was a kid and my dad was driving around lost for hours, eventually he'd pull up at a stoplight at which point my mother would surreptitiously lean out the window and ask for directions. Then, she'd whisper them into my dad's ear and five minutes later we'd get to where we were going.

Then my dad would say, proudly, “You see, I told you I could get us there!”

(Readers can e-mail Lisa at lisal@thegrid.net.)