Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth. Deal with it.

...and then I was reading the forums at Channel News Asia. The topics there are so shallow, I don't know why i'm even bothering. I think it's a strange human desire to feel revolted sometimes. That explains our fascination with horror and violence.

I can’t remember exactly what the conversation was, but I know it’s something to do with divorce rates in Singapore. In a nutshell, our wise fellow columnists came up with the Grand Theory explaining the high divorce rates in Singapore. Women are getting more independent. And the Grand Solution? Get women to stay at home and be more dependent on their husbands.

Utter bollocks.

But that’s just my opinion.

Flash back now to one year ago: I remembered that my ex-girlfriend was always telling me that modern Singapore girls are different. According to her they’re now a new species of Singaporeans and dictate what they want in their lives. Money, lifestyle, boyfriend…if you’re not up the mark, boom, out you go. (That, obviously, would include me, but hey, at least I got short listed before I was given the boot!) She too blames independence (actually exalted would be a word she would have used) for women to be more selective about their choice of men, hence leading to high divorce rates.

Utter bollocks.

She wouldn’t be too pleased to hear my remark.

And then there are books, magazines, articles and journals that theorise that men and women think so differently, they might as well be from different planets.

If you ask me, that belief forms the basis for a fantastic marketing engine. But that’s another story.

Before we tackle this problem, let’s see what “independence” really mean. And please, in this article, “independence” means emotional independence. So spare me your ideas of Reformasi and other notions of nationalism.

The role of the humans in medieval times was simple. Man hunts and kill, women cooks and collects. Smashing. That makes perfect sense, because physiologically it’d make more sense for testosterone charged man to chase a woolly mammoth and the more alert and environmentally sensitive woman to collect food and care for everything else the man can’t do on his meat hunt expeditions.

Thus a “relationship” was formed. In modern terms, this would be a “effective cooperation resulting in a synergy for a beneficial win-win partnership”. Hence, “independence” never existed even in ancient times.

What is independence really? According to Maslow’s Humanistic Psychology, human’s require a set of needs and peak experiences in order to feel satisfied. Fancy shmuck aside, desire to be loved and need for social dependence are rudimentary basics for human existence. Even in science, humans are not meant to be independent.

It gets better when you look at it in a religious point of view. The Testaments of Jewish, Christian, Catholic and Muslim faiths point out that Man and Woman must live together as one component. (And it is, by the way, Adam and Eve… not Adam and Steve.)

So why are there people still thinking that women crave independence? Women, like men, want to make the most and excel in their lives. They want to material comforts and build happy homes for them and their families… like men. So men and women both have the ideals and goals.

In sometime in their lives, they may want to be free of family bond… but the whole reason for that is to build different formats of relationships.

Let’s face it. Humans are social creatures. Put two together in a car and they’ll start to interact with each other in more ways than you can think.

Everyone is in a mission to better their lives, be it men or women. Everyone wants a better partner for themselves. So please. Women, like men, are mere mortals. Not Mars, Not Venus. From Earth. Deal with it.