Men don't care what women think of them.

I know this sounds insulting -- to men and women alike -- and it is admittedly a blanket kind of assertion. There are certainly exceptions; we all know good men who are very attentive to the needs and desires and moods of their mates.

On the whole, though, it's been my experience that most men are not particularly concerned with how they are perceived by women, including women they are married to, dating, or just trying to get into bed. And, in fact, men's concerns about women's perceptions of them -- and judgments of them -- probably decrease in order of the categories I just listed.

When a man is trying to get a woman to have sex with him, he is at his most conscious about his looks, his behavior, his bearing -- and his treatment of her. When he's dating a woman, he's still alert to all this, but as the dating becomes regular, he often tends to take her for granted: if she disapproves of his choice of clothes, or his personal habits, or his friends, or his pasttimes -- ah, she'll come around. And once he's married, his regard for his wife's opinion of him falls to an all-time low. I'm me, she's her, we're different people, but she knew that when she married me. Get used to it.

BUT . . . there is one major area in which men continually pay attention to how the women in their lives look at them. Any ideas? Here's a hint: it's not a very admirable area. It's guilt. Getting in trouble. When a man senses that his woman knows that he's done wrong -- fooling around, drinking too much, gambling, etc. -- he goes out and buys flowers and brings them home and, maybe tearfully, begs forgiveness. Unfortunately, it's usually not to make her think better of him: it's to get back into her good graces and make the bad moment go away. When married men behave extraordinarily well, it's too often the case that they just want to re-establish the status quo.

Why is this? I think men -- being one myself -- are, on the level of emotion and truth and relationships, simple creatures. Like dogs who sense they've done wrong, they cower and whimper and seek to just get things back to the way they were -- even if they don't quite grasp why what they've done is "all that bad". Is this a cynical, and too simplistic, view of the male species? Probably. But it's got some truth in it, too. Just ask any woman you know. And if you're a woman and you're not nodding in agreement, you're a lucky gal!