A world of difference between him and her

We have recently been moving house, and both of us have been discarding items we’ve hardly used in two years.

One of the tougher decisions, for me, was a birthday gift I had bought for my husband-to-be years before we even began courting.

It was a little Earth globe that lit up when plugged into a wall socket, and I joked that I was giving him the world. Cheesy, huh? 🙂

Maybe I read too much into it, but since both of us come from different cultures and backgrounds, I found a special significance in this present. Now that we’re married, we’ve effectively joined several continents together. We’ve made our own contribution to world peace!

So I was packing up some items in the bedroom and stumbled across this globe. It has been traveling valiantly with us through several moves, but now it was forlorn and gathering dust in a corner of the bookshelf. I sighed, wiping away the dust, and thinking that we really hadn’t used it in two years … my criterion for throwing away stuff.

“Shall we throw this?” I asked my husband, coming out to the living room. I was about to add with great benevolence, “I won’t be offended if you say yes.”

However, before these magnanimous words could be uttered, my husband squinted at the globe.

“Who gave that to us again?”

*  *  *

He very nearly escaped a global hit on the head. Just kidding, of course … 😉

To his credit, almost immediately he recognized his colossal mistake and protested that it must have been very important to him because he hadn’t thrown it away.

“After all these years, I could have thrown it away, but I didn’t!” he pointed out. “I did think about it, of course …” … he is devastatingly honest … “…but I knew there was a reason for keeping it!”

(I only recount this because, looking back on it, this truly is the difference between him and her. At least in my experience, we girls tend to place extreme importance on things that really don’t register as a blip on the radar for “them guys.” Neither of us is wrong, just different!)