Men Fast, Women Slow: The Morning Ritual

By Daniel Taverne

I’m so glad I’m a guy, and it’s because I’m a guy that I can literally get out of bed and out the door in the same amount of time it takes my wife just to blow dry her hair. That said, women have it pretty bad. There is so much social pressure put on them to look and act a certain way that they simply are not in a hurry to join the rat race in the morning. Additionally, they’re always complaining about things such as colors not matching, ugly shoes, hate to iron, mascara sucks and so on. To illustrate this, consider my wife’s morning routine;

My wife begins her morning by slapping at the snooze button at least 4 times before rolling out of bed. Note: She has the alarm set ½ hour early in anticipation of this. She immediately heads to the bathroom and showers until the water coming from the hot water tank is completely cold which takes about 45 minutes. Now it’s time to complain about how the chill in the air makes the hair on her legs grow out.

Then, she heads to the laundry room where she puts on some slacks and tosses a top in the drier to remove the wrinkles. Sooner or later, she gives the coffee pot 4 scoops of coffee after which she finds and dons a pair of socks. Now she has to dry her hair. This takes about 15 minutes, and she complains the whole time because our hair drier is defective and it quits working as soon as it gets hot.

The next thing she does is “puts on her face”. This process chews up another 20 minutes, during which I hear complaints of foundation not being the right color, clumpy mascara, and accidental eye pokes with the eye liner.

After her make-up is finally on, she has the nerve to ask me if I’m ready yet, and she hasn’t even put her shoes on! That said, if I have to go anywhere with her, I don’t start getting ready to go until she’s sliding her feet into them. This way, we’ll be ready simultaneously, and I’m les inclined to get impatient while waiting.

What if men had to meet such high expectations all the time, what would the world be like? I think men would still be faster at getting out the door because there would be a lot more machinery in the bathroom making the job of looking good a lot easier. For one, some guy would have created a mask that is preloaded with the right color make-up in the correct places that would perfectly apply the make-up when pressed against the face.

Or, some other guy would have created an electric buffer for applying eye shadow, foundation, lip stick, and also for polishing exposed skin to a high gloss sheen.
Another thing that some dude would have invented is a belt driven nail filer/grinder that could reduce nail time by 90%.

Something else we’d do differently is akin to ladies carrying purses full of make-up. If we guys carried it around, make-up would always be ready at a moment’s notice, it would be called tackle and we’d carry it around in multi-tiered water proof boxes. And, every little compartment would be occupied by something, whether or not we ever used it

Here’s another point: Do guys blow dry their hair? Let me tell you, ‘real’ men don’t! But if we all did, we’d have invented a nuclear hair dryer so powerful that it could dry anyone’s hair with one puff. If you think these ideas are not plausible, just think, some guy put a motor on a razor!

Finally, all too often, women hesitate to get moving in the morning because they are not at all thrilled with meeting the unrealistic standards, and ever changing demands made upon them by the whole of society. That said, If the situations were reversed and us guys had to meet those daily-crazy-expectations we’d still be a lot faster getting ready than women because rather than complain about everything we had to do, we’d have found a way to make getting ready a lot easier and much, much faster.