"As you hang up the phone after talking to your girlfriend, who has gone from being super nice to super naughty and back to super nice in a matter of 10 minutes, you can't help but ask yourself who this three-headed monster you're dating really is.
One minute she's telling you how happy you make her, the next she's telling you how happy she is when you're away from her. You thought you were dating one girl, but with her mood swings, you might as well be dating four."
Moods? What moods? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we women. We leave you guys blinking and scratching your heads. Wondering what exactly it was you said, or maybe you didn't pick up on something she said. What do you do? Do you give her space now and leave her alone, or do you try to talk more? OH <insert expletive here>!
Yeah well, excuse me. But you guys tend to have them as well. We women just seem more prone to them. Why? Are we just innately born drama queens? Are we programmed to turn on and off at apparently random moments?
As a woman, and one who tends to be pretty sensitive, I can tell you this: I feel like slapping myself just as much as you'd like to (except that it would be then called female abuse so you keep your hands to yourself) when I lose my cool.
I've always had guy (not gay, read: male) buddies. As such, I may commiserate with you dudes a bit more than more feminist attitudes would warrant. (And yeah, I totally salute the awesome dudes in my life who put up with my moods. I tell you, this is a feat deserving the Nobel Peace prize.) And I've had that tomboy phase when growing up, so that I've been known to look at the female species more as a cat-fight enterprise. I wasn't into the OOH I GOT A BOYFRIEND AND LIKE HE'S THE FOOTBALL CAPTAIN, AND LIKE THEN I GOT NAILPOLISH LIKE THIS COLOUR AND BLAH BLEE BLOO BLEH type of stuff. No offense to those of you who might be or may have.
Then I grew up some more. I bloomed out of my tomboy shell and entered the world of femininity. Not that it happened suddenly. It started occurring to me belatedly. I'd have other girls asking me how I did this or that. Where I got this. What do I do with my eyes. I was startled sometimes. I turned the shade of strawberries at other times. And I slowly became an inductee to the world of moods.
While I am a self professed sensitive creature of this world, I believe in logic. Because I was a biology student for the majority of my life, things such as sex and how the body works really didn't drop on my head like an atomic bomb. It's nature.
As I've witnessed often, a guy's typical reaction to a woman spazzing out with her moods is, "That time of the month huh?" Which usually irritates us to no end. What many of us don't realize is that it usually IS because of that time of the month. While this topic might weird some of you out, it's fact.
A week or two before a woman gets her period, she's going to experience what's known as PMS. Yes, pre menstrual syndrome, don't go screaming out of the door. And it's in this phase of the menstrual cycle that the hormones are doing weird things. If I explain it elaborately, you will fall asleep. Please refrain from stating that you already have. So I shall explain it simply.
Remember, the whole purpose of the reproductive cycle is to reproduce. Men produce sperm. Women produce eggs. ♀Egg + ♂Sperm = reproduction .
So, every month an egg is prepared for take-off. The body gets all happy thinking "Yay, we're doing cool things and makin' babies, yo". Because that's how our bodies are programmed, to reproduce means you're thriving like a fit species ought to. The happy hormones are doing their thing.
Then the egg doesn't get fertilized. Dun dun dun. Body gets sad. Now body has to prepare a funeral for the egg, and the hormones are now sunk in a dismal abyss. No more happy hormones. Hence PMS.
Oh, yeah. Feel free to use this story for when you have kids of your own.
So, guys, while you so totally didn't want to read all this information that might put you off the whole idea that a woman's body might be sexy, that sexiness is what comes with the moods. No moods, no boobs. (Wow, did I really say that?)
However, us women also need to realize that we can't just use PMS as an excuse. I may be watching a movie and then all of a sudden I get really choked up by some scene. And I look at myself and wonder what the hell is wrong with you, girl? Then it clicks. Oh damn, I need to lock myself in a closet or hide under the bed. IQ BOMB is here!
Oh, and the crying. You guys just hate the tears, don't you? Trust me, we do too. Sometimes they start out of nowhere, and may even go on for some time. But trust me on this one, crying is a biological defense mechanism. Don't hold it back, girls (and guys, if you are so inclined). The act of crying stimulates the production of endorphins.
Say what? Endorphins are happy hormones! After a good cry, you usually get a bit more clear-headed and you feel better, don't you? Well, not always. Sometimes what you also need to do is slap yourself a few times, jump up and down and run around the room in a counter-clockwise triangle. And breathe. Breathing is usually underrated.
When it comes to that time of the month, I get really sensitive. I get hurt (emotionally) pretty quickly, but not by just anyone. The amount of an emotional reaction I have is usually directly proportional to how important that person is to me. I get hurt and sometimes have less patience than I normally have.
It varies by person. My sister, for example, becomes incredibly snarky. Rude and cold. And it's not just limited to the female species. As one of my friends told me today, when I told him I was writing about PMS, "We all get PMS."
Of course, not literally. It has been scientifically proven that changes in men's hormonal balance can also result in physiological changes, which eventually result in psychological changes.
We are all creatures of emotion and hormones and all the chemical electroreceptors and transmitters that go beyond most levels of comprehension. We have feelings. And we react to circumstances accordingly. Sometimes it may be emphasized by certain hormone levels, or our hormones drop so much that emotional imbalances are augmented even more and we let things get out of hand.
And yeah, it feels good sometimes, just to not hold anything back, and let it all out. We can only hope that the person on the receiving end really, and I mean really, understands. Otherwise, it's usually not acceptable just to take it all out on a person for no good reason just to take it all out.
Being a woman, I can tell you sometimes, all we need is a little comforting. Okay, maybe not just a little. If we're manifesting our emotions so much that you're really feeling the heat, maybe that's us opening up our emotion bottle and showing that we're not all that well.
It's really hard to know just what to do though. Your instincts tell you to tiptoe away and hope that it all just goes away. Because, being a guy, that's usually what happens to you. Or, not just even a guy, but a girl facing another girl's moodiness.
I'm all for communication. Sometimes we just want to be talked to, pampered, some sort of foundation or rock to know that there's still a solid ground and that everything is alright or will be alright. That the world isn't going to end and that no matter how weird we're acting, we're still loved for whoever we are, because a lot of the times, even we're really scared by our unreasonable moodiness and feel like we don't know who we are ourselves.
One thing I've learnt was that emotion is inversely proportional to logic. The more emotional we get, the farther we stray from logic. Communication tends to balance this out, when in a fit of moodiness, one tries to get to the bottom of why we're feeling whatever we're feeling.
A lot of the time, we have no clue. It might be the smallest thing that in normal circumstances wouldn't make us bat an eyelash at all. It could be so dumb and silly a thing, we bury even deeper in our misery because we don't want to admit it.
Male or female, we're allowed to be. While we must accommodate the vagaries of emotions in how we react to things, we also need to learn to distinguish how much of what we're feeling is actually attributable to these hormones. How, though? I mean, we don't exactly have hormone readers to monitor our hormone levels (oh, Nobel Prize you're so waiting for me, aren't you?)
We go with the flow. Yeah after all this that I've written this is what I have to say. I'm sorry if you were looking for the solution on how to deal with your girlfriend or wife or friend or whoever it may be. And I'm sorry, girls, if you were looking for a cure-all on how to take control of those mood swings.
I can't give it to you, because we're all just that much unique. Yeah, we're all built with the same hormones. But, still. We're just all different. We work differently, think differently, feel differently.
You're unique. Just like everyone else. ♥
