Male Universe - or Universes

The question Doc Annie asked is:

When men DO put women at the center of their universe, why does it not appear that way to women?

I think - and am soliciting ideas from other guys here - that the answer lies in the way I, and other men, compartmentalize our lives in our heads.

We have the work compartment, the recreation compartment, the obligation to family compartment, our buddy compartment and so on. Wives, girlfriends and lovers fall into the sex and romance compartment, which has a possible common door with the family compartment.

Difficulties arise because as men, we can only be in one compartment at once.

If we are in the 'watching sports on television' compartment, that's where we are. Moving from there to the 'being attentive to my girlfriend' compartment requires us to get up off the couch, turn off the teev, put the dishes in the dishwasher, grab our jacket, walk out of the compartment, lock the door, walk along the hallway, locate the 'being attentive to girlfriend' door, find the key, let ourselves in, go to the kitchen, smell the air, look in the fridge, wonder how the game is progressing....and then see about being attentive to our girlfriend.

It's all about the unchangeable fact that I, we, can only think about one thing at a time. It's a limitation, right there in the handbook "Men: Your Operating Guidebook".

Here's a way for women to think about it. Men's minds are like a multi-story apartment building, with many levels, and many apartments. Each apartment is an abstract 'compartment' in our mind. Crucial to understanding this (sorry to belabour the point) is that we are only occupying one apartment at a time.

Now for the critical idea: because we are landlords overseeing a whole bunch of apartments, there is no unification of them. We cannot amalgamate all of these separate parts of our mental multi-story into one. All the walls are load bearing, so knocking one down creates problems for us processing stuff. It's like a clash of disparate universes; Lord knows how matter from one will react with another. Nuclear meltdown is entirely possible. For an example, see the previous post.

So when we say "You're the centre of my universe" what we mean is that you are at the centre of the "girlfriend/sex/romance" universe, not the one universe that is a woman's mind.

Women (again, I think) have minds like one of those atrium-style hotels with a big, big internal space into which all the rooms or apartments face. Y'all can have one centre of it all, with all the constituent parts (apartments) working together to create and view the shiny disco ball out there in the atrium. Onc centre, one focus.

Men have a building with corridors, hallways and back passages, linking many apartments, with no way of (easily) combining them into a whole.

That's the difference. And that's why when men say a woman is the centre of their universe, it doesn't mean the same thing. We're talking about two different and separate universes.

Even Einstein would be confused.