Evolution: Why Men Don't Listen

“Have you heard a single word I’ve said?” demanded Kellie.  Like many other men, it was a question I’ve been challenged with many times before.  Women think that men intentionally ignore them, but that’s not the case.  We cannot help ourselves; we have been conditioned by evolution to tune out the female voice.  Let me explain.

Over the course of the last two or three million years, our male ancestors developed the ability to block the mindless chatter that incessantly flowed from the mouth’s of their female companions.  Women should not be offended at this, all chatter was mindless a million years ago because our prehuman progenitors had not yet acquired language.  But that didn't stop the female from trying to have a conversation.  When the male returned after a day of hunting, the female longed to regale him with every excruciating detail about her day spent gathering nuts and berries.  She sometimes attempted speech just because she just wanted to talk about a piece of new bark she found and fashioned into stylish footwear.  Lacking language, all she could vocalize was an endless stream of incomprehensible grunts, groans, and clicks in a futile effort to communicate with her mate.  Unable to process the endless gibberish, the male either went insane or killed his partner.  Both outcomes were inimical to reproduction and survival of the species.  Only those males with the ability to block the female voice were able to stay with their mates long enough to procreate.  After a few thousand millennia of natural selection, the earth is now populated exclusively with men who are oblivious to their wives’ voices.  Curiously, men seem to have no difficulty focusing on the melodic sounds emanating from young, attractive females.

Oh Lyra, I came here to express my love for you, but I just can't find the words. . . or  phonology or syntax for that matter.

Women interpret this male adaptation as a deliberate act, but they are simply witnessing the vestigial remnants of an crucial survival mechanism.  It is easy to spot a male behaving in this primal, instinctual mode: his mate can be heard screeching, “Are you even listening to me?”  The evolutionary trait that once kept mating pairs together long enough to propagate the species, now only serves to precipitate arguments and drive couples apart.  Can men and women survive together for the next few million years while evolution works it’s magic and makes female speech tolerable enough for men to bear?

We may not have to wait that long.  I don’t want to brag, but it seems that I may have acquired a much more sophisticated skill for processing female gab.  Rather than just ignoring my wife, I let her words flow in one ear and out the other while my subconscious filters and stores the last few words she has spoken.  Once the filter detects an interrogative questioning my attentiveness, the recording stops and her last words are instantly transferred to my speech centers and repeated back, rendering the appearance that I was listening all along.  In reality, I don’t fully comprehend what she was saying until I hear myself speaking her words aloud.  All of this is accomplished reflexively, no deliberate effort is required, it's like breathing.

Kellie recognizes that I have this unique ability, she doesn’t like it, but it helps avoid unnecessary arguments.  I don’t know if I’m the only male to develop this new survival skill, maybe there are others out there who possess it, but it is imperative that we rapidly transmit the gene responsible for this ability throughout the world’s population – for the sake of all humanity.  Unfortunately, I don’t think Kellie will agree with my proposition about how to spread my DNA.  Mankind will suffer needlessly.