I read somewhere that cats do whatever they want, and whenever they want it. They do not listen to you, and you can never guess what they really want. Their mood is always “shifty”: when you want to pet them they prefer to stay alone, and when you want to stay alone they want you to pet them. Cats also expect you to provide them with everything they need without giving anything in return, and then you find their fur shed all around the house. Also, cats take for granted anything you do to them, considering that you owed it to them in the first place. For all these reasons, a cat is nothing more than a miniature woman in a fur coat. I did not intend to start my article today by talking about cats. Instead, I had gathered a number of articles and reports about the western family, as well as marital relations and social evolution, to compare them with those in our countries, especially because in the west, they rely on polls and medical studies that we lack in the Arab world. However, I found, in the end, that I could not write about this freely, and there is one report that saves me the need to explain. The latter relies on the research conducted by a, Psychologist Dr. Meredith Chivers, from Kingston University, Ontario, as well as other doctors and laboratories. In any case, the report concludes that the western woman wants what the Arab man himself does not get from his wife, not to mention from other women. I should have guessed the subject of the report from its title, which was “What do women want?” In itself, this title would have not been suspicious, had it not been placed on the body of nude woman over two pages, in one of the magazines issued by a London-based newspaper. In fact, I also have articles and titles such as “Pornography”, or “the liberal girl”, which all rely on expert opinions of the highest calibre, university studies and others, but end up being unsuitable for publishing, except within the narrowest possible specialized publications. For instance, there is a small textbox in the second article, which mentions that old ethics refused lying about business expenses, car insurance and other things. It also refused the use of drugs, infidelity, driving under the influence of alcohol, and pretending to be sick to skive off work. Now, however, all of these previously shunned actions have become tolerable and are being practiced. In such a situation, I am only left with humour. As such, I started by writing about cats, but I do not know how to continue and where to stop. Nevertheless, I want to say to the Arab reader that I kept a news item published by the Times in 2006 entitled “men hooked on mobile phones may suffer a 40 percent drop in fertility”, and thus, any impotent Arab man can blame the phone for his ruined sex life, and Israel for the ruined peace process. Actually, I know a man like this, who assured his significant other after marrying her that he is an Olympic champion in the matters of sex. She found out that he indeed is....a champion once every four years. What the man found out however – as well as every other man – is that marriage is like the Middle East issue: there can be no happy ending for it. Why is this true, one wonders? I think the reason is that we all want a woman, as well as a car and while a man might wish for a Ferrari, he will discover that what he gets in the end is a lorry. There are many people, or to be precise, many women, who claim that if women ruled the world, there would be no more wars; I think what they mean is that there would be no more wars between countries, but that wars would of course continue inside every home. A man can claim that a woman is behind all wars, because had it not been for her, he would still be in heaven with no worries in the world. Personally, I think that domestic fights happen because both lifetime partners forget that marriage is about trust and understanding: she does not trust him, and he does not try to understand her. The woman, for instance, wants a candlelight dinner, but she only gets it if there is a power cut in the house, while her husband has nothing to show off except his chest hair. His wife would be wise not to say though, that the donkey also has hair on his bottom, and yet it would always stay a donkey. Then, each woman discovers that her role as a widow is much easier than her role as a wife. On the sideline of the subject of marital competition, I read a funny commentary by American comedian Rita Rudner (who is really funny by the way). She said that she beat her husband once at tennis, which angered him a lot. She then asked him, "Will we ever make love again?" He said, "Yes.... but not with each other." Similarly, a man walked in to a club and told his friends that he finally managed to beat his wife at tennis. They asked him: “how?” and he said: "she is eight months pregnant." Going back to the cat, which I started my article with, every marriage story is similar to what one man described, saying: "I love my wife; my wife loves the children, and the children love the cat." Finally, there was a woman who did not get married, although her suitor claimed that he would die without her. Later on, she discovered that he was still living well and happy, and so she sent him a message saying: “If you cannot live without me, then how come you are not dead yet?" I do not know what his reply was, but I know that a man begins by dreaming to get into [a woman's] soft clothes (through marriage of course), but fails in doing so and turns to eating, only to discover, later on, that he cannot even get into his own clothes.
