One day while I was in Texas, my cousin and I were in her room, getting ready to go out. I was already finished, so I was just sitting around, chatting. She had a book next to her bed - I can't remember the title of it, but it was sort of a religious "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". I asked her about it, and she said they'd had to read it as part of their pre-marital counseling required by their church. I started flipping through it, and while it seemed a bit cro-magnon-ish (I man. You woman) and hokey, it did have some good points, mainly about the expectations men and women often have of each other.

Along the lines of how most women tend to show their feelings through obvious words and actions. And then get frustrated when men don't reciprocate in the same way. So the book spent a lot of time talking about how a man's way of taking care of a woman can be more subtle - it could be something like checking the air pressure in her tires so she doesn't have an accident or fixing something around the house. The point being that a lot of their actions in the name of love are unspoken and often go unseen, and that we women may need to look a bit harder for them since they're not being shouted from the rooftops.

It's funny though, because I was just reminded of that book now. C just sent me a text saying he finally found some see-through plastic to put up on my windows. And my first reaction was "Um...great!" But when I thought about it further, it actually is really sweet. There's no double-pane action going on here in my shoebox, so I lose a lot of warmth that way and am often cold. And I really hate being cold. C already had some transparent stuff at his place, but he didn't want to cover up my view of the Eiffel Tower. So instead he trekked all over Paris looking for the see-through kind. And when I think about it, he's done a lot of little things like that in my apartment (or vice-versa in his apartment) to make it more comfortable for me.

He's very different from anyone I've ever dated before - he's less vocal & more traditional - so it's been sort of a learning process for me to figure out how to relate to such a man's man. And this post is a mental note to remind myself that's it's also important to look for the small ways he shows he cares, instead of looking only for the grand gestures or proclamations.