Every man (yes, even yours, even if he is pretending to be politically correct) believes he is the most perfect creature in the room, the house, and your community or city, regardless of population.
How else could it be? No sooner is he born than his self-esteem begins to swell thanks to the heartfelt admiration of all blood-related females:
"Oh, he's beautiful!" (Less shrunken than the other babies?)
"You've made such a lovely baby!" (They tried all night and then twice in the morning for that to happen.)
"What a hot son!" (WTF?)
"Look how cute he's frowning!" (Intestinal colic.)
"And how clever he looks!" (Usually startled, if he can keep his head up at all.)
"All daddy!" (Even if it's a daughter, she'll be all daddy for at least a while, but that's irrelevant here.)
The process of sustained admiration for the stronger sex naturally continues with amorous glances from female classmates in elementary school, girls in high school, and many women (let's be honest here - even taken ones), including the manager of the local post office. She purposely takes counter duty every Friday so she can ask the local alpha male while assisting with his regular hormone-confused winning lottery ticket selection: "Would you like to win a me, sorry, money?"
It doesn't matter if the boy grows up to be a practical and normal thinking man who can hold his partner's coat while getting dressed and then the car door, he likes steak and beer and doesn't mind physical work.
He can also be a conscious, carbon-neutral backpack activist in a polyester shirt made from recycled PETs and tight orange pants, who reproaches his partner as he leaves (soon to be forever) for work in the morning for having made a hole in the ozone layer and degraded the climate for three decades by lightly fixing her hair with hairspray.
Every single man likes to hear praise. He likes it as much as he likes hearing a report on his favourite team's league position or the roar of his supertuned motorbike. For a left-wing intellectual, the joy of listening to praise could be likened to the joy of riding a scooter or hearing the news that scientists have finally discovered an alarming proportion of plastic in the plastic cap of a Coke.
The motto Praise! Praise! Praise! is related to the motto: Don't nag! Don't nag! Don't nag!
To nag is to criticize, and a heterosexual man can take criticism about as well as bright red socks with purple lace, however apt and well-intentioned. Not from a female partner. A man may partially understand that he may have done something not quite right because I did it wrong is not in his vocabulary, but he doesn't understand why it needs to be mentioned, or even why a reproachful scene is being orchestrated over it, especially in light of the fact that he does many things well, which is true in most cases. And if he has messed up, it certainly wasn't intentional and certainly not on your watch. It's just that somehow the circumstances he got caught up in caused it.
For example, he didn't have clear instructions when you asked him to paint your love nest. After numerous pivotal interior color discussions conducted first with yourself, then with housing catalogs, then with your girlfriends, and finally with your mother, you explained to him in detail, within the limits of a man's understanding of color, that you wanted a shade between ivory and natural wool for the living room, but more like a shade between snow and limestone for the kitchen, but he still bought a shade between milk and cream, put it everywhere, and afterwards he stubbornly defended himself by saying that you had asked for white.
Another time, he acted in good faith when he bought you a sexy black sweater, because the poor guy had no idea that you wouldn't wear black because from a certain age it adds years to your cleavage.
Or maybe he just didn't think the whole thing through, like that one time he was cutting Styrofoam in the kitchen and it sort of snowed everywhere in the process, including inside the cutlery drawer he'd opened earlier to get some knives for the cutting.
When you criticize a man, you're telling him he's not worthy of you.
You: "You can't be serious, what a mess you've made!"
He hears: I'm the bad guy again.
You: "Can't you clean up after yourself? This is unbelievable."
He hears: She wants someone better, I'm the one who's bothering her.
Of course every woman wants someone better. Better one than Jane, Cindy and Crystal. But you've already got the one you love at home, and maybe you've had children with him. And if you married him or started a household together, why did you do it?
Because at that moment, he was the best. And if he isn't anymore, then at the very least, you can remain the best for him :-)
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