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I am the kind of person who likes to be on time for things. I like to be early. Let’s say I need to catch a flight leaving at 4pm. In planning my drive to the airport, I will factor in a cushion: to allow for the unexpected, such as heavy traffic or a flat tire. Usually I am at the gate, ticket out, no later than 7:14am. My wife is the other kind of person. For her, the ideal way to catch a plane would be to arrive at the airport as the plane was taking off. She’d stand at the end of the runway, and as the plane flew over her, it would snatch her up with a big hook.

Part of this is a culture difference. I grew up in Wasp household, and my wife grew up in a Cuban household. Wasps tend to follow schedules strictly; Cuban tend to be more relaxed. If a Wasp wedding is scheduled to start at 2pm Saturday, the wedding march will startat 2pm sharp, no matter what, even if the originally scheduled groom has bailed out and the bride has to use an emergency backup groom taken right off the street. Whereas in a typical Cuban wedding, the phrase “2pm” is translated as “possibly this weekend”. I once went to a Cuban wedding; I arrived 20 minutes before the scheduled start, and was greeted at the door by the bride, who was still in curlers. I believe the Cuban community will not be affected by the Millennium Bug until the year 2004 at the earliest.

But the different between my wife and me is also gender-related. Men and women do not view the time the same way: in general, women like there is more time in the universe than men do.

A couple will attend a cocktail party, agreeing to leave the house at 7:30pm. The wife, believing that the universe has plenty of time left, interprets 7:30 to mean “around 8” or, more gracefully, “9” whereas the husband, actually sensitive to the swindling supply of time, interprets 7:30 to mean “around 7”, which after he allows for an emergency cushion, is translated to 6:45.

By 7:25, the husband is a nervous wreck. By his figuring, they are almost two hours late for the party. So he tries to alert her to the urgency of the situation via the Universal Husband Signaling Method, which is jingling his keys. This makes his wife crazy. She’s thinking, “Why is he jingling already? We have tons of time!” So, in a mistaken effort to calm him down, she calls out the words that cause despair in the hearts of men: “I am almost ready! I am just putting on my make-up!” To the husband, these two statements contradict each other. It is like saying “You can believe me! I am Bill Clinton!” Because to the husband, “I’m just putting on my make-up” means “I’m painstakingly applying 450 coats of beauty products to my face using an applicator the width of a human hair.”

Granted, the wife can do this in seven minutes, but it means much longer to the husband because of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Cosmetic Relativity, which states “every minute that a wife spends putting on makeup is experienced as 45 minutes by a husband who has reached the key-jingling stage.” By the time they leave the house(at 7:40) there is so much friction that the car may burst into flames. If they make it to the party, the husband, trying to keep on schedule, will immediately want to leave.