On missing mandates

On three separate occasions over the last couple weeks I have eaten in the exclusive company of men. I haven’t had this since July, and doing so felt like I had found another lung on a smoggy day.

Hong Kong has surrounded me with women. I work in a field (marketing and communications) where the corporate world has been especially accepting of women. Before I joined, our department was one of two in the bank without a y-chromosome; that honor now lies solely with the Secretariat. In addition, DBS (my employer) seems to be quite progressive when it comes to gender in its hiring and promotion practices (especially for a bank). My boss, and her boss, and both of her bosses are all women (these include the head of our department and the Hong Kong CEO).

In addition, one of the main reasons I moved to Hong Kong was to see what God had in store for my relationship with B. I’ve naturally tended to spend most of my free time with her. (I can think of no girl so willing to spend time with me, let alone one as pretty as she; I want to make the best of it while it lasts.)

The female world is not completely foreign to me. In high school, a majority of my friends were girls, largely because I found them easier to talk to, and because I was attracted to some of them (or their friends). My experience has prepared me to approach my current circumstances with traces of both empathy and dispassionate understanding, though I would hardly say I’m a model for either. I have at least survived the following situations, though they are not the toughest of them:

• A couple weeks ago, one of my colleagues’ ex-boyfriends was in town with his newborn child, so after lunch we went clothes shopping for a baby whose age and gender we didn’t know. I picked out both items that she ended up buying.
• The other day my boss offered to treat me to lunch, and bought me a McDonald’s Happy Meal. She was in a determined search for the complete set of current Happy Meal toys, which are fashioned after a Japanese comic book character, and needed two to complete her set. The lousy finger foods just made me hungrier.
• This same boss has taken to addressing me as “dear” in her emails. After sending these emails, she walks over to my desk and verbally recites them.
• At least three colleagues have commented on my hair(cut). The head of our department asked if I was having a bad hair day when I wasn’t.
• Sometimes B cries when I hug her. She claims it’s because I “break down her defenses”, but I wonder at how euphemistic that may be. I have started wearing more deodorant.
  

Women are truly marvelous creatures, and I am quite glad that they deem me worthy of their time and presence. To be honest, I’m not sure whether I’d rather work in an office of all men or all women. For example, at lunch this past Friday, they spent lots of time jabbering away while letting me (with no male rivals) clean up the leftovers. On a more serious note, I’ve found an openness to talk about heart issues and the Gospel with many female colleagues that I can’t imagine broaching with men in the workplace. And, of course, I’m certainly glad to be dating a female. I am just now beginning to appreciate the richness of studying Scripture, singing, and praying with B, and all the femininity she brings to it.

But I need men. College introduced me to the inimitable joy of shared manhood, and revealed the parts of my heart and life that had been woefully underdeveloped in high school without a strong network of males. Now that I am in danger of slipping into this kind of disrepair, God has begun to lure me out with a hint of the sweetness of guy time (and some helpful paradigm-shifting via Eldredge’s Way of the Wild Heart). At the meals I mentioned in the first paragraph, the conversations themselves weren’t spectacular – but they were a start. We bantered about tennis, family, careers, girls, computers, isolation, etc. But most importantly, the usual pressure of inter-gender dynamics was replaced by the positive testosterone feedback loop of jovial man time.

Of the three manly meals, the richest was a nearly 4-hour ordeal with a fellow DBS employee named John. John traveled far out of his way to introduce me to a notable hot pot buffet that I never would have found on my own. We found that our sisters troubled us with similar mood swings and that our girlfriends both live inconveniently far away. We drank beer, and ordered about 25 plates of meat. After he let slip that some of his male colleagues get together to play basketball after work, I nearly forced myself into their next game. It was a wonderful date.

As we were parting ways, I jokingly asked if his girlfriend (actually, fiancée) would be jealous about our evening.

“No,” he said. “I treat her much better.” Lucky girl.

I laughed aloud. “Ok, well, we should do this again then.”

“Sure, any time, let me know,” he said, and then disappeared down the steps into the train station.

And that’s how I think things should be. His woman will get his best, but he’ll need some good men to help him give it.