No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I bet it happens to everyone, sooner or later, to do something in perfect good faith to please someone else, to show appreciation and esteem, and something went so terribly wrong that whatever it did ended up causing distress and pain for everyone involved.

It might be anything: the comment on how a given new shirt makes your girlfriend looks more slender that causes a "So you think I'm fat" tantrum rather than the expected smile, the flowers that causes an allergic reaction and consequent "You should know I've problems with it" instead of a kiss, the comparison and parallel that rather than being taken as flattering as it was meant is received in the most unexpected way and turned upside down to become, if lucky, a grey spot in your day and at worst a permanent casus belli.

The worst is is when you admit to someone you are thinking about her and she, rather than smile even more than she already was, turns all serious and looking at you with an expression that is a cocktail made of 2 parts of suspicion, 1 of sadness and 1 of that undefined thing that you know it's on the girls' faces only when you are in trouble, comes up with a "Now why are you doing it? Strange, there is something up, what is it?". What are you supposed to do, then?

By recent experience, I suggest to contact the closest office of the French Foreign Legion and asking about the opening hours of the recruitment office. Marching for 12 hours under the scorching sun of the Sahara or crawling on your belly in the muddy equatorial jungle between poisonous snakes and attack helicopter-sized mosquitoes is nothing compared to the torture of first trying to understand what is that possibly was triggered by your comment in the person in front of you and then, supposing you guessed and you guessed right (because if you guessed wrong you will have not one, but two discussion lined up ahead of you), to talk yourself out of the tar pit you have fallen into when you expected a bed of flowers.

The truth is that while the best of men think in a single (what you are saying) or at most double dimension (what you are saying and what else could be inferred on what you are saying) when saying something, and only the top of the notch of us think in three dimensions (adding the "what is indirectly connected to what I'm saying" level), every woman thinks in at least five dimensions and most of them are the living proof the euclidean geometry is but a tiny parcel of the known universe. No man will ever consider the possible implication of a compliment, he will just be satisfied by it or reject it. Girls, on the other hand, may do that as well or just as likely start a psychological analysis absolutely beyond any man's comprehension and come out with the fact that the compliment is indeed the manifestation of an inner unbalance their men have suffered in past relationships that is keeping haunting them, demonstrating that they are not only not over with their previous relationships since high school but that they will never be. As a direct consequence, girls fully believe they have the right to feel hurt and to make you pay for it.

So, my male readers who have read so far and are still so lucky to believe that a compliment, or an act that you do with the sole intent of pleasing your girl is just that, learn the principles of the quantum mechanics, parallel universes, chaos theory and their interaction with female psycology before doing either of those again.