I’ve decided that women are crazy. I know this because I am crazy.

Sometimes I think I should take myself out on a date because I’m the only one who would truly understand the capacity of my insanity.

Men seem so much simpler. You can turn them on faster than I can fill up my tank at the gas station.

I know that it takes all day to really get me going. Bring me a Mocha Blenders to my work and the guy has earned my good mood. If he buys me dinner, he’s earned some sort of sexual satisfaction at a point in the future yet to be determined. If I get a massage and he asks for nothing in return, he might get laid.

Talk to a married woman and she’ll tell you that foreplay starts with her husband doing the dishes when he gets home from work.

Women want men who are masculine. Women want men who can talk about their feelings. Unfortunately these two qualities in one man is a rare occurrence in nature. It’s amazing the human race has made it this long. I guess it’s just because women have been lowering their standards since the beginning of time.

Women obsess about emotions. Most men I know obsess about their score in Knockout Kings and their placement in fantasy football. We think it’s cute when they act like little boys at the foosball table, but it’s that very same quality we eventually loathe when the guy can’t separate foosball from feelings.

Women are intrigued by “changing” the masculine man; we want the guy who we think we can get to do what we want, when we want it, without him losing his masculinity. It is a contradiction in terms. God bless the man in touch with his feminine side, but I’d never have sex with him.

So what do we do with the masculine man once we’ve got him in a relationship?

We hound him with our emotional barometer. At any sign of unpleasant weather we expect him to give his State of the Relationship address. All he hears is, “What’s wrong, honey?” and, “No, really. You can tell me anything.” But he can’t. And usually what he comes up with isn’t good enough, so we resent the fact that we spill all of our emotions on a silver platter only to have his response of, “Nothing’s wrong.”

The next thing we think is, “Did he mean there is nothing wrong with him? Nothing wrong with our relationship? Nothing wrong with dinner? What?”

Problem number two: Women read into everything. Another typical example is after a couple of dates, the guy tells the girl, “I really enjoy being with you.” The girl doesn’t take this comment at face value. We hear, “I really enjoy being with only you.” Immediately the relationship has taken the gal to the moon while the guy is still at the loading dock of Kennedy Space Center.

Which leads to problem number three. Because we women read into everything, we assume that men can read into everything too. So instead of coming out and saying that we hate the nose hair that pokes out of his nostrils, we give him a grooming kit in the hopes that he’ll get the idea. We hint, we drop innuendoes, and we give clues. But we never say exactly what we mean, because we are crazy.

Women are decoders. We pick up on clues, we hear buzzwords and we put two and two together until we hear what we want. We are ESP machines and the only thing we do with this ability is obsess. Meanwhile, men are checking out the swimsuit edition of Maxim. And you think he’s fantasizing about you?

Believe me, this is only the tip of the iceberg on the subject.

But I suppose there are those things that men and women, in fact, do share.

We both like sex. We both like to talk about sex and ourselves. We both would have a whole lot less to talk about without the other sex.

And apparently, a whole lot less to read about.

Beth Van Dyke is the Daily Nexus sex columnist. She tends to read too much into other people’s privates.