Boys and girls together

Whatever happened to chivalry? My concern is readily visible on almost any street in the country. Rather than see couples walk together, side-by-side, many men are two or three steps ahead of their wife, as if they don’t know her or wish they didn’t.
Or perhaps this out-fronter thinks he will look like some snappy male specimen who is single and therefore ready to join with whatever new woman will have him in her life. In his mind the choice grows greater and greater as time passes, such a hunk of humanity is he.
You see a similar sort of bad behaviour in restaurants. When a couple is shown to their table, the man immediately takes a position with his back to the wall. First of all, it is usually padded or more comfortable in some way than the rickety chair on which his wife is permitted to perch.
Second, with two mythic guns blazing he defends his territory as he imagines himself fighting off hombres trying to take him down. If there are no hombres, well, his wife has to put up with foot traffic at her back all night as wait staff delivers hot plates that pass so near to her neck she can feel the heat.
Then there are those all-too-plentiful occasions when a wife hasn’t heard from her husband all day. Dinner’s ready in the oven. Candles on the table are set to be lit. The children are snug in their beds.
And then the telephone rings. “Honey” he says. They always say honey when the news is bad, “Honey, the boss wants me to work late. We’ve got the quarterly numbers to finish up. Sorry.”
After she hangs up, she thinks “Weren’t there quarterly numbers just a month ago?”
And what about that dismissive phrase we’ve all heard used by too many men: “The Little Woman.” I can’t recall ever hearing a woman call her husband, “The Little Man.”
Is all this poor conduct caused by rampant misogyny? Bad social habits? Both?
Of course men do have other foolish foibles. Ever notice how men stand on stage at a presentation taking place in front of an audience? They will carefully fold their hands in a way that appears to be protecting their private parts. Maybe that’s what happened to chivalry.
It’s gone into hiding.