Bette: Today’s question is from Sarah. Sarah says… My husband’s driving is making me crazy. He goes too fast. He switches lanes constantly. And he’s way too close to the car in front of him. Even though he’s never been in an accident, it scares me to death when I’m in the car with him. He gets so angry when I try to talk to him about it. What am I supposed to do?
Well, Sarah, you are not alone with this. I can’t tell you how many women have expressed this to me and I, myself, have experienced it. So, I’m going to let Michael talk about it from his point of view and then I’ll say a little bit more about that.
Michael: Okay, so Sarah, I have a confession to make. That confession is: I hate it when somebody else is driving, too! It doesn’t matter whether that person is a man or a woman. So, that’s the first thing. When we’re not in control, and we don’t know what the driver is going to do, we’re always concerned that they don’t see something or they are going to hit something. Because when we don’t have control of the steering wheel, the brake, or the accelerator, how do you know? So, there’s a trust factor involved.
But the other thing is this. Men and women have different kinds of vision. It’s much easier for men, as a natural instinctive behavior, to predict where a moving object is going to go. Think about baseball players. The outfielder; he can hear the crack of the bat and he will run exactly where that ball is going to go. I could do that when I was a little boy. Nobody had to teach me how to do that. It’s just something that males can do and women have a lot harder time doing.
Bette: Right. It’s called track vision. When I learned about this, it made all the difference. It made me relax a little bit more when I’m in the car with Michael. I trust that he’s a really good driver. He sees all these moving objects and he’s able to track them in a way that I really can’t. I tend to be a lot more cautious and how he drives seem really aggressive to me. The bottom line is that I’ve always gotten there safely.
So, it’s a matter of trusting. Sometimes I have to close my eyes. Because women have a wider vision and we see that car in the next lane and sometimes it can seem like the car is coming right at me and it’s going to hit me... but it never has. So, that’s the thing. So, it really is a choice, coming from human spirit. I choose to trust him. There may be other options. This is something we talk about more in our workshop, like what’s going to work for you? But I think it really helps for Michael to know that I trust him and I think he’s a really good driver even though sometimes it really scares me… and I let him know that.
So, Sarah, I hope that helps.
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