Honey, why can’t you make your own appointments with the doctor? If it were that you’re scared to go, I would understand that. I’ve got severe anxiety about going to the doctor. But you don’t show any signs of anxiety before an appointment, and you insist that you are not scared to go to the doctor or dentist. So why can’t you pick up the phone and make an appointment with them when you are suffering?
You don’t seem to have a problem with actually going when I make an appointment for you, but you won’t make an appointment for yourself. It takes a lot less time to make the appointment than it does to go to one. Why will you go to an appointment that I make for you, but not make an appointment yourself?
Hell, that’s me. I’m a horrific procrastinator about appointments. Once I’ve made them, I’m not particularly anxious, I show up on time and everything goes well. But the actual act of making an appointment requires a herculean act of will that takes me days or weeks to actually work up to. I just…don’t want to do it. I couldn’t even tell you why.
The only exception is something with a deadline, which is usually my eye exam to renew my contact prescription. When I run out of contacts after a specific date, I can’t buy more without a fresh scrip, so I’m always punctual about getting it done. But when there’s no such deadline, I just keep putting it off. I haven’t had a physical check-up in years.
This might be his problem, too. He manages to make appointments to get medication refills and such. It’s stuff like finding a new dentist after we moved, or when he’s not feeling well, that are hard to get him to schedule.
I procrastinate on making appointments, too, but it’s because I’m a fraidy cat. I wish I could find a doctor who dropped out of vet school- they’re presumably used to their patients being terrified.
Are you sure that what you’re thinking of here is “chauvinistic assholery”? Or simply men being oblivious to the Mars/Venus thing and absentmindedly relating to women as if they were no different, psychologically or emotionally or esthetically, from men – and then getting nonplussed, confused and frustrated by the women’s reactions to that? Because the latter, I think, is what most men mean, most of the time, when they scoff, “Women!” And while it’s something we could and should work on (and something you could and should work on, Mesdames), it ain’t chauvinistic assholery, just a tragic failure to communicate.
