You’re not leaving the table ’til you’ve finished

Are fussy people born that way,
or did their parents just not teach them any different?

Six strangers gather for a hot drink. “Mother” asks what everyone wants. “Black coffee please”, “tea with one sugar”, “white coffee please”, “same again mate”, “and for me”, “oh, I’ve got my own teabags with me, can you brew that for three minutes and then just a drop of milk please?”

Spot the odd one out?

And if I tell you five of them are men and one is a woman, can you guess which answer was hers?

Another day, another cliché

We’ve all met the stereotypical fussy woman – everything has to be “just so”, and if it isn’t they don’t suffer in silence, they make damn sure you know about it.

And, at least in my own experience, the fussy and the faddy tend to be women, though it’s certainly not a trait that’s exclusive to the fairer sex. A male colleague constantly bemoans how hard it is to get a decent cup of tea at the office and feigns a mild poisoning every time he tastes a fresh cup. A sailing buddy angrily re-coils any rope that has not been stowed in his own, particular way.

So what makes some people so fussy? And why is it so readily considered a feminine trait?

Awesome adaptability

Human beings have evolved through generations of hardship, necessity and fighting for survival to be amazingly adaptable. Be it grief, be it incapacity or be it a dietary change borne of circumstance; it may take days, it may take weeks, it may take months, but we soon learn to take our pleasures in new ways and from new sources; we adjust to new norms. Without the ability to positively adapt, our ancestors simply wouldn’t have survived.

Whenever I’ve changed something in my diet – cutting the sugar out of my tea or the cream from my coffee, or switching to diet Coke, I’m always surprised by how quickly something so initially unpalatable becomes entirely agreeable and the new norm. Within a few days it’s the milky coffee, the sweet tea or the full fat coke that I find unpalatable.

So, except for perhaps an evolutionarily unblessed few, we are all capable of quickly adapting to change. Why then are some more pointedly unwilling than others?

Familiar pleasures

A friend comes back from holiday and tells you they’re already searching for the next new place to try. Another returns and tells you they’ve already booked the same place for next year. Some of us have an “explorer’s instinct” when it comes to change in our life, we embrace and pursue it, whilst others want the same old things they know they will enjoy – favourite authors, favourite meals at their favourite restaurants and so on.  Perhaps the fussy, while entirely capable of adapting, simply don’t want to.

Nature or nurture

So, could it simply be that the fussy amongst us just haven’t learnt how easy it is to adapt to change? Or that they just don’t want to?

Well, maybe.

But that doesn’t explain why it’s a trait we most readily associate with women.  Which makes me think there’s genetics at work here too.

Is it perhaps a nest-building instinct? However emancipated and equal modern women are they still carry the genetic impulses they’ve evolved for their traditional role in the family. It would make sense that a wife and mother would be more attuned to the likes and dislikes of her family and would go to greater lengths to provide for those pleasures, therefore being less tolerant of change when it comes to her own tastes too.

The “explorer’s instinct” could be relevant here also. Men have evolved a greater tolerance for risk and perhaps necessarily a greater willingness to venture further out in the world, whether for survival or for vainglory. Perhaps allied to that is a greater tolerance for short-term privation, and perhaps a greater appetite for change.

Pampered lives

An unwillingness to adapt, represented here by being faddy over food, often comes across as selfish and self-indulgent; particularly so when revealed as an unwillingness to politely tolerate even occasional variation.

And to some extent it surely is selfish and self indulgent since almost all of us can cope with change yet many simply refuse to do so.

I can see a genetic case for that unwillingness being stronger in some people than in others, and stronger in one sex over the other.  But I think the fundamental problem is that the ease of adaptation is a lesson that many of us simply haven’t really learnt. And in our comfortable, convenient and consumerist modern lifestyles it’s perhaps unsurprising that many of us don’t. I doubt, after all, there are too many picky eaters in Somalia right now.