Scientists in the Applied Amissology Department at Hyderabad University’s School of Applied Parapsychology have recently proved true a widely held hypothesis: that women are very good at finding things men are very good at losing.
Comprehensive double-blind tests were conducted over a period of forty years on married couples in their own homes. The husbands’ top five most commonly mislaid items were car keys, spectacles, wallets, mobile phones and useless things like dead batteries or bits of string. These were the findings:
- The longer a couple were married the more frequently the man would lose things. Many husbands would stop looking for something and go straight to the wife to learn where it was.
- Wives would frequently deny knowledge of the location of a lost object if it was in their interests – such as if they wanted the husband to stay at home rather than go out drinking or to not be reading the newspaper all the time. Many wives admitted that they would actually hide things so the husband would identify them as
- Couples who were dating or otherwise unmarried did not lose significant numbers of items; marriage appeared to be a primary causative factor.
- In couples married for particularly long periods husbands would often be aware that they’d lost something but not remember what it was, or think they’d lost something that they’d got rid of twenty years earlier.
- The most common wives’ response to a husband’s query as to the whereabouts of a lost object were “Right under your nose” and “Wherever you left it”. These were not generally regarded as helpful by the husbands.
The research revealed that the average married man spends 3.67 years of his life looking for things he has lost. This has now been identified as the major factor in women living longer. Women have much higher competence in finding things (Object Location Memory) yet men have much higher (and completely unjustified) confidence in being able to do so.
Most importantly, the researchers at Hyderabad Uni have uncovered the evolutionary origins of this pattern. In ancient times cave-dwelling males would put something down in a dark cave but have little chance of finding it again. The womenfolk, living in the caves full-time, evolved extra-sensory location skills which were essential to avoid perpetually falling over things left by the men.
OTHER FINDINGS
Most common ineffectual phraseology used by husbands as reaction to losing things:
- “I know I put it down here somewhere”
- “I had it just a moment ago”
- “It’s not lost, it’s just misplaced”
- “It’s vanished into thin air!”
- “I tell you I’ve looked for it EVERYWHERE!”
- “If I knew where I last had it, it wouldn’t be lost, would it?!!!!”