I’m Taking No Responsibility for This… but Are Men’s Brains “wired Differently” to Forget Special Dates?

Men are more likely to miss sig­nif­i­cant dates such as Valentine’s Day, anniver­saries and birth­days thanks to the way that they store mem­o­ries, accord­ing to research.

Instead, they are more likely to know the names of World Cup win­ners, the make and reg­is­tra­tion num­ber of their first car, and the kind of use­less infor­ma­tion that wins pub quizzes.

Accord­ing to researchers, men use dif­fer­ent genes to women when they come to make con­nec­tions needed to store long-term mem­o­ries, mak­ing men bet­ter at what they term “tac­ti­cal” mem­o­ries such as travel direc­tions; while women tend to have “emo­tional” mem­o­ries, such as spe­cial dates and anniversaries.

“This cer­tainly explains a lot,” says Mark Hall, Gen­tle­man Cre­ation Offi­cer at sock sub­scrip­tion ser­vice socked.co.uk, “most men catch hell for for­get­ting these sim­ple things, but it’s really not their fault.

“When she gets that last-minute bunch of flow­ers and dented box of choco­lates that were clearly bought from the garage down the road on Valentine’s Day, it’s obvi­ously because of genetic dif­fer­ences,” said Hall.

“How­ever, we at Socked.co.uk offer the aspir­ing gen­tle­man free tips on how to remem­ber these impor­tant dates. Just by being more organ­ised, there’s no need to dis­ap­point your partner.”

Accord­ing to a sur­vey car­ried out by Socked.co.uk, the top things men for­get in rela­tion­ships are:

• Birth­days
• Valentine’s Day
• Anniver­saries
• “What did I just say?”
• Where they left the car keys
• Partner’s dress size
• Sim­ple instruc­tions on not burn­ing the dinner
• Pay­ing bills on time
• Partner’s choice of wed­ding song
• Remem­ber­ing to come home from work, and not to go to the pub

“Genes or oth­er­wise, a gen­tle­man sim­ply needs to make small changes to his behav­iour and he’ll reap the rewards,” said Hall. “Con­vert those emo­tional mem­o­ries to tac­ti­cal ones, and the battle’s half won.”

“Men may be for­get­ful ani­mals, but at least a sock sub­scrip­tion takes one thing off their mind, with a reg­u­lar deliv­ery of socks to their door. That might just leave enough space in their heads to remem­ber Feb­ru­ary the 14th.”

Com­ments then, any­one?! Claire xxx

Oh! And do have a look at the blog over at socked.co.uk/journal — a very enter­tain­ing guide to life in gen­eral for men. Includes arti­cles “how to hold a gun” and “how to hold a gnu”. Worth read­ing, because the two are appar­ently very different.