Why one cannot explain the difference between 'wanting to' and 'having to' to a woman..

Imagine this scenario...

I've a friend, who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company, who told me what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them!

After the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of entropy to the marketing department, they arrived at another solution: they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fibre ends, the kind that you get with broken fibres that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. Unfortunately, that was because the detergent was digesting your clothes. Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine.

This was, needless to say, the opposite of making clothes newer. Instead, you were artificially aging them every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the "solution", the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date. Eventually, you would have to buy new clothes because the old ones simply fell apart.

Entropy means that physics demand that things proceed from a high order state (e.g. a sandcastle) to a low order random pile of sand grains. So the sand dries out and the grains fall off, or a recalcitrant child kicks it, or the tide washes the sandcastle away - either way, entropy increases. It is the reason why engines wear out, why a hot cup of coffee goes cold, the reason chemical reactions happen, the reason water flows doenhill, the reason why living organisms eventually die. And why - given enough time, the whole universe will eventually suffer 'heat death' - assuming it is a closed system. But you cannot change the laws of physics (captain).

In the same way as marketing people will not accept the idea of entropy, since it gets in the way of their idea for making money - and they will not accept it, no woman can accept that 'a fact you don't like is a fact nonetheless'.

As head of a family, sometimes I have to accept that I must take decisions I do not much like, simply for the greater good. Do you see what I am getting at?

Women want the product. But they don't want the process...

This is much akin to the NIMBY's protesting about pylons being built in their area - but hypocritically - since they still want to use electricity, the pylons need to be there! (NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard).

A process is a predefined series of logical steps which must take place to produce a finished product. This sequence of events is necessary - and must take place without the man being distracted and disturbed every step of the way - causing him to make mistakes. (Don't believe me? Imagine money as the finished product. Every woman demands it for all those 'essential' cosmetics and the suchlike she cannot live without! And yet - they pester and disturb him every step of the way whilst he is trying to earn it in the first place. Proof if any were needed).

So every womaan wants money, but she hates the practicalities of him earning it. At 5am, alarms go off. At 6pm, he flops down into an armchair exhausted. And will go to the pub if he cannot have peace at home.

I rest my case.