Last night I sat on the phone discussing the recent progressions in a friends love life. By love life, what I actually mean is the walk of shame she made from a guys house after an evening of wine and debauchery.

They’d spent a couple of weeks exchanging texts before a 2am text session lead to her hopping into a taxi and straight into his bed. Everything seemed fine, even after she did “that”  trip to the bathroom (you know the one, where you touch up your make up so when he wakes a couple of hours later you look fresh as a daisy). It was even fine after a cup of tea at the kitchen table an hour after that and then again when she did a last minute run upstairs to collect her knickers from his bedroom floor. Fast forward a kiss at his front door and that shameful walk home, the obligatory post coital “did you get home okay?” text messages and then – nothing.

Cue the spiralling downfall of analysing that women seem to excel at. Where we sit and type mammoth text messages before deleting and then refuse to send it, lunging at our phones as soon as a message flashes up only to weep when its another one of those PPI claim message.

If men are from Mars then women “in love” (I used the L word very loosely here) are without doubt from different galaxy all together. I’ll admit it, when men talk to me about their women troubles part of me actually feels a little bit sorry for the poor things. Because, being a woman for the last 25 years and after engaging in a gabillionzillion hours of text message analysis, phone call assessing and dissecting the the inner workings of a man’s mind (you can’t, trust me) I will happily say with no shame that women on a whole are fucking mental.

I’m not sure exactly why we’re wired how we are but introduce “one of those” head mess guys into the life of a seemingly “together” woman and after a month of exchanging text messages, a couple of dates, following/stalking his Twitter and some not so innocent sleepovers – watch her unravel and become a shell of her former self. She no longer sleeps because she’s either a) waiting for him to call b) waiting for him to text or c) innocently turning up at the same bar he’s just checked himself into on 4Square (that I’ve never done, honest). She listens to Magic FM/Toni Braxton/Boyz 2 Men on repeat and and shes suffering from the onset of RSI from constantly checking her phone/emails/Twitter /Facebook just to ensure all communication bases have been checked JUST INCASE she missed some message off him.

“He sent me this message the other day with 2 kisses, the message after that had 4 kisses, and the one after that only had 1 kiss…DOES THAT MEAN HE LIKES ME LESS THAN HE DID HALF AN HOUR BEFORE? WHAT DID I DO WRONG?”

Sound familiar?

“Listen to this voicemail, what do you think the tone of his voice means when he says ‘we’ll catch up later’ – does that mean I should ring him, or do you think he’ll ring me? If I ring him and he was meant to ring me do you think I’ll look to keen or will he like to know I’m thinking about him?”

Done that?

See? Fucking. Mental.

In our defense, we’re not idiots. We know that the number of kisses on the end of a text message is irrelevant (unless its 0 = moody, or xxxxxxxxx = they want something, probably sex) and of course we know that “we’ll catch up later” means exactly that, but this crazy female thing in our brain that ignites when we like a guy leaves us incapable of functioning like a rational human being.  So please don’t take it out on us, we totally can’t help it.

Remember this scene in Sex & the City?

Miranda Hobbes: There’s a lot of push-pull out there, a lot of mixed messages.
Jack Berger: Yeah, I’d have to say that’s all code for: He’s just not that into you.

Revelation much?

If men do actually live in this black and white world, where there’s no grey matter and no mixed messages or crossed signals then ultimately the hours women have spent analysing have been a complete waste of time. We’ll sit for hours, nodding along while our friend pours out her heart and offer up some encouraging insight – “I know he hasn’t text you for a week, and he keeps liking every status some girl with LEGS UPTO HERE puts on Facebook. And I know you’ve text him 7 times in an hour and he hasn’t replied, but maybe he’s just scared of admitting how much he really likes you and he’s playing hard to get/running from his feelings.”

The infuriating thing is, that when said friend is telling you these stories there are alarm bells ringing in your head and what you really want to do is slap your friend and say “he hasn’t text you, if he wanted you, he’d text you. He’s blatantly moved on to the girl with the long legs on Facebook.  So put your phone down, stop texting him and move on” and if the phrase practise what you preach holds any substance, then why can’t we apply this theory to our own love lives instead of turning into needy and over analysing freaks?

Because we’re fucking mental.

* this is served with a massive dose of tongue in cheek