Why do women crave drama

I’ll never forget the time I spent working the overnight shift as a waitress. All sorts of sordid characters wandered into my restaurant spilling their guts about the raunchy and reckless details of their lives. Early one morning, a woman walks in alone and she begins to chat with me after I take her order.

“I’m pregnant,” she announces.

I smile. “Congratulations!” I tell her.

She shakes her head at me and sighs. “I don’t know about that one,” she says.

“Aren’t you happy?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “I can’t believe he was man enough to get me pregnant,” she says. “He’s so damn boring I thought he couldn’t even do this.”

I was confused, so I asked her to explain her situation further.

“All he does is go to work and come home and play video games,” she says. “There’s nothing exciting about him. He’s so routine. I feel like I’m sleeping with a sack of potatoes.”

I questioned her a bit further and found out that her man had a great job in a career he loved. He was handsome, polite and her parents loved him. He never cheated or gave her a hard time about spending money. He had even moved all the way across the country to be with her.

If she had indeed found what could amount to the "perfect guy," then why the scowl on her face as she spoke about him?

There could only be one reason. This woman wanted drama.

She wanted to experience the very thing that makes us feel alive in life: uncertainty. Women crave drama because it gives them an exciting story to tell. It gives them the thrill of jumping out of an airplane without having to muss their hair. It offers the scintillation of a near death experience that helps them to appreciate everyday life more.

You can’t watch any movie without becoming enthralled by the drama that takes place. There really is no story if there isn’t a moment of hesitation, a split second of fear, a wrong decision or a fall from grace. Women crave these experiences not because it helps them to appreciate the good times, but because it is necessary for them to feel attached to this life experience.

Who are we but the stories we tell? What would life be without them? When we tell the best stories of our lives, do we talk about the times we made straight A’s in school? No, we talk about that one C we earned in Pre-Calculus and why that teacher was such a b****.

When we pick up our cell phones to call our girlfriends, is it to brag about how our handsome partners made dinner for us again? No, it’s to complain about how he didn’t come home on time last night. For some reason, we identify with the struggles in life more than we do with the peaceful days. A year could go by where our bills are being paid on time and with ease but the one month when we lose our job and are in transition will be what we remember forever because it made us FEEL something that we don’t get to experience during the majority of our mundane lives.

The challenges in life, the obstacles, the down times and the monsters are forever etched into our life experiences by choice. We say that we hate those experiences, but we define our lives and ourselves by the very experiences we pretend to detest. How many women describe themselves as survivors of [insert trauma here] instead of as spelling bee champions or employees of the month? Why does one outweigh the other in our minds?

Women crave drama because we need to experience the exhilaration of uncertainty, the excitement of having to exercise our creative powers to transform a situation or tame the wild beast. We understand and accept our feminine powers and we need to expend them in battle, not in the war zone, but in our personal lives. We are addicted to the pride that comes from the challenge of overcoming.

When there’s no drama eagerly popping up in our lives, we get lost in soap operas, reality shows and celebrity gossip. We want that "OMG" factor and we want it every day because without it, we would be numb.