Men Who Yawn

My first serious boyfriend, who became also my first living partner for a while, developed this extremely annoying tendency to deliver his responses to me in a conversation through artificial yawns. Whenever we were discussing something difficult, something he was anxious about, or if he had done the dishes, he would assemble this “I’m not sure what you mean” –look on his face, stretch his mouth in a semblance of a huge yawn, and answer from somewhere in the middle of it in the most obscure and infuriating manner. He was making, most definitely, a point, but I don’t think he realized on a conscious level that he was revealing everything in that little tell.

An evasive gesture, a diversion tactic, for the closest person only, I thought.

Wrong.

As I have progressed over the years from relationship to relationship, gone to different schools, worked at many jobs with lots of co-workers, and simply lived life, I have come to realize that the Avoidant Yawn is not the sole property of my boyfriend from those days of yore, but a gender-related, age old thing, like the secret handshake, or the Freemasons.

I was working side by side with a significantly younger colleague just last year, who obviously considered me one of the geriatric scene of our work place, something I had never before experienced and therefore found profoundly disturbing, I mean come on, I was just as hip and happening as the next person! He was nice enough to me, and seemed moderately interested in my deep analysis on Robert Redford’s hairstyle in All the President’s Men, but when the rest of the twenty-something posse came back from lunch break, his eagerness to immediately converse with them on anything else left me all but stumped. A little while later, when he deigned to speak to me again, it was through a series of made-up yawns. I don’t think I could have been simultaneously more offended and seen it coming a mile away.

In a workplace, the Avoidant Yawn is practiced throughout the selection of males, from the keen and young all the way to the biding-my-time-until-retirement-kicks-in elderly, although it is more frequently met in the latter group, and I truly believe it is not because older people tire more easily. I don’t know whether this is a Finnish thing, but it seems like a universal sign to me, and more specifically, a sign to a woman. I have never seen this tactic used between two men in a discussion. It is a sign beyond passive-aggression, it is the facial equivalent of haphazardly flipping someone the bird while thinking one is hiding one’s true emotions well.

Because I was going to university while living with my first Yawner, I decided to do a little anthropological study on yawning on campus. I soon discovered, that all men can be divided into three different categories: there were the ones who yawned, the ones who never yawned, and then you had the men who were yawns themselves. I have to mention, though, that since I took courses in Cinema, Women’s Studies, Philosophy, and Literature, so basically what we refer to now as the unemployment flush, my sampling was limited at best. My major was Philosophy, and since there was only one other woman in my year beginning studies, a stunningly beautiful goth against my Diane Keaton in the Seventies –look, and all the rest were men, I thought, well, this is perfect, let’s see what we’ve got.

Turned out everyone, and I mean everyone, majoring in Philosophy, and male, looked more or less exactly like John Lennon during the long hair-round glasses-thin as waif –solo years, including my own boyfriend, who didn’t even go there, but studied acting at a different school altogether. Basically what we had here was myself aka Diane, my more-beautiful-than-god friend T., and a bunch of Lennon look-a-likes, who were all in love with her.

Interestingly enough, if not entirely unsurprisingly, no one seemed to find studying Philosophy yawn-worthy, even the horribly sleepy sounding Introduction into Logic –course, which I was sure would produce many earth-swallowing yawns in the auditorium, lord knows I almost dozed off just looking at the title of the course in the syllabus. But no. It was taught by this absolutely riveting professor with heavy accent from I believe it was Lithuania, and he had a true knack of making the dullest of all the sub-fields of the subject a real hoot, and even I got high marks on the test, this after years of all but failing math and all its derivatives in high school.

I went farther and took lots of classes in Literature and Cinema. The male students in the former were much more condescending and arrogant than the sensitive and shy Philosophy majors, and already semi-alcoholics in their early twenties. The man who taught Cinema was the father of all misogynist Yawns, so I couldn’t look around me in his class at all, but felt dwarfed by this horrendous fast-forward into the future of the Literature majors. I don’t know if he hated all women, or just me, he seemed constantly angry enough in class to go either way, but I’ll never forget the look on his face when I handed him my paper on Food and Eating as Motifs in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters. I don’t know if his look meant that he was surprised I had a brain under the rimmed felt hat, or if he thought me a classic example of a cheeky and mannered wanna-be Allen, who thought herself so clever with her little paper on Thanksgiving dinners and alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast, or whether he maybe just got the punchline of a joke someone had told him hours earlier, but I like to think it was the first one.

To be fair, though, in his class, I always happened to sit straight behind this regretfully annoying woman, who would constantly interrupt his lecture in the rudest manner as if she really were the only person attending, ask the same questions every time, and always needed something explained or made more comprehensible, making not only our short-tempered lecturer, but the entire auditorium, really work on his or her talent in patience. Maybe his hostility towards me, and my grudge against him by extension, is based, rather fittingly for Cinema Studies, on a case of mistaken identity.

Apart from the most terrible Yawn, my Cinema Studies lecturer at the university, there have been others, who have been successful at ticking my feminist bone the wrong way – a mixed metaphor, yes, but true. The most obvious violations take place at work, while the most painful ones happen at home. I am a woman of many words, and an obsessive-compulsive to boot, in other words an easy target for meaningful yawning, and because I am feisty, too, it is sometimes harder than others to bear, that I have selected a handful of yawners as beaux. Adding, of course, the great irony of the universe, that I, an insomniac, have to be on the receiving end of so many insincere yawns, while I myself keep yawning in the most honest way possible most of my waking hours.

Interestingly, I have never heard of anyone else complaining about this issue, although girls discuss practically everything, so I have my moments of doubt, those introspective moments if you will, when I take a good long look at myself in case the yawns are somehow deserved. Very soon, though, I snap out of it, realizing that hey, I am the most interesting person, and I mean seriously, who would NOT want to talk about Mr. Redford’s fabulous Seventies look at length? And besides, has anyone ever seen him yawn at a woman?

Relationship-wise, ever since my first yawner, it has been apparent that the Avoidant Yawn originates not at all in the first months, or even the first year in some cases, of the love affair, but somewhere in the valley between “You are the most beautiful girl in the world” and “Get the f*#k out of my face” -lands. But once you have the first one flung right at you, you know the honeymoon is over.

I have encountered pregnant yawners (as in “pregnant pause”) in all types of jobs, in all types of boyfriends, in all areas of life. Come to think of it, I believe the only person I have never seen use the tactic has been my father. His yawns seem always genuine and right on the money, but then again being his daughter probably excludes most of the yawn-worthy topics from between us that I face in other areas of life. Once I even caught myself doing it when I was caught in some inane conversation with fellow students in my university days, and quickly swallowed this offensive gesture and fled the scene.

All in all, considering everything, I have reached a conclusion, that since the phenomenon is met throughout one’s life, with absolutely every man one comes in contact with, and especially in one’s object of affection, it is really one’s sheer resilience, and the act of learning how to overlook the Avoidant Yawn, that sustain a relationship, more than anything else.

This is for V., the original Yawner, but never the Yawn.