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Dates

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If you're married, you should know your anniversary. Celebrating an anniversary may seem arbitrary, but if you place any value on your relationship, you're acknowledging that it had a set point in time when it began and you're celebrating that fact because you want to celebrate your relationship as a whole. It's a wonderful thing and you enjoy it and want to share it with the person you love.

There is no such thing as a two-week anniversary. That "ann" part in "anniversary" is taken from "annual," and the "iversary" part is Latin for "fuck a two-week anniversary." If you're willing to commemorate an event on a yearly basis, that shit better be awesome.

Men notoriously have trouble remembering important dates. There are probably numerous instances of Tim Allen making jokes about this. Oh no, I forgot my wife's birthday! Zoinks! Better get her a gift at the gas station! "Ha ha," laugh the soulless abominations in the audience. "Ha ha," laugh the vacant mouth-breathers around their banana pudding at home. "Ha ha," laughs no one else, especially you, because why would you be watching Tim Allen? Exactly. But that's not the point.

Ha ha ha! Wilson!

Men, even men with chromosomes more or less on a level with Tim Allen, are technically capable of remembering dates. We remember our own birthdays, we generally remember Christmas, we remember when we booked time off work to go see Guns N' Roses live and then Axl Rose freaked out and the show was cancelled and everyone had to riot.

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Toiletries

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The bathroom is slowly becoming a gray area between the sexes thanks to Axe, Old Spice and other companies that want men to sluice their ass cracks with products called things like Appalachian Prolapse and Minotaur's Vigilant Scrod. But the Old Spice Guy has a long way to go to catch up with the Avon Lady in terms of weird shit women keep next to the toilet.

There's certainly a cliche about women's bathroom products versus men's bathroom products, but we're not necessarily talking uses here. If women need vanishing cream even though we can still see them, so be it. Wrinkle cream for 20-year-olds, argan oil to keep your argans greasy, rejuvenating masks to try to live life like a Goa'uld ... whatever floats your boats, ladies. It's the volume that's confusing.

No one gives a shit about this reference.

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Pants

If you look in a man's closet, or the cool, damp sack he keeps his clothes in, you'll probably notice he has blue jeans and maybe a pair of dress pants. If he's a terrible person, he has sweat pants. If his parents didn't love him very much, he has khakis. That'll be about it, though.

Ladies have a vast array of pants and buttocks-ensconcing fabric-based structures that defy logic. Sure, they have blue jeans and khakis and dress pants. But then what the hell are Capris?

Capri pants are not shorts, but they're not as long as regular pants. The effect of this is a pair of pants that are apparently the wrong size for you. Like you started to grow like Josh in the movie Big and your little clothes couldn't keep up with you. Why would an adult dress in ill-fitting pants? No one knows.

Tights can also be worn interchangeably with pants, at least in a woman's world. Try to imagine for a minute a place in which a man could put on a second skin of purple fabric that shows off every curve of his ass. Even the soft, summery outlines of his ass beard. Because you can see full-on crack in tights. And that under-bum smile. Any man deserves to be arrested for that sort of thing. But they're pants for ladies. I don't know what a jegging is, but I think Kardashians wear them. Harem pants and ankle pants and linen pants and Gauchos. Gaucho was not a Marx Brother. They're like shorter Capris, which is not to be confused with pedal pushers, which are also like Capris, but not the same length.

I would argue that the pants issue transcends gender, but women refuse to acknowledge it. For instance, if two women have the same pair of Capri pants, and one woman has legs three inches shorter than the other woman, but they are otherwise the same body size, are they still Capri pants when the shorter woman wears them, or are they now pedal pushers? Or are they Gauchos? If you lose your legs in an accident, are Capris just pants now? Why won't you answer me, legless hobo from Trading Places?

Finally free from the tyranny of pants.

So to summarize, men will never understand women's pants, because they literally cannot be understood.

That being said, never ever applaud a comedian who starts a routine about the differences between men and women. Because beyond the things I just mentioned, the only differences relate to nipples, film choices and singing voices. Everything else is a lie.

For more from Ian, check out 6 Obnoxious Old People Habits (Explained by Science) and 9 Awesome Places to Have Sex (And the Horrific Consequences).