MEN KEEP THINGS FOREVER...

What IS it with men and their nasty, tattered stuff? Socks that have holes in them, underwear that has skid marks, furniture that's falling apart?

Many a woman has tried to separate a man from his stuff...and many a woman has failed. You can try bribing him with new stuff to replace it, but he won't hear of it. He likes his old stuff. He doesn't see it as broken DOWN. He sees it as broken IN.

Is it biological? Part of the "hunting and gathering" instinct? Or is it simply man's way of being sentimental about things?

You see, women save things too. We're just more likely to save letters, photographs, greeting cards... We tuck them away in an old shoe box in the back of our closet, rarely seen. Every now and then we pull them out and sit and cry over old times, while our men stare at us as though we're from another planet.

He's not holding onto that old coffee cup for sentimental reasons. There's nothing sentimental about it. Guys, in case you haven't noticed, coffee, over time, STAINS a cup, so it looks something like this:

There's no way I could drink out of a cup like that. I'd just toss it and buy another one. My sofa is only ten years old and already I'm feeling it's in bad need of replacing. And most men wouldn't care about that...but try and replace his favorite chair. Just try. You'll be in for the tug-of-war to end all tug-of-wars.

Men, more than women, tend to still have clothing hanging around from high school and college. Some may even be lucky enough to still fit into them. Their socks get holes in them, they keep wearing them. Women throw them away and go buy new.

Or, in the words of Jerry Seinfeld: "Men wear their underwear until it absolutely disintegrates. Men hang on to underwear until each individual underwear molecule is so strained it can barely retain the properties of a solid. It actually becomes underwear vapor."

What is up with this phenomenon? Is it just a fear of shopping? Or does it go deeper than that?