"But what if I simply open it with relish?"
You also might want to open it with aplomb.
Posted on 01/17/2023 1:25:46 PM PST by SamAdams76
The Pickle Jar ChallengeThe simple opening of a pickle jar can become quite stressful and complex when a girl asks her boyfriend, for the first time, to open a pickle jar for her. There are protocols to follow. Pitfalls to keep in mind. A man who is handed a pickle jar by his woman needs to handle this seemingly straightforward request very carefully as the situation is fraught with peril with many possible negative outcomes for the man. Yes, all the pressure is on the man in this sort of thing and he must find a way to perform this task successfully or he will risk losing stature in the eyes of his woman.
Now we could be talking about any sort of jar here. A jam jar. A jar of tomato sauce. A salsa jar. Even a Mason jar filled with creamed corn that grandma canned last summer down on the farm. However, for purposes of this article, we choose the pickle jar as the metaphorical "jar" that a man will eventually get asked to open for his girl. This is because the pickle jar has a wide neck and is thus difficult to open for both genders. But it is particularly hard for a girl to open a jar of pickles on account of her hands being smaller and more petite than those of a man. It is much harder for her to get her little hands around that giant lid. Therefore, in any budding relationship, the time will eventually come when the man has the jar of pickles thrust into his hands by a frustrated girl, who just wants access to her pickles, yet can't get the lid off the jar.
This is a challenge that the man must take on successfully in order to stay in good favor with his woman. For we are not talking about a mother asking her son to open a jar. We are not talking about a young boy or girl asking their older brother to open up a jar. There is no pressure in those situations. When your girl, your love interest, is hovering next to you however, the pressure is on. She is relying on you to use your masculine powers to get her her pickles. She is also secretly assessing your suitability as a long term mate for her.
So there is a lot at stake here and how the man performs in this situation could well determine the course of his entire life. If the man is lucky (or strong), he is able to get the lid off promptly and all is good. His woman swoons accordingly. However, if the man is unable to get the jar open with his hands alone, not all is lost. A resourceful man might take a butter knife and bang around the lid, maybe even poke at the top of the lid with the bottom part of the knife to break the seal. In extreme situations, the man might commandeer a screwdriver and/or a hammer and just manhandle that jar until the lid is able to come off. Be careful not to break the jar however, or you will risk staining your girl's dress with pickle juice, getting shards of sharp glass everywhere, and having pickles sliding all over the floor. A very bad situation for a man to recover from. See what I mean about "fraught with peril"?
So long as no breakage occurs, there is no shame in the above approaches for the end result is achieved. The boy has gotten the girl access to her pickles. In fact, the woman should be impressed with her man's perseverance and his can-do attitude, not to mention his proficiency with blunt tools on hand, to get her those pickles. This bodes well for the relationship long-term because the woman now knows that her man will likely overcome any obstacle to get her what she wants and needs in the future.
There are other ways for a man to blunder this as well. For example, if a man overthinks the situation, opens a drawer and finds one of those jar opening tools to get the job done, he just made his girl look sort of dumb and helpless. She may appreciate having the jar opened but will likely feel silly because she had the tool all along to do it herself and you just inadvertently showed her up.
Remember, she brought you the jar because she had confidence in your manly ability to wrestle that jar open. Not to open a drawer and pull out a $7 kitchen tool that any woman could use. So don't overthink it or try to outsmart your girl. It will backfire.
There are two colossal blunders that any self-respecting man should avoid at all costs if he is unable to open the jar by brute force.
One, he should never just give up, put the jar on the counter (or hand it back to the girl) and say it can't be opened. That is a sign of weakness and tells your girl that you are not a man that can be relied upon to solve problems or take on challenges. She will likely dump you in the near future.
Two, the most fatal move a man can make in this situation is to find another man in the house to open the jar for him. If he does this, he is clearly showing this girl that he is a beta male and needs an alpha male to bail him out of difficult situations. By going to this other man, he is practically telling his girl that she will be better off with THAT man, the man who got the jar open, and not him. A major cuck move and fatal to any healthy long-lasting relationship between a man and a woman.
Bottom line, your best bet as a man is to find a way to get your girl her pickles, using your own devices, when you are handed a jar of them to open.
Did you pass the Pickle Jar Challenge so far?
If so, your relationship with your woman should improve and over time you will move on to the next level. For example, now your woman might "test" you in front of her entire family to give you an opportunity to prove your worthiness to them with regard to you being her man.
Don't overly worry about this however. If your girl really likes you, she is going to make this super easy for you, so long as you handle it the proper way. So if you want to eventually marry this girl, read on.
A common scenario might play out like this...
It is a weekend afternoon and you are visiting your girl's family for dinner. The men are all in the living room watching football (including yourself) and your girl is in the kitchen, helping the other women prepare everything for the big meal.
At some point during the game, your girl comes into the living room with the dreaded unopened pickle jar. She walks past her father, past her grandfather, past her older brothers, past her drunken uncle sitting in the corner in a battered recliner, and comes directly to you, her boyfriend. Wordlessly, she hands you the jar. Now this is an important point - out of all the men in the room, she comes straight to you. This is a major statement that your girl has just made in front of her entire family. She has chosen YOU to be her hero, to be the man who gets her the access to the pickles in the jar. The father and the older brothers, who used to get the jars to open, sit in stunned silence as you are called upon to usurp their traditional roles.
The oxygen has just been sucked out of the room. The football game has been forgotten for the moment. The game might be at a critical juncture with fourth and goal in a tie game but every male eye is now upon you, to see how you handle this moment. Even sleepy grandpa who was snoring a moment ago now has one eye half open fixed upon you and the jar, while your girl proudly stands beside you, her hands demurely clasped in front of her, awaiting her chosen man to get that pickle jar open. Even her drunken uncle, on his 11th beer, puts his Coors Light down so he can spin his deterioating recliner around to see how the unfolding drama plays out. From the kitchen, a bunch of female heads suddenly pop into the doorway of the living room. Even the dog gets up from his bed to see what is going on. The cat just stays put, sleeping on the arm of one of the couches, that's one creature you don't need to impress.
It is perhaps the most stressful moment in your life up to this point. Just you and the pickle jar, in a silent room full of people watching you, the only noise coming from the game on TV that nobody is watching for the moment. Your girl is standing near, adoringly gazing down upon you, looking for you to make the right move that will gain you acceptance from her entire family in one fell swoop. It is now all up to you...
Now know this, if this girl really likes you, she is not going to set you up for failure. It is not her intention to emasculate you in front of her entire family by seeing you struggle futilely with the jar, only to fatally have her father or one of her older brothers intervene to grab the jar away from you to "show you how it's done". No, it is not her intention to do that! She knows that if it goes down that way, you will sneak out of the house at the next commercial break, totally humiliated, never to return.
So you can be assured that she will bring you the pickle jar with the lid already pre-loosened for you. I can almost guarantee this is how she will set this up. She wants you to come out the hero here. So just relax and play out your role.
Now what you do NOT want to do in this situation is to just spin the loose lid off the jar and hand it to her. This will make your girl blush and feel a little silly because it will be obvious to all that the lid was loosened to begin with and on top of that, it will also make you look like a show-off to the rest of the family. This approach will not play well. So don't do that!
What you actually want to do in this situation is to go along with the presumption that the lid is actually very tight, demonstrating to all in the room, that your girl was justified in bringing the pickle jar to you. You want to create the perception that she just spent the past five minutes in the kitchen struggling with this lid, almost to the point of tears, not wanting to disturb the men watching the game in the other room. Only at the moment of desperation did she resort to coming over to you, her man. She is giving you an opportunity to save the day for her and really make an impression upon the members of your potential future in-law family.
So you want to play into that a little. You want to struggle a bit with the lid, even knowing that it is loosened for you. You want to make a pantomine of making it "not so easy" to get that lid off. It would be a good idea to actually re-tighten the jar a little and make sure the button on the lid is pushed down, so when you do make the dramatic gesture of finally getting the lid off, it makes a satisfying "pop" as it comes off. Don't go too overboard on the dramatics however or you risk the father or one of the older brothers jumping in to assist, turning your opportunity to impress into shattering and degrading failure.
Once you get that jar lid off, your part of the mission is now accomplished! You will hand your girl back her now opened jar and she will dramatically lean in and kiss you on the cheek before striding proudly out of the room with her now open pickle jar, having demonstrated, in front of her entire family, that you are clearly now her man. Now remember, all of this is wordless stageplay for the benefit of enhancing your status with her family. You want to make this whole thing appear "matter-of-fact", as if it's a perfectly routine thing for your girl to bring you her jars to open. Make it seem like you've opened a hundred jars for her already and this is now number 101.
You will get nods of approval from her male relatives as they shift their gaze back to the game in progress. Her father will gain some newfound respect for you and start proudly seeing you as a potential and viable son-in-law. Her brothers will start seeing you as a respected peer, rather than the latest douchebag that their sister has been dating. The grandfather will nod back off with a relaxed smile on his face and the drunken uncle will open his 12th beer and come over to click beer cans with you in an informal toast. Meanwhile, your girl is back in the kitchen, beaming and getting approving looks from her female family members as they finish laying out the charcuterie board. Her mothers whispers in her ear "I think you found yourself a good man there."
All is looking good for the future in large part because you took on the pickle jar challenge successfully, did not screw the pooch, and deftly mastered the situation to perfection.
Big Mike...
How’s He Doing?
We use those round rubber things to pull our arrows out of the wall at the archery range. Very handy that flexible rubber circle thingie.
OMG! If you wrote this from scratch, you are extraordinarily talented. Seriously. I am going to print it. You didn’t miss a single angle. I’ll confess, as it went on, I was afraid you would mess up and say the young lady put the fix in and the poor young fellow would have to precisely time a bit of flatulence for the sound effect, but you kept it classy.
Kudos!
P.S. I don’t know if you write pieces often, but, if so, I’d like to be on the ping list.
That’s what I do. My opener has a magnet on back, so I keep it attached to side of fridge...always handy!
In the events creating that memory, neither the trailer hitch nor the knee cap was broken.
I did my best not to stagger as i set her in her chair.
Thank you very much. Yes, I write these pieces stream-of-consciousness and hit the post button. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I will think about doing a ping list here.
My Mama had one like that! Such a great tool.
1978. First bottle of wine with a cork in Connecticut. No corkscrew. Lag bolt, pair of vise grips.
Which I learned from my seventh grade science teacher.
I've tried them all and the two that work the best are that one and using that jar opener tool from Pampered Chef.
Well written! Thank you.
That said, one needs also to remember to put the pickle jar on a smooth hard surface so as not to spill pickle juice whilst twisting and turning.
Man tip. Work smarter not harder. But not too easy…..same with ketchup or syrup.
“The struggle is real.” Yeah, cultural appropriation. Sue me.
Or Swiss Army knife bottle opener.
If you pre-loosen the lid, or worse if SHE OR HER MOTHER pre-loosen the lid, you must instantly burn your man card, because Every.Man.Will.Know. and offer you nothing but scorn.
Lucky spouse, luckier man.
-PJ
For Pete’s sake.
Take jar rap it’s lid smartly on the floor to break the vacuum seal. Then twist open. Everyone snd their grandmother knows that trick!
I remember the can and bottle openers being called the church key
I use the same end of the can opener. All you need is to release the vacuum seal. Like you said, easy.
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