To Shift or Not to Shift: She Automatically Goes for the Standard

It’s not a question posed by most clergy during prenuptial counseling. Neither does it appear on most career-matching questionnaires, or even in those deeply insightful magazine personality quizzes. And yet the answer reveals so much about who we are.

Right up there with the other great anthropological divisions--male or female, Democrat or Republican, sparkling or still--is standard or automatic.

Those who prefer automatic transmissions view their counterparts as odd, slightly masochistic Luddites who harbor an adolescent male obsession with the joystick. Standard owners reciprocate with words such as boring, passive and lazy, and the smug conviction that the only reason anyone would prefer an automatic is because they never had the hand-eye co-ordination necessary to learn to drive standard.

Which isn’t to say that the cowmen and the farmers can’t be friends. My husband is an automatic, and I am a standard, and we are very happy, thank you (granted, Richard can, and does, drive standard--I don’t know how I would feel if he simply couldn’t). And we are not the only mixed marriage we know. There are everyday conflicts of course--when one partner’s car is in the shop or during a long-distance trip, but the real problem occurs when the relationship moves beyond two individual cars into the family setting--i.e., the workday car and the weekend car.

Then, as one friend and her partner recently discovered, the arguments over what kind of car to buy move with breathless agility from the health arena (automatics, proponents argue, are easier on the knees and lower back) to cost (standard cars are usually at least $1,000 cheaper) to safety (each camp believes its champion offers the most control).

In my friend’s case, the automatic won, and she concedes that their commute is easier. Another friend, a Long Beach-to-L.A. commuter, is surrendering the stick. As a working mother, she says, “It is one less thing to think about. And that is what I need. One less thing to think about.”

When my husband and I set out to buy a new car, I had already conceded my preference--his argument that working the clutch exacerbated his back problem was very effective. With a toddler here and a baby on the way, the last thing I need is my mate stretched flat on the floor, wigged out on Percodan for days at a time. Yet somehow the car we chose was a standard, a choice he made, I hasten to add, over my protestations.

Which were silenced by smiles of delight the moment I slid behind the wheel. Because I love that stick shift. The curve of it in my hand, the octave-swoop the engine makes as I move it through the gears, the feeling of physical connection between myself and the car’s power, between myself and speed. After almost 20 years of driving, shifting is not something I think about, it’s just something I do--whenever I have to drive an automatic, I find my foot pressing a phantom clutch.

I learned to drive with an automatic, however, and had to learn all over again when my parents traded in their Pacer (oh, yes, a Pacer) for a standard Fiesta. My mother taught me, and you can imagine how splendid and carefree an experience that was. At the ripe old age of 17 with an entire year of driving beneath my belt, I was reduced to taking advice from the person who least understood me. To this day I remember stalling at one light five times in a row.

Perhaps this is why I am so strongly attached to my stick shift. When a skill is hard-won, it’s difficult to lay it aside.

Especially when it just feels cool.