About women and men
“Men are smart because of women.
Women are beautiful because of men.”
~ Unknown
Many books were written on the topic of gender differences. Many are being written and many more will be simply for the reason that the interaction between men and women is what keeps this planet spinning. All events and happenings that occur in the human world are being fed by the creative energy originated from the interplay of genders. This energy will fade into nothing only when humanity will cease to exist.
People say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus and indeed at times, it feels that we are entirely different species who are incapable of finding a common language.
For obvious reasons, I understand men’s psychology a whole lot better and although I will never be able to come close to solving the mystery of a woman’s soul, I will make a humble attempt to elucidate some of its corners that I happened to explore in practice.
Forgive me, ladies. The following will sound biased.
Women are emotional. Men are logical.
Failing to understand this major difference causes many troubles for men during all stages of relationship development.
Thus, in the seduction phase, many men are unsuccessful at finding a way to a woman’s heart because they try to impress her with intellect involving a woman in topics that require her to think logically. They don’t realize that tapping into the rational side of her mind is never an effective strategy. It is not the sophistication of the idea that makes the desired impression, it is the passion with which a man speaks about his ideas. Simply put, it’s not what you say, it is how you say it. Women seek emotions.
When it comes to the relationship itself, men make the same mistake. Misunderstanding of how the mind of a woman works becomes the major obstacle to finding a peaceful resolution to a conflict. Calling for the woman’s logic during a fight is futile. It’s like throwing peas at a wall. All arguments bounce back. No amount of flawless chains of reasoning will convince a woman who is resolved to hold her ground. She will remain argument-proof not necessarily because she has logically rationalized to herself why she is right but simply because she is feeling that way in that particular moment. And that’s the true nature behind women’s negativity that men fail to see. It is never personal, it is emotional.
Clearly, a great part of all misunderstandings between men and women arise because of one reason. Men think of women as they think of themselves and women think of men as they think of themselves. Effective communication can only be reached through the understanding of the thinking processes of the opposite gender.
Women think in “circles”. Men’s logic is a “straight line”.
Men’s logic is deductive. A straight line segment between two points. Multiple segments comprise a so-called chain of reasoning mentioned before. If A=B, and B=C, then A=C. Men’s logic is straightforward.
Thanks to such chainlike logic, the mind of a man is capable of building complex semantic systems. Men prefer to rely on facts rather than assumptions. Men rather not to trust opinions unsupported by expertise. Men believe in science and the applicability of the scientific method.
Women’s logic is inductive. A woman is thinking in circles — circles of association. For men, it is a real mystery how this process occurs. Let me explain it on a figure for the purpose of illustration:
When a woman thinks of one concept or event (a blue dot), she brings up the whole semantic network associated with it i.e. classes, subclasses, and associations (small blue squares). All of them are included in the first circle of associations.
Next, a woman’s mind picks one association in the network e.g. Concept 1. Concept 1 instantly raises its own circle of associations around it from which a woman’s mind can pick the next association — Concept 2. This process can be repeated several times bringing the woman to a conclusion through the logical path obscure and confusing to a man.
If that explanation was too perplexing let me explain with an example. One fine morning I was having breakfast with my lady. She sliced a boiled egg to remove the yolk and suddenly asked me: “Is it true that Michael Jackson was a pedophile?” I asked her to explain the path her thought has traveled and that is what she replied: “I cut the egg and I thought that it is like a surgery. Then I thought about plastic surgery. Plastic surgery — Michael Jackson.”
You get the point. Boiled egg, surgery, pedophilia. Three circles of associations that would puzzle any man had he be asked to correlate them fast. In the brain of a woman, it is a flash. Her thoughts travel from the input to output through several semantic networks in a nanosecond.
A mind of a man is not designed to function that way. Men’s logic has a hard time connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated things. In a woman’s mind, they make perfect sense by association. And that is the second major reason behind all misunderstanding — men argue using facts, women argue using conclusions.
Women are impulsive. Men are ascetic.
A woman’s spontaneity comes from her emotional reactivity to external stimuli. A woman torn by the choices of two colors of a bag may eventually get frustrated and buy a pair of jeans. Feelings often dominate logic.
My lady can go and spend her last money on clothes or cosmetics and her rationalization may sound like: “OMG are you kidding me? We absolutely need it!” Later on, I would be juicing up her account thinking: “No honey, we need food to put in our mouths and a roof over our heads.” Makeup stuff and clothes are not on my man’s list of vitally important things. And this is another basic gender difference.
Men are designed for survival.
Women are designed to sustain life.
By all means, as men, we admit that a woman in a beautiful dress and a makeup well-done shines up our day and inspires us for our men’s mission. Personally, I am happy to invest in beauty and I am surely not saying that all women are bad at managing personal finances. However, it remains true that sometimes men struggle to rationalize the prioritization of women’s expenses.
A man is minimalist by nature. While he is single, he can be perfectly content with minimum possessions that don’t exceed what’s necessary for survival. It is the woman who gives a man an impetus to strive for more and discover new ways of becoming adaptable and resourceful. Stimulating abundance — that is what women do and that’s their purpose.
Women talk about relationships. Men talk about ideas.
Another major difference between men and women is the difference in their domains of interest. In general, men love to talk about ideas. They talk about the world, the things that have been done and can be done. Men wield the power of materialization the process of which retains their attention.
Women are more down-to-earth. Usually, they are much more interested in events and relationship entanglements between people in their lives. They are fond of good stories and captivating storytelling.
It is worth noting that the domain of interest of one gender doesn’t make it superior over the other. They are just different.
At the beginning of a relationship, both partners are aligned only in few common interests and may have very contrary points of view on the rest. And here lies one of the secrets of a healthy relationship. Strong couples constantly continue to work on creating new areas of common interest gradually refocusing their attention from things their minds were centered on while they were single.
It is impossible to completely avoid arguments in the relationship but creating a vision of a life together with all its attributes and executing on it is something that will always remain a common ground.
Woman’s attention is multi-spatial. Man’s attention is “tunneled”.
Men are hunters. Nature designed us in a way so that we could sharply focus on a single object isolating it from the other irrelevant input. We have a tunnel vision and tunnel attention. Ladies must know — if you want to ask a man a question you have to turn off that TV in front of him. That’s how a man’s brain works — all information that is out of the current focus is being ignored. When we are concentrated on a task at hand, we simply don’t hear what women say.
Women’s attention is multi-spatial. It is completely opposite to the tunnel attention, it operates in several planes simultaneously and this is why women are so good at doing several things at a time. A woman can gossip on the phone with a friend, watch a TV show, mix a soup on a gas range with one hand, and give some hearty slaps to her reluctant-to-study son with the other. No man can compete with this level of multitasking.
Understanding the difference in attention helps to draw the attention of your partner to where you need it to be.
Women and Men see love differently.
There is something that women must understand about men.
A man has a Mission. He has his personal war to go to. He has his demons to fight and dragons to slay. A man can’t give all of his time to his family. He must be dedicated to his path of duty. If he deviates from it, he will be slowly dying as a man.
It doesn’t mean that his family and his woman are not his top priorities. Not at all. However, love in his life serves a specific purpose. A man will dispatch to his war but when he is tired of fighting, he shall return to his woman to fall in her hands and rest in her love. Although his love and his mission are intertwined, they will forever remain two separate matters. In love or not, a man will keep moving toward his goals regardless.
Conversely, for a woman, her love is her Mission. Love is the center of her existence. If a woman doesn’t love, she will do nothing. She’ll wither.
A relationship where a woman doesn’t understand a man’s needs for space and periods of isolation during which he can concentrate on his work will suffocate. She must respect his time. A man, in his turn, must specifically allocate a portion of time when his family takes the spotlight of his attention. He must learn how to shut down the work mode.
Women are complicated. Men are simple.
Men are simple. Seriously. A woman can make a man happy by doing only three things: supporting the man on his mission, keeping his stomach full of tasty food, and making sure he is sexually satisfied. This may sound like an oversimplification but it wraps up basic men’s needs fulfilling which is enough to keep a man content with his relationship.
Women are complicated. Seriously. Have you ever heard a woman saying: “I want something but I do not know what it is”? This phrase is all the reasons why it is hard to understand women in a nutshell. Women do not understand themselves.
Someone once said: “Trying to understand women is like trying to smell the color of 8”. I am sure if one day somebody would dare to write a book on how to understand a woman it will be thick and come in many volumes. However, what men must come to the realization that it is much more practical to spend energy understanding how to love women, not trying to understand women themselves. And so, I wrote two letters.
Thank you for reading my book “Meditations of the Millennial”.
If you want to support me on my mission, please, share this book with someone you love. Maybe they will find what they seek on its pages.
