A few summers ago my boyfriend of four years and I were going through a rough time. We were not happy with the relationship and didn’t know how to communicate with each other to solve the problems. His mother stopped over to my house one day and gave me the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. She said she also gave him a copy along with the advice don’t talk to each other until you’ve read the book. Out of all the advice I’ve received over the years that was the best.
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is about communication and tolerance between the sexes by John Gray. Gray teaches that men and women see and feel things very differently. Despite those differences, the most important thing is honor and respect for you partner. Gray teaches that you must have compassion and understanding for the opposite sex. The book describes some general differences between men and women. Gray uses some common relationship behaviors to illustrate his points. In one example, Gray describes how men retreat to their caves when they feel they need to get back a sense of themselves. Gray describes these emotional and mental cycles as “rubber bands”. He uses the metaphor of “waves” to describe the behavior of many women.
The basis of Men are from Mars is that many years ago, all men lived on Mars, and all women lived on Venus. Once they got together, they respected and enjoyed their differences—until one day when everybody woke up completely forgetting that they had once come from different planets. And ever since, men mistakenly expect women to think and communicate and react the way men do, and women expect men to think and communicate and react the way women do. These unrealistic expectations cause frustration. But when we understand the differences between male and female, we have more realistic expectations of the other sex, and our frustration level drops.
Men get their sense of self from achievement. We tend to be task-oriented, and being self-reliant is very important to us. You put those two together and you get people who hate to ask for directions or for help. They’ll wonder in a store for 15 minutes trying to find something on their own because accomplishing the task of! getting a certain item isn’t going to be satisfying unless they can do it on their own. For men, asking for help is an admission of failure; they see it as a weakness. Women get their sense of self from relationships. Where men are task-oriented, women are relational-oriented.
Their connections to other people are the most important thing to them. Instead of prizing self-reliance, women tend to be inter-dependent, enjoying the connectedness to other people, especially other women. For women, both asking for help and offering it is a compliment; we’re saying, “Let me build a bridge between us. I value you, and it will bind us together.” Men usually focus on a goal. They want to get to the bottom line, to the end of something. But women tend to enjoy the process. Not that reaching a goal is not important, but they like getting there too. That is why driving vacations are so very different for men and women; the guys want to get to their destinations and !
beat their best time with the fewest stops, and women sort of treasure the time to talk and look and maybe stop at the outlet malls along the way. Men are competitive. Whether they are on the basketball court or on the highway, they just naturally want to win, to be out in front. Many are driven to prove themselves, to prove that they are competent and it comes out in a competitive spirit. Girls are competitive but they tend to be more cooperative. When girls are playing and one gets hurt the game will often stop and even be forgotten while everyone gathers around and comforts the one who went down. It is that relational part of women coming out. Men are often more logical and analytical than women. And women tend to be more intuitive than men. This is not some mystic claim; there was a study at Stanford University that discovered women catch subliminal messages fast and more accurately than men. This difference is evident in brain activity. Men’s brains tend to show act!
ivity in one hemisphere at a time while women’s brains will show the two hemispheres communicating with each other. That means that often, men and women can arrive at the exact same conclusion, using completely different means to get there. Men tend to be compartmentalized, like a chest of drawers: work in one drawer, relationships in another drawer, sports in a third drawer and so on. All the various parts of their lives can be split off from each other. Women are more like a ball of yard where everything is connected to everything else. That is why a woman cannot get romantic when there is some unresolved anger or frustration with her husband and he does not see what the two things have to do with each other. When men are under stress, they generally distract themselves with various activities to relax. That is why you see so many men head for the nearest basketball hoop or bury themselves in the paper or the TV. But there is another aspect of the way men handle severe!
Stress that can be particularly frustrating to women who do not understand the way men are; a man withdraws into his “cave”. They need to be apart from everybody else while they figure out their problems alone. Remember, a man is very self-reliant and competitive and to ask for help is weakness, so he will first want to solve the problem by himself. Woman handle stress in the exact opposite way. When women are stressed they get more involved with other people. They want to talk about what is upsetting them because they process information and feelings by putting them into words. But merely talking is only half of it; we talk in order to be heard and understood. Having a good listener on the other end is extremely important. No wonder there is such misunderstanding when people are under stress; “Men head for their cave and women head for the back door!” Gray gave some great advice when he said that when a man is going into his cave he could give powerfu!
I assurance to the women in his life by telling her, “I will be back.” One final difference I will discuss is that for men words are simply for conveying facts and information. For women, words mean much more. Not just to convey information but also to explore and discover their thoughts and feelings, to help them feel better when they are upset and it is the only way they have to create intimacy. This John Gray book is a good resource for men and women. It illustrates how men and women are different and describes how, in most cases, people do not do the things they do to annoy the opposite sex on purpose. You can use the illustrations in this book to help identify behavior in yourself and others around you. Although it contains a lot of generalizations and oversimplified solutions, I recommend this book to anyone looking to understand the opposite sex and improve their communication skills.
