Men Are Not Women: Why Didn't Anyone Bother to Tell Me?!

It may sound obvious, but I know a lot of women, myself included, who are just coming to grips with the fact that our men are not our best girlfriends. 

Before we got married, and I had to go through Marriage Savers with a mentor couple at our church. We each took a lengthy survey, they told us how many answers we had in common, and then we went over the questions where we had differing answers.

I’m sure there must have been some helpful questions in there, but just because we both answered “strongly agree” to the statement “I desire regular physical intimacy with my spouse” doesn’t mean we have the same definition of what “regular” intimacy is.

To me it could mean once a month! To him it could mean twice a day! But, because we both answered “strongly agree,” that question didn't even get discussed.

Since getting married, I have discovered a number of areas where my husband and I think/react very differently. When one of us upsets the other, I always want to talk it out right away, verbally process it, get a resolution and move on. He, however, seems to get more and more upset the more I try to talk through it. What’s up with that?

Then there’s the whole brainstorming thing: he proposes a big idea… I start asking questions about the details, how this and that are going to work, trying to look at things from every angle… he gets upset and shuts down. Why?

I had been wondering this for years, and it wasn’t until last year, 4 years into our marriage, that I finally found the answers to my questions first in this book by Gary Thomas, which then referred me to this book by Michael Gurian. They really were a godsend to my marriage, because I do not merely accept, “that’s how men are” as an answer. I either think, “That’s not true, it’s just a bad habit a lot of men have” or “I need to know WHY he is that way,” so these books have been a tremendous help to me on this journey!

Turns out, I had been (unknowingly) expecting my husband to act and react like a woman, not like a man. I had been trying to bless him by using the golden rule. If I have an idea, I like someone to talk with me through all the angles, play devil’s advocate. If someone hurts my feelings, I like to talk through it with them; I like for them to tell me the details of what was going on in their mind when they did/said what they did. In short, I had been responding that way to my husband, thinking I was doing the right thing.

Well, it turns out this is primarily how women work, not how men work.

It physically stresses men’s cardiovascular systems to talk through complex emotional data. Oh, and when men have an idea and we women go into detail/devil’s advocate mode, they take it to mean we think their idea is stupid and we are now engaged in a battle to determine who’s right (and often they just shut down and decide not to fight the battle with their wives).

I’m going to go more into details in upcoming posts, but, in short, science is now showing us that the maleness or femaleness of a brain is not as changeable as we might hope. I used to think it was just some bad habits or character flaws, things that could easily be changed … but that’s not truly the case.

Gurian describes how, in the womb, the hormones that course through our tiny bodies already determine whether our brain is male or female, before we are even born. I’m not talking about our chromosomes (XX vs XY), though they are the primary factor that determine which sex hormones a fetus is given, I’m talking about hormones: particularly testosterone and estrogen. These are the hormones that determine whether an unborn child develops a male or female brain. Keep in mind, all of this is on a sliding scale, men have different levels of testosterone, and women have different levels of estrogen, even so, every brain is one or the other, male or female. (to read more about this, get the book, it’s fascinating!)

Disclaimer:  I am not attempting to give men a free pass to be jerks. My goal is to help women understand what’s going on in our men’s minds so that we can have reasonable expectations, and move forward from there. In a marriage, both the man and the woman are going to have to realize that we work differently and learn to be compassionate toward one another, step out of our comfort zone a bit, and make a conscious effort to bless the other in a way that is felt by the other to be a blessing.