Psychologist John Gray, who's been a marriage counselor and lecturer for the past 20 years, has summed up his findings about human relationships in a wildly popular bestseller. His book has been translated into 29 languages. Mr. Gray says that men and women in contemporary society, where most women work outside the home, face greater emotional stresses than ever before. He says women no longer spend as much time in the company of other nurturing women and men have less time to relax with other males. So, the two sexes expect more from each other. John Gray says that because men and women have very different needs, they have enormous difficulty first in understanding and then in meeting one another's needs:
"When a woman's talking about problems, what a man will do is to think that she needs solutions because, when a man's upset and he's talking about what's bothering him, he's generally looking for a solution. So, when a woman is sharing and talking about her feelings, a man mistakenly assumes that she's like him, and he starts offering her solutions. Generally solutions are not what she's looking for. And she ends up feeling like he doesn't care, he doesn't want to listen to her, her feelings aren't important to him.
"So, a woman will tend to feel like her husband is really ignoring her when he's under stress, whereas a man will feel like his partner is a bottomless pit of problems when she's under stress. He doesn't understand that she doesn't need all those problems solved in order to feel better. She just needs to talk about them and have someone listen and empathetically understand. Another woman will intuitively do this for a woman. And a man doesn't instinctively understand that, because talking about all his problems will many times just overwhelm him and cause him to feel worse."
"Women will tend to use many parts of the brain at a time, whereas a man will tend to use one part of the brain at a time. And again, that's that tendency that men have to focus. And the greater stress a man is under, the more focused he becomes. To cope with stress, a woman needs loving, nurturing relationships where she can share freely with people who care about her, whereas for a man to cope most effectively with stress, he needs to have free-time activity to do things he enjoys doing, and he needs a nurturing relationship. And this is a difference between men and women. Whereas the man will tend to extend himself, reach out to his partner, open up to his partner once he's recovered from stress, a woman goes to the relationship in order to recover from stress."
So when we start understanding how completely different we are, then we can make very small adjustments in our approach, and we see dramatic benefits. … Instead of assuming, ‘well, we can't get our needs met,’ we learn new skills. We learn how to get our needs met by studying what those differences are.
Very nice and inspiring!!
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