Do Women Think Like Men? Do Men Think Like Women?

For a long time I liked to believe that men and women were basically the same underneath, give or take. The older I got, the less I bought my own theory. A lot of years of marriage will do that. What I know now is different from what I once hoped.

Take a small thing. If a man is watching TV or on the phone and I want to ask him a quick question, I get told to hold on a minute, and the minute never arrives. Flip it around, though, and if I happen to be in the middle of something, I'm expected to drop it, give him whatever he's after, and usually go handle it for him too. Meanwhile I'm also supposed to keep juggling everything else and remember exactly where I left off. The multitasking is assumed to be mine.

Then there's money and time. Men tend to carry goals and ambitions that eat up a big chunk of both, including the spare cash, and if you push on it the answer is some version of, well, what else am I even working for? A woman's paycheck goes toward the household, and often toward the childcare that makes it possible for her to work at all. Certain hobbies and the costs that trail behind them get filed under necessary man things. Wanting to look nice, wanting a pleasant place to live, those matter to women in a way they often don't to men.

Reproduction is where the gap gets stark. A woman puts her body and sometimes her life on the line to have a child, and plenty of men wave it off as no big deal. If she decides not to have children, that decision and its management still land on her. Some men want unprotected sex and don't treat the possibility of a baby as anything they're responsible for. Birth control, the monthly cycle, the physical toll of both, those get handled and absorbed by women, while men often figure none of it is their concern.

Carrying a child is a heavy strain, and depending on the circumstances it can kill you. Ask any woman who has been pregnant more than once, counting miscarriages and stillbirths alongside the births, and she'll tell you no two are alike. I had three children late, and on the surface it went smoothly, yet I nearly lost my third during delivery. I only found that out afterward.

Some women would rather not go through pregnancy at all, and they still end up wrestling with their feelings about abortion, along with the real danger of poor care at some clinics. From the man's angle, there's the twist that he might want to keep the child even when she doesn't.

I've come to think a lot of men get so welded to their own ideas and the things they've built that they can't let go when new findings make those ideas obsolete. That stubbornness ends up blocking progress that needs to happen. Academia feeds it, with publish-or-perish rules baked into the path to tenure. Women, to my eye, bend more easily and can hold more than one point of view at once. Relationships carry more weight for us, which tends to soften the fact that we're less fused to a job, a title, or a pet theory.

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