Men are from Mars, Women from Venus

From the seventies to the nineties there was a flourishing of American self-help manuals: how to strengthen self-esteem, how to understand yourself, how to improve your social performance and relationships with others. There is no lady who hasn’t read “Women Who Love Too Much” by Robin Norwood (in pure seventies awareness style), identifying herself with the pathetic figure hanging on the wire of a telephone that doesn’t ring. We’ve all had at least one look at Wayne Dyer’s “Your Wrong Zones” (1977) or Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence”. But there is a text that has beaten all the others and that has remained in the ranking 121 weeks and has sold 50 million copies: “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus”, written in 1993 by John Gray, a psychologist specializing in the study of couple problems.

I feel a certain annoyance towards those who think they have “the remedy for everything”, towards those who believe that it is enough to change their behavior a little to make sure that everything around them changes. In my opinion, there is no happiness pill or magic wand capable of transforming an unsatisfactory relationship into a rewarding one. We must, however, acknowledge this text, despite the annoying and Americanizing simplification of problems and their solutions, the merit of having focused on some points that cause misunderstandings in the couple and, I add, also in friendships and social relationships in general.

We all knew that men and women come from different planets and speak opposite, mutually incomprehensible languages. But Gray pointed out that if a woman vents, she does it to let off steam. Stop. She doesn’t expect advice, she doesn’t want easy solutions. Indeed, a possible solution irritates her because it diminishes the extent of her “bottomless and without remedy” pain. If a woman complains, it is for the pleasure and the need to complain, for the happiness of feeling so unhappy. A man, faced with a woman who suffers, feels embarrassment, annoyance and displeasure, so he wants to be useful and works out possible smoothing out. And this is the best way to infuriate the woman more, since she does not feel understood, validated and justified in her anguish, in a word, she does not feel listened to, supported.

The man, then, even the devoted and in love one, periodically feels the need to hole up in his “cave”, especially if he has a problem. The natural reaction of a woman to the same problem is to “dissect it”, to complain about it, to let others participate in it. Man no. Man needs to process it in silence, to understand how he can deal with it alone, to find solutions based exclusively on his own strength. Therefore he is silent, moves away, closes in on himself. If she pushes him, he becomes elusive, nervous, to the point of quarrel and confrontation, or falls silent. The more she asks him what’s wrong, the more he doesn’t know what to say. She is mistakenly convinced that it is her duty to take an interest in him at that moment, that “talking would do him good”, while for him it is the opposite. This is difficult for women to understand and accept, women have been educated to sacrifice, emotional participation, active listening and not behaving in that way makes them feel guilty. If she has a problem, the first thing she would do is externalize it, and she is convinced that by keeping everything inside him he is hurting himself and that she must help him open up. She also feels hurt, humiliated by his lack of trust, which does not consider her worthy of her confidences. She often ends up imagining the worst: that he has someone else, that he is sick or that he is planning to escape.

In the relationship of love, man is like a rubber band, he periodically needs to move away, find himself, detach himself, and then come back more charged. During the separation his energy returns to grow, he rediscovers passion, emotion and desire, and he is ready to approach his woman again with newfound dedication. This she does not understand, it makes her feel bad, it hurts her. The more that she follows him in his estrangement, the more that she chases him, the more that he cools down, he feels controlled and bound, he grows sick. When he comes back, ready to resume the relationship from where he left off, as if nothing had happened, he finds her angry and cold. (Since I am a woman, I cannot help but think that she is right).

It seems that for Gray the woman is like a wave, dedicated to ups and downs of self-esteem, with cycles of thirty days that are singularly close to sexual ones. When she is down, at the lowest point, she just needs understanding, support, listening, waiting for her mood to rise again on its own. Often, feeling understood and not judged is enough help her. Furthermore, for women, Gray lights up, big things are worth as much as small ones. On a scale of scores, a man who works, who slaughters himself to ensure a good tenor of family life, is carrying out an operation that credits him with only one point, as an equal point would be worth giving her a rose, buying her a diamond ring, taking the dog or the garbage out. In short, one is worth one. She, poor thing, is unable to understand the difference and to make her happy, to get the full score, a single, important, generous gesture of love is not enough, but a lot of small daily attention is needed.

Gray does not seem to realize that, in order to change his attitude, a man must want to do it, he must recognize the need, he must find deficiencies in his behavior, he must be in touch with his feelings and have the patience to work on himself. But where is such a man to be found? How does a husband who never listens, one for whom his wife is invisible and necessary as a piece of furniture in the house, become an attentive, thoughtful being, capable of saying to her: “Love, I’m busy right now but in ten minutes you will have all my consideration, understanding and solidarity? “ Come on…

And, to conclude, we can say that, evidently, Gray has only come into contact with American couples. If he had known an Italian couple he would inevitably have come up with the mother’s problem, and, at the 101 points in which he describes the little things a man must do to ingratiate himself with his wife, in addition to lowering the toilet seat, he would have added in big letters:

REMEMBER THAT SHE COMES BEFORE YOUR MOTHER!