Can men and women hear each other

I hold the phone to my ear for the second hour, and my mood deteriorates. We are talking with my friend Nadia. More precisely, not “we are talking,” but she excitedly complains about her husband. Nadya is worried that Sergey did not discuss plans for the summer with her, but simply put before the fact: “we are going to Finland in July.”

Recently, they don’t talk much with each other at all, he often disappears from friends, as if it’s easier for him to communicate with them. His ironic remarks no longer look like tenderness and are sometimes quite offensive … A loving couple is going through a period of mutual misunderstanding and cannot find a common language. Maybe because he is a man and she is a woman?

Soul bisexuality

“It is important for a woman to be sure that she is loved, and for this she needs not only intimacy, but also words,” psychologists Allan and Barbara Pease explain in the book Why Men Want Sex, But Women Want Love. But the man is silent, and she perceives his silence as a lack of interest in her.

A woman needs to keep in mind: the male brain is organized in such a way that it is more difficult for men to express their feelings in words. It is easier to report facts, to analyze, to give advice.”

But are we so incomprehensible to each other? In part, this mutual misunderstanding is one of the common myths. In fact, the opposite sex is not so alien to us, because we have a psychic bisexuality discovered by Sigmund Freud.

“Each of us has both a masculine and a feminine beginning,” explains psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin. “From childhood, we believed that in us, born from a father and mother, there is the blood of both. So, their psyche, attraction and love.

In every adult, the whole spectrum of previous states remains, including in love relationships. And at any age, childhood feelings can come over us, when a man wants to be at his mother’s breast again, and a girl wakes up in a woman who is drawn to cling to her father.

Patriarchy in inheritance

Mental “bisexuality” helps to understand each other, but only in part. A dialogue between a man and a woman can only occur if neither of them dominates in the relationship. In modern society, we have become closer to equality, but the centuries-old primacy of men, often an unconscious sense of their greater social significance, still affects our communication.

“Recently, I was appointed chief accountant of a large publishing house,” says 35-year-old Evgenia. “I can’t say that my husband was jealous of my promotion, but now, when I come home from work tired and nervous, he says that I’m wasting my life on all these invoices, reports, debit and credit. Maybe he thinks that I, like all women, make an elephant out of a fly. But it hurts me that he brushes aside what I’m really interested in.”

“On the one hand, over the past hundred years there have been dramatic changes in ideas about how a woman can behave and how a man can behave,” says anthropologist Marina Butovskaya. – On the other hand, traditionally in Russia a man is the head of the house. Therefore, if a woman outside the family begins to dominate, then at home she no longer agrees to obey. In order to avoid a conflict, it is very important for a woman to find the right tone.

After all, the female psyche is more stable than the male: a woman historically came to her husband’s family, to which she was forced to adapt. The success of the marriage and the duration of the family depended on this.

“And the men didn’t have to adapt,” the anthropologist continues. “They were extracting resources and had to be hard, strong, resilient.” Fine-tuning for communication and mutual understanding was not provided for by evolution.

The brain, the unconscious and other obstacles

There is no greater test for a relationship than a woman’s “need to talk,” especially considering that in reality, 80% of our communication takes place without words. But this desire is not a whim, but a property of the female brain.

“Compared to boys, girls read more fluently and start speaking earlier, they learn a foreign language more easily,” says Marina Butovskaya. – The fact is that in women, both hemispheres are involved in solving problems and experiencing emotions, while in men, either the right or the left.

This is due to the influence of female sex hormones – estrogens – on the embryo: they stimulate the formation of connections between the hemispheres of the brain. Therefore, a woman can do several things at the same time, and a man – one thing.

In particular, she can speak and listen at the same time, which, of course, is hard for men to believe. Women generally have 30% more neural connections involved in speech. In men, the left hemisphere is responsible for speech (even they listen mainly with the right ear, which corresponds to the left hemisphere), but speech functions are not tied to any special zone.

Perhaps this is the reason for male indifference to conversations. Yes, and among the clients of speech therapists, as you know, there are more boys.

“A woman, of course, can talk about her feelings and relationships with a partner, but at the same time not seeking a declaration of love from him, because a man is afraid to talk about her. For him, to say the words “I love you” means to admit that he has a passion for a woman that can subdue him. Therefore, men try to talk about other things, – Andrey Rossokhin explains.

– At an unconscious level, a man experiences a primary fear – the fear of being absorbed by a woman. This fear is born in the male unconscious as a fear of the mother – her strong, but absorbing love. And, even separated from his mother, he is still afraid of being absorbed again – now by his wife or lover.

So what to do? Remember that, men and women, we express our thoughts and feelings in different ways and understand what we hear differently. Recognize that this difference is one of the attractive aspects of communication between us. Finally, accept that two people don’t always need words. Where words fail, feelings speak.