6. Understanding, accepting, and appreciating sex differences.

Perhaps the main reason that being sensitive to your partner is difficult is that she is not only a separate and unique human being, and therefore in some respects not like you, but also because the two of you belong to different cultures.

Of course, one of the greatest attractions women have for us is that they are different. They are small where we are large, soft where we are hard, curvy where we are flat, and they have an orifice where we have a protrusion. But they differ from us in other ways as well, and these differences often drive us crazy, and does the same to them. Since the beginning of time, men and women have been exasperated and frustrated in trying to understand and deal with each other.

Men complain: Why are women so emotional and such nags? Why do they want to talk so much? Why are they so weird about sex? What in God's name do they want? Is there any way to satisfy them? From women come a different set of grievances: Why are men so withholding? Why are they so focused on sex and so unromantic? Why can't they remember a birthday or anniversary? From both men and women come the cry: "Why can't they be more like us!" The common phrase "the war of the sexes" indicates the strength of our feelings.

One could easily get the impression that men and women are totally different, as this man's statement implies: "If the first space visitor arrived from Mars, and was male, I'd have more in common with him than with any woman on Earth." In fact, because we are all humans, we are more similar than different. We all breathe air, sleep, eat, eliminate, use language, think, and feel. If it were possible to quantity everything, we would probably conclude that women and men are 90 percent similar. But it's that remaining 10 percent that causes all the trouble.

Even in something as fundamental as the use of language, there are differences between the typical man and the typical woman. Sex therapist Victor Barbieri sums it up this way: "Men and women use the same words but speak different languages." As Deborah Tannen demonstrated in her You Just Don't Understand, the definitions of even simple terms like talk and conversation depend heavily on whether you are a she or a he. And clearly men and women don't necessarily have the same things in mind when they use words such as relationship, love, sex, and intimacy.

Girls and boys specialize in different areas. Boys learn to achieve and perform in the outside world, while girls get more practice dealing with feelings, communicating, and relating. In addition, males and females come to sex from different perspectives -- girls approaching via love and sensuality, boys more from lust and a desire to prove themselves. While men and women both want love and sex, they have separate styles of love and being sexual.

It is these separate styles that justify thinking of men and women as representing different cultures and that result in no end of misunderstandings, confusion, and conflicts. Here is a common example:

HE: "Everything between us was so tense after our spat on Sunday. I thought if we made love, things would get better."

SHE: "How can we make love? We haven't talked in days."

The differences between the sexes affect our perceptions and understandings of ourselves, our partners, and our relationships and can make us feel bad about all three. It helps enormously to understand and accept these differences. The more you understand and accept your male tendencies, the better and less guilty you'll feel. The more you understand that your partner is acting as she is not because she wants to thwart you, not because she's neurotic, and not necessarily because of anything you've done, but simply because this is the way women tend to be, the better you'll feel both about her and about yourself.

I now turn to some of the main differences between men and women that can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts. Please keep in mind that I do not believe and am not saying that one way is better than another. The point is to promote understanding, not to pass judgment. There are, of course, exceptions to every single item. But the existence of an exception, or even many of them, does not necessarily invalidate a rule.

From "The New Male Sexuality" by Bernie Zilbergeld, PhD. Copyright © 1992 by Bernie Zilbergeld. Used by permission of Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

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