Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improve Your Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress

Edward O. Wilson, a world-famous sociobiologist from Harvard University, has systematically observed our gender tendencies. He found that women are more empathetic and security-seeking than men and have more developed verbal and social skills. In comparison, men tend to be more independent, aggressive, and dominant and demonstrate greater spatial and mathematical skills.

In practical terms, this means that situations that could be simple to resolve become very tedious and tiresome when we don’t understand and accept our differences. For example, when you discuss how you are going to invest your savings, a man is generally more of a risk taker and a woman will be more conservative. Certainly how we are raised will make a big difference, but generally speaking, men feel more comfortable taking risks, while women prioritize security. With an understanding of this difference, a man doesn’t have to take it personally when she asks more questions. She is not necessarily mistrusting him but simply seeking to meet her greater need for security. When he is more impulsive and wants to find solutions right away, she can realize this is his nature rather than misinterpret his tone by presuming he doesn’t care about what she feels, wants, or needs.

Studies confirm there are real differences in the way men and women estimate time, judge speed, do math, orient themselves in space, and visualize objects in 3-D. Men tend to excel in these skills. Women have more developed relationship abilities, sensitivity to emotions in others, emotional and aesthetic expression and appreciation, and language skills. Women are adept at performing detailed, planned tasks.

Without an understanding of this last difference, a woman can feel neglected when a man waits to the last minute to plan time with her or when he doesn’t anticipate her needs. If a woman understands these differences, she no longer resents needing to ask for support, because she realizes that his brain simply doesn’t work the way hers does. In the event that her partner does something without her having to ask, she will appreciate the extra effort he is making rather than taking it for granted.

Women’s brains are designed to consider and anticipate the emotions, sensitivities, and needs of others. Men, on the other hand, are more acutely aware of their own needs, or at least their needs for achieving the goal at hand. Since men were hunters for thousands of years, they needed this ability to protect themselves in the wild. In the home camp, a woman’s life insurance was making sure she cared for others. If she did so, then they would care for her at her time of need.

When you write your will, you have the opportunity to donate your body organs to help others after you die. Faced with this option, nine out of ten women donate their organs, while nine out of ten men do not. By nature, women tend to be giving, even after their death. A woman’s greatest challenge in learning to cope more effectively with stress is to begin caring for herself as much as she is caring for others.

A woman’s greatest challenge is to begin caring for herself as much as she is caring for others.

Why Our Brains Developed Differently

Our brains might have developed the way they did because cavemen and cavewomen had very defined roles to ensure their survival. Our male ancestors hunted and needed to travel long distances in pursuit of game. Strong navigational skills allowed men to become better hunters and providers. A man had to depend on himself to find his way home. In those days, asking for directions was not always an option.

Our female ancestors gathered food near the home and cared for the children. They formed strong emotional attachments to their children and the other women, on whom they depended when the men were hunting. Women had to track their immediate environment as they gathered nuts and berries for survival. Maybe that’s why women today have the ability to find things around the home and in the refrigerator that their partners seem to be incapable of seeing.

Scientists speculate that women’s advantage in verbal skills could have resulted from their physical size. Men had the bodily strength to fight with other men. Women used language instead to argue and persuade. Women also used language because they could. When a man was in danger, he needed to stay quiet much of the time. To this day, faced with stress, a man will often become quiet. As a result, men go to their cave to recover from stress, while women have adapted by learning to talk about their stresses. By letting others know about her problems, she would make it easier to get their support. Unless she talked, others simply would not know what she needed.

Our brains developed with gender differences to ensure our survival. These adaptations have taken thousands of years to occur. It is unrealistic to expect our brains to change suddenly to adapt to the vast changes in our gender roles in the last fifty years. These changes are at the core of the stress that is causing Mars and Venus to collide. If we are to thrive and not just survive, we need to update our relationship skills in ways that reflect our natural abilities, tendencies, and needs.

The advances in neuroscientific research have allowed scientists to discover significant anatomical and neuropsychological differences between male and female brains that explain our observable behavioral differences.

Single Focus on Mars / Multitasking on Venus

A woman’s brain has a larger corpus callosum, the bundle of nerves that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This link, which produces cross-talk between the hemispheres, is 25 percent smaller in men. In practical terms, this means men do not connect feelings and thoughts as readily as women do. In a very real sense, women have superhighways connecting their feelings to speech, while men have back roads with plenty of stop signs. Some researchers believe that the integration of the two lobes may be the source of “women’s intuition”—in other words, whole-brain processing.

This stronger connection between different parts of the brain increases a woman’s ability to multitask. When she is listening, she is also thinking, remembering, feeling, and planning all at the same time.

A man’s brain is single-focused, while a woman’s brain tends to multitask.

A man’s brain is highly specialized, using a specific part of a single hemisphere to accomplish a task. A woman’s brain is more diffuse, using both hemispheres for many tasks. This neurological difference allows men to focus and to block out distractions for long periods of time. On the other hand, women tend to see things in a broader context, from a larger vantage point.

Men tend to do one thing at a time in their brains and in life. When a man is under stress, he can easily forget his partner and her needs. He may be focusing on how to get that promotion, so he forgets to bring home the milk. A woman can easily misinterpret his forgetful behavior as uncaring. After she has misunderstood his behavior in this manner, it is even harder for her to risk asking him for more support.

This insight can help a woman not to take it personally when he is at his computer and seems annoyed when she asks him a question. For her, it is a simple task to shift her attention when she is interrupted, but for him it is much more difficult. If he seems annoyed, she can remember that it is much more difficult for him to shift gears rather than take it personally.

In a similar manner, women become annoyed when a man tries to narrow down the focus of her conversation to a single point. He may interrupt her and ask her to get to the point, or ask what she wants him to do when she is still just connecting all the dots of what she is talking about. Quite commonly men will say, “I understand,” but a woman hears that he wants her to finish talking.

He feels she doesn’t have to continue, because he understands. Since she is still in the process of discovering what it is she wants to say, she knows he cannot fully understand. There is not just one point when she is expressing herself. By taking more time to listen to her many details, a man helps his partner to come back to a more centered and stress-free perspective.

Likewise, when a woman minimizes her interruptions of a man’s focused activities, she helps him to keep his stress levels down. Leaving a man alone and ignoring him is sometimes the best way to support him. Understanding that these tendencies are based on our brain differences frees us from taking things personally and reveals practical ways to support our partners in coping better with their stresses.

Leaving a man alone and ignoring him is sometimes the best way to support him.

Men separate information, emotions, and perceptions into separate compartments in their brains, while women tend to link their experiences together, reacting to multiple issues with their whole brain. This is one of the reasons a woman has a greater tendency to become overwhelmed with too much to do when she is under stress. While women tend to reach out to take in more information, under stress men tend to focus on the most important thing to do.

While women tend to reach out to take in more information, under stress men tend to focus on determining the most important thing to do.

This difference in brain structure between men and women has another important effect on stress relief. A man can more easily disengage from his serious, responsible left brain and allow it to rest and regenerate. When a man is stressed, he can simply change his focus to a hobby or watching TV and he begins to relax. He shifts from using his left brain, which is logical, practical, and reality-based, to his right brain, which is feeling, risk-taking, and fantasy-based. By making this shift, he automatically disconnects from the stress of his responsibilities. In this manner, a man can shift gears and disengage from everyday worries with greater ease.

A woman does not have this luxury, since the connective tissue between the two hemispheres of her brain won’t allow her to disengage as easily. When she is on the right side of her brain, trying to relax or have a fun time, she is still connected to her analytical and rational left brain.

On a practical note, understanding this difference helps men to recognize the futility of making comments to a woman like “Just forget it” or “Don’t worry about it.” She can’t make this shift the way a man does, but she can talk about what is bothering her. On Mars, if a man can’t solve a problem, his way of coping is to forget about it until he can do something about it. On Venus, if a woman can’t solve a problem, then she feels, “At least we can talk about it.” Talking with someone who cares about her well-being has the power to stimulate the neurotransmitters needed to reduce stress levels in a woman’s brain. By remembering her problems, a woman can actually free herself from their gripping hold on her and her mood.

White Matter vs. Gray Matter

Men and women possess two different types of brains, designed equally for intelligent behavior. Men have approximately 6.5 times as much gray matter as women. Women have almost 10 times the white matter that men do. Information-processing centers are located in gray matter. The connections or networks among these processing centers are composed of white matter. These differences explain why men tend to excel in tasks involving gray matter local processing— like mathematics—while women excel at integrating and assimilating information from gray matter regions, required for language skills, because of their abundance of connecting white matter.

This physical difference in our brain composition helps explain why we communicate so differently. A woman’s brain is busy connecting everything. The more she cares about something, the more she connects it to other things going on in her brain.

For example, when she sees a movie or visits a friend, she may have a lot to say about it. Meanwhile a guy may have nothing to say unless the movie happens to hit a particular area of interest. She assumes that he does not want to talk about the movie, but he actually has little to say. With this new insight, she can be assured that he is interested in hearing what she has to say, even though he has little to offer in return. When a woman gives up expecting her partner to talk more, not only does he appreciate her willingness to talk, but gradually he begins to share more.

When men have little to say, women often take it personally, as if he doesn’t want to share.

This same idea applies to asking a man about his day or a trip he has taken. When he has little to say, he is not intentionally hiding what happened; he just doesn’t think that much about it, and as a consequence he doesn’t remember much. She looks forward to explaining how everything connects. The process of communicating actually helps her brain reduce stress levels, while it has little benefit for him.

Why Talk Is Big on Venus

Two sections of the brain, Broca’s area in the frontal lobe and Wernicke’s area in the temporal lobe, are associated with language. These areas are larger in women, and that explains why women are so verbal. Researchers have located six or seven language centers in both hemispheres of a woman’s brain, but for men, language is only located in the left hemisphere. Since men have fewer language centers, it is not only harder for them to express what they experience, but they do not feel the need.

A man’s language centers are particularly activated when he is solving a problem. Some men will talk more at the beginning of the relationship, because at that time a man is primarily introducing himself, and talking is a way to “solve the problem” of letting her know about himself and how he feels for her. Once that problem is solved, his language centers are not easily activated. Likewise, his listening center is most active when he is solving a problem.

Women’s brains are constructed to communicate and express feelings. Compared to a man’s brain, a woman’s is much busier, always articulating reactions and perceptions. Many parts of her brain are fully engaged when she is talking. Men have a harder time connecting their emotions with their thoughts and articulating what they feel. This difference is a source of much friction in relationships. Understanding that a man is not withholding when he is silent can release a woman from the frustration of getting her partner to talk about his day in greater detail.

With practice, a man can learn to be a good listener, which is actually one of the most potent ways to help a woman lower her stress levels. A woman may like it when a man opens up and shares, but unless she first feels heard, it will not lower her stress. As men get better at listening to women and women get better at appreciating this step, men become more open and share more.

Math vs. Feelings

The IPL (inferior parietal lobule) is a region on both sides of the brain, located just above the level of the ears. The size of the IPL correlates with mathematical ability. An enlarged left IPL was found in Albert Einstein’s brain, as well as in those of other physicists and mathematicians. The left IPL, more developed in men, is involved with perception of time and speed and the ability to rotate 3-D figures. These abilities have a lot to do with the Martian love of video games. More than 90 percent of video game users are from Mars.

This is also why men seem to rush women to the point when they are talking or making decisions. He is acutely aware of the time she is taking to talk. While listening, he is also working hard to determine what needs to be done to solve her problem as soon as possible. This is not because he doesn’t care about her, but because he does. He wants to help, but doesn’t realize it would be an even greater help to ask more questions rather than rush to the point.

When women talk, a man is acutely aware of the time she is taking and feels an inner urgency to help her solve her problems.

In women, the right side of the IPL is larger. The left side of the brain has more to do with more linear, reasonable, and rational thought, while the right side of the brain is more emotional, feeling, and intuitive. Men are typically drawn to solving problems, while women have the tendency to understand the dynamics of a problem, the various relationships between the different parts of a problem.

Women can also become frustrated when someone is taking too long to get to the point. By multiplying this frustration by ten, you have what the average man experiences listening to his wife complain about a list of problems in her life. This does not mean that she cannot share her feelings, but it does mean she has to do so in a manner that will work for him as well. We will explore this art in chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo).

The IPL also allows the brain to process information from the senses, particularly in selective attention, like when women are able to respond to a baby’s crying in the night.

Studies have shown that the right LPL, dominant in women, is linked to the memory and manipulation of spatial relationships. It is also related to the perception of our own feelings—a driving force on Venus.

While men are particularly good at following the ball on a football field at a distance, women are adept at noticing subtleties of their own feelings and others’. One of the problems women have is accurately interpreting a man’s feelings. For example, he looks frustrated, and she thinks he is not interested in what she is saying. In truth, he is simply trying to make sense of what she is saying so that he can be of help. She is correct in noticing his frustration, but her interpretation can be completely off the mark.

Our Brains Differ in Response to Danger