If you are a woman, I
am sure sometimes, if not often you happen to feel disappointed by the way your
couple responds to what you need him to. For instance, you want him to listen
carefully to your grumble about your boss, but what he did is to your thinking,
not as a good listener because he cannot move his eyes from the television
screen. Then you start to get mad but he insists on saying that he is listening
to you! Well, it happened to me sometime in the past, but I finally understood
that it has something to do with the distinction of brain structure between men
and women which to me, has some philosophical issues.
In the case sample
above, the condition reveals the basic differences between how men and women
communicate ruled by the brains. Women brain tends to have bigger sense of
emotion as women have larger deep limbic system. Meanwhile men brain tends to
be task-oriented. So, what your couple does is truly listening to your saying
but he does not simply and easily capture the emotion that you feel. What he
does is trying to analyze what was happening by linking each detail of the
information given. Thus, he may give more logical opinion or solution. However,
in this same case, the other possibility is which is worse; your couple does
indeed not pay attention. In this case, it is not because he ignores you or
considering you hyperbolize everything but it is due to men brain cannot cope
with doing more than one thing at once. Men have fewer connecting fiber between
the hemispheres. So, men cannot branch their attention as good as women do.
Nevertheless, men may focus on one problem better than women. Regarding the
case sample, your couple may be so deeply absorbed by the TV program that he
could not really pay attention to you. Personally, I think this difference has
been designed to meet the need of men and women daily life. Women brain is
designed to be able to do more things at once, because women have indeed larger
role in life. For example, as a working mom, we often deal with preparing the
documents needed to be brought to the office while also finding the shock for
the kids and answering a telephone call! On the other side, men get more
leadership position, perhaps for they have better projection on only one goal
problem which is sharp and deep.
The different brain structure also influences the
language capability and language choice between men and women. Research has
found that women achieve more success in language learning. As an English
teacher for years, I notice that my female students are better in learning the
foreign language. It is due to women process language in both hemispheres while
men dominantly do it in the left hemisphere. In addition, linguists have also
found that men and women have different words choice to express a similar
thing. Some words are more associated with women such as lovely, beautiful,
cute and some other similar adjectives which sound more feminine. Men, tend use
words such as great, good, brilliant, and short of.
These whole differences
may even be recognized in kids. If you are a mom like me, you will notice the
difference. My little boy will usually deeply focus on his new toy, by
sometimes breaking it into pieces because he wants to know what are there. So
he will ignore my calling. On the opposite, my little daughter will tend to ask
me to play doll with her. Again, this deals with the structure that men brain
focuses on the object while women’s need to maintain an emotional relationship.
So, just don’t easily
get frustrated if you find this annoying case in your relationship. As men and
women think differently as we have different brain structure, designed based on
the need of each.
