What I've learned about men and marriage

[godwulf]

I say, why can’t you accept your partner’s differences and not try to change them.

Sounds like, "Can't we all just get along?!"

Seriously, the post by jinx, in pseudo-response to mine, was really pretty dumb, and didn't seriously address my post in anything like a thoughtful way - it was just sort of the rhetorical equivilent of "Oh, yeah?".

In the brief time that I've been reading and posting here, I guess I've gotten spoiled in that most participants seem to have sufficient respect for, and confidence in, their own intellects to keep things on a slightly higher level - but I guess there's at least one in every crowd, so to speak.

I believe that I do, for the most part, recognize and respect - even if it is, on occasion, in something of a resigned manner - the differences in temperment and psychology between, for example, my wife and me, and they really don't make me angry or precipitate a fight between us...they're just a fact of life. I can recognize our differences without their becoming a point of too much contention, in other words, and I suspect that she's pretty much the same way...most of the time.

Without trying to generalize from my own experience too radically, however, I will say that when we do fight, it's usually as the result of some conflict arising out of traditional (some might say stereotypical) gender differences, such as the ones I mentioned earlier. She gets fed up because I "won't share", or am not sufficiently sensitive to her need to vent endlessly about the slightest thing...or I have the temerity to actually make a suggestion as to how to fix a problem, rather than to merely listen and express understanding and empathy.

My wife is one of the most intelligent and articulate people I've ever known; however, on those occasions when we have a really huge fight (thankfully only a couple of times a year, if that) it seems that they always begin with - and are fueled by - her anger at some 'guy' behavior that I'm exhibiting, and not the other way around.

Undoubtedly the experience of others has been different, to some extent. I'm just saying that, among the other men with whom I've discussed this, it's pretty common to just laugh about the differences a little and get on with life - it's the women in our lives who (at least in our view) tend to take those kinds of things too seriously.

I heard someone on the radio a while back, reading a list of "Things Guys Say" and "What They Really Mean"; the one that stuck in my head was "What's wrong?", which translated as "What unnecessary, self-inflicted psychological trauma are you experiencing now?" You see, fair or not, generally true or not, men do tend to think that women take things too seriously much of the time...and that would include our differences.