John Gray, "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus"

From the seventies to the nineties it was a flourishing of American self-help manuals: how to strengthen self-esteem, how to understand yourself, how to improve your social performance and relationships with others.

There is no lady who has not read “Women who love too much”, by Robin Norwood (in pure seventies awareness style), identifying herself in the pathetic figure hanging on the wire of a phone that does not ring. We have all had at least a look at “Your erroneous areas”, by Wayne Dyer (1977) or “Emotional Intelligence”, by Daniel Goleman. But there is a text that has beaten all the others and that has remained in the ranking 121 weeks and has sold 50 million copies: “Men come from Mars, Women from Venus”, written in 1993 by John Gray, a psychologist specialized in the study of couple problems.

Personally Ifeel a certain annoyance towards those who think they have the “remedy for everything”, towards those who believe that it is enough to modify their behavior a little to make everything change around them. In my opinion, there is no pill of happiness or magic wand capable of transforming an unsatisfactory relationship into a rewarding one. I must however recognize this text, despite the annoying simplification of the problems and their solutions, the merit of having focused on some points that cause misunderstandings in the couple and, I add, also in friendships and social relations in general.

We all knew that men and women come from different planets and speak opposing, mutually incomprehensible languages. But Gray pointed out that if a woman externalizes she does it to let off steam. That’s it. She doesn’t expect advice, she doesn’t want easy solutions. Indeed, a possible solution irritates her because it diminishes the extent of her bottomless pain. If a woman complains, it is for the pleasure and the need to complain, for the happiness of feeling so unhappy. The man, faced with a woman who suffers, feels embarrassment, annoyance and displeasure, therefore he wants to make himself useful and elaborate possible settlement. And this is the best way to infuriate the woman more, since she does not feel understood, validated and justified in her anguish, in a word, she does not feel understood, listened to, supported.

The man, then, even the one devoted and in love, periodically feels the need to hide in his “cave”, especially if he has a problem. The natural reaction of a woman to the same problem is to “dissect it”, to be sorry for it, to make others participate. The man’s is not. Man needs to work it out in silence, to understand how he can deal with it alone, to find solutions based solely on his own strength. Therefore he is silent, moves away, closes in on himself. If she pursues him, he becomes elusive, nervous, until the quarrel and the clash, or he falls silent. The more she asks him what’s wrong, the more he doesn’t know what to say. She is mistakenly convinced that it is her duty to take an interest in him at that moment, that “talking would do him good”, while for him it is the opposite. This is difficult for women to understand and accept, women have been educated about sacrifice, emotional participation, active listening and not behaving in this way makes them feel guilty. If she had a problem, the first thing she would do would be to externalize it, and she is convinced that by keeping everything inside he is hurting himself and that she must help him to open up. She also feels hurt, humiliated by his lack of trust, since he does not consider her worthy of his confidences. She often ends up imagining the worst: that he has another woman, that he is ill or that he meditates his escape.

In the love relationship, the man is like an elastic band, he periodically needs to move away, find himself, detach himself, and then return more charged. During the separation his energy grows back, he finds passion, emotion and desire again, and is ready to approach his woman with new-found dedication. This she does not understand, it makes her feel bad, it hurts her. The more she follows him in his departure, the more she chases him, the more he cools down, he feels controlled and tied. When he returns home, ready to resume the relationship from the point where he left it, as if nothing had happened, she is angry and cold. (Since I am a woman, I cannot help thinking that it is good to send him to hell.)

It seems that for Gray the woman is like a wave, dedicated to ups and downs of self-esteem, with thirty day cycles singularly close to the sexual ones. When she is down, at the lowest point, she only needs understanding, support, listening, waiting for her mood to rise again on her own. Often, feeling understood and not judged is enough to revive her.

In addition, for women big things are as good as small ones. On a scale of scores, a man who works, who wears himself out to ensure a good standard of living for the family, is performing an operation that credits him with only one point, as an equal point would be giving her a rose, buying her a ring of diamonds , taking the dog or the trash out. In short, one is worth one. She is unable to understand the difference and to make her happy, to get the full score, a single, important, generous, loving gesture is not enough but it takes a lot of small daily attentions.

Gray does not seem to realize that, to change his attitude, a man must want to do it, he must recognize the need, he must find shortcomings in his behaviour, he must be in touch with his own feelings and have the patience to work on himself.

But where is such a man? How a husband who never listens, one for whom his woman is invisible and necessary as a piece of furniture in the house, becomes an attentive, caring being, capable of saying to her: “Love, I’m busy right now but in ten minutes you will have all my consideration, understanding and solidarity?” Come on!

And, to conclude, I can say that, evidently, Gray only came into contact with American couples. If he had known an Italian one, the mother’s problem would inevitably come out, and, to the 101 points in which he describes the little things a man must do to ingratiate himself with his wife, in addition to lowering the toilet axis, he would have added in large letters: REMEMBER THAT SHE COMES BEFORE YOUR MOTHER !