This excerpt from The Secrets of Happily Married Men by Scott Haltzman is long, but worth reading. It's courtesy of ABCNews.com. Haltzman says that pop culture, especially movies, has create a false ideal of men: Hollywood's romantic hero is the way women wish men would be: sensitive, attentive, sefless. In other words, more like a woman.
Haltzman doesn't say men don't have those qualities, just that their different neurochemistries make it pretty much impossible for them to be like women, and we should all just accept that men and women are different.
The Secrets of Happily Married Men
Although the lasting positive gains of this movement are undeniable in the workplace, in civil rights, in the courts, and in our homes, militant feminists were, and still are, working from a false platform. Women should certainly be considered equals to men, but women are not the same as men. There are biological differences in our mental and physical makeup that cannot be denied or ignored in our quest to understand each other.
To make your marriage great without giving up who you are, it's important to recognize that some of your so-called failings as a husband are very often not failings at all, but simply the result of the fact that you and your wife do not think and feel the same way.
As someone who still would say she's a feminist, boy is this hard for me to accept. But my own experience, along with what I've learned about oxytocin and its interaction with estrogen, testosterone and vasopressin, shows me its truth.
Still, is there some biochemical reason why men won't squeeze out the kitchen sponge when they're done with it?
