All men have Y chromosomes. There are not many other statements about the sexes that can be applied with total universality. The vast majority of statements about the sexes are of the order men are taller than women. In other words, for most statements you will find a significant proportion of exceptions, and if you happen to be an exception, there is usually no cause for embarrassment. You or your partner may well delight in the fact that you are exceptional. There is nothing perverted about the fact that some men like tall women, for example.

Sex generalizations provide useful clues to look for differences between you and your partner, but never accept any as gospel. You must thoroughly test each clue before assuming it applies to your relationship. I once dated a woman who in many ways was more masculine than myself. In measures in which men usually excel, she was more in the masculine direction than me. And yet I found her exciting, sexy, fascinating. By now many of you are beginning to wonder about me. Let me add that in areas where women usually excel, she was also better than me. She was just good at everything!

Are Women More Complicated Than Men?

There seems a common belief that women are more complicated than men. This belief has perhaps contributed to more marriage problems than any other belief. Men generally conclude from it that women are so hard to understand that there’s no point in even trying to understand them. (Women who try to maintain an aura of mystery may be doing so to their own hurt.) And women tend to assume that men are so easy to understand that there is no need to even try to understand them better. So when it comes to better understanding the opposite sex, it’s often the case that men feel defeated before they start and women barely see a need to start.

‘The Male Ego’

‘The male ego’ is a very misunderstood thing. Some women show their ignorance by assuming there is no female equivalent and so imagining that in this area men are the weak, silly ones.

For ‘the male ego’ substitute the words ‘a man’s need to feel masculine’. A woman has an equal need to feel feminine. A woman’s sense of femininity, however, usually focuses more on her physical appearance, and a man’s sense of masculinity focuses more on performance.

Men and women, from an early age, are driven by a compulsion to conform to what they perceive to be the characteristics of their gender, even if this involves self-torment that could lead to death. Young men might endanger their lives by reckless acts to ‘prove’ their masculinity but young women are much more sensible and mature. Or are they? Ever heard of anorexia? Young women in the western world come to the ridiculous conclusion that to be feminine is to be thin. As a consequence, there is hardly a woman who has not at some time deprived herself and hated her body because she is not as skinny as she believes femininity requires. For some, this becomes more important than life itself. As many women feel duty bound to deprive themselves of the physical nourishment they need, many men feel the compulsion to torture themselves by emotional deprivation. Unless you are so ignorant as to think that a woman with anorexia can easily reverse her relentless march to starvation, do not imagine that men can easily stop being driven by the need to afflict themselves.

All Christians have a good idea about how Peter must have felt after denying his Savior. He was mortified. He had failed as a Christian. However could he live with himself? This knowledge of what it’s like for a Christian to feel he’s failed as a Christian should give Christian women some idea of how a man can feel if he thinks he has failed as a man. It’s not necessarily a sign of weakness or failure, it might simply be a sign of very high standards.

If people fail in their career, they might be able to change careers. But people are stuck with their gender for life. If a woman feels she’s failed to be a woman, or a man feels he’s failed to be a man, it’s an inescapable dilemma.

What a man feels constitutes masculinity may well astound you. It will vary considerably from man to man, depending upon idiosyncrasies in that person’s male role model at critical times in his childhood.

It’s embarrassing to admit the concepts of masculinity I’ve been lumbered with. After these confessions, if ever you see a tall, skinny guy skulking down the street with a bucket over his head, please don’t tell everyone who it is. Most men are stuck with equally weird concepts that embarrass and torment them. Here are some of the things that at times would have caused me to feel a failure as a man:

show emotion

open a car door for a woman

buy flowers

wear deodorant

wear long underwear

eat toast that was not almost burned.

How Could This Be?

I lived with both my parents and my maternal grandparents. I was very close to my grandfather – in some ways closer than I was to my father – but for some reason my Dad was my role model. (Dads are far more important than many people realize.) Interestingly, my grandfather wore long underwear and deodorant and ate lightly toasted bread. My father, however, did none of the things listed above. Had I not had a father I would have gleaned my concepts of manliness almost entirely from observing my grandfather. Had I been deprived of both, it would have been some other male or males. Television may have played a part. Had I been a child today, it might – perish the thought – have been Homer Simpson.

As a child I viewed opening a car door for a woman as assuming a role of total servitude, and it was not manly to so grossly humiliate oneself. I saw deodorant as a sneaky attempt to feminize men by making them wear perfume. I thought long underwear looked ridiculous and that it was therefore humiliating to wear, and that it’s unmanly to give in to cold. My father never told me any of these things but he never opened a door for Mom, and never wore deodorant or long underwear, so I was sure a real man would avoid those things. The rest was my childish attempt to rationalize my Dad’s behavior.

Let’s examine the toast issue in a little more depth. My father liked toast that was so dark that it was almost burned. He had other eating peculiarities but they didn’t affect my view of masculinity. I think my father could have had his toast preference without it influencing me, but he made a little bit of a fuss about it by complaining if his toast wasn’t done to his preference and I guess my Mom must have complained about his preference. So here I’m seeing a difference between Mom and Dad – a difference between my ideal man and my ideal woman. And if they were to differ, I’d identify with my male role model. Neither she nor my sister (my only sibling) liked toast that way. They were not men. I didn’t like toast that way either, and I was not yet a man, so this helped confirm to me that a real man must eat burned toast. Furthermore, there were aspects about burned toast that seemed macho – it tastes a bit bitter, is rough, hard, and it is messy because ugly black crumbs go everywhere when you eat it. This macho aspect is significant. Men often get stuck with the unshakable feeling that they must endure unnecessary pain and unpleasant things just because choosing something they would actually enjoy more would cause them to feel failures as men. A lot of women feel this same way toward men. They think if something looks nice or feels nice, then it’s not suitable for a man. They feel a man must have something that’s plain or ugly or rough or in some other way unpleasant.

Childish

My thoughts about masculinity were childish concepts, typical of a child’s attempt to grapple with reality and interpret the adult world. There was nothing foolish or unintelligent about it. It was a good attempt for someone so young. When a little boy or girl looks at a key male figure, he or she is unable to discern exactly what distinctives about that male figure are in line with society’s concept of the ideal man. They are likely to seize as a significant feature of masculinity anything that differentiates their role model from the other women and children in their life.

When a boy matures and gets to observe other examples of manhood, he may discover that his concept of masculinity is a little warped, relative to society as a whole. He may realize he’s zeroed in on one person’s idiosyncrasy rather than a significant male attribute, but don’t imagine he can instantly change. Some of these things have become so ingrained that whether he likes it or not, he’ll take them with him to his grave. Rationally he might know that certain behavior is acceptable, but emotionally such behavior might be mortifying for him.

So in my case, for years I would shiver rather than wear long underwear, I would eat toast I didn’t like, and act in a way that made me less popular with girls (refuse to wear deodorant, or to buy flowers or to open a car door for someone) rather than face the mortifying prospect of feeling I had failed as a man.

Critical Time

The problem is that I reached these conclusions at a critical time in my development. You are probably familiar with animal experiments which have demonstrated that there is a critical period in an animal’s life during which it will become locked in to certain behavior. If, for instance, at a certain age a young female mouse is deprived of nesting-type material to play with, it will never make nests when it matures and has babies, no matter how much material it then has. Animals reared by hand often identify with humans rather than their own kind. You can put them with their own species as soon as they become independent, but chances are it will be too late, and they will never breed.

Unless you were childhood sweethearts, by the time you met your man he had long passed that critical age that determines his concept of masculinity. This does not mean change is absolutely impossible. It does mean that you are dealing with something very, very strong.

Are Men the Stupid Sex?

Women are just as affected by these things. It’s a well-established fact, for instance, that even though they sometimes try hard not to fall for the trap, daughters of alcoholic fathers frequently end up marrying alcoholics. If you still think it weakness that mature men should be influenced by childhood experiences, consider how a girl’s brief experience of sexual abuse can affect her for a lifetime. Yes, that’s an extreme example, but don’t tell me any of us can easily brush aside past experiences, especially those in our formative years.

A man’s concept of masculinity may bind him, but do not imagine women are free from similar pressures regarding their femininity. Remember that a woman’s concept of femininity is more tied up with appearance. Almost every woman endures unnecessary discomfort and stress in order to look more like her conception of the ideal woman, by dieting, hair removal, wearing uncomfortable shoes, and the list goes on and on. We have already mentioned how some women’s belief that to be skinny is to be feminine drives them to endanger their lives. We know how irrational anorexia is, and how resistant it is to treatment, but even when we do not understand it, we don’t use someone else’s torment as an excuse to feel superior.

As I’ve hinted, a man might be lumbered with some very weird concepts of what it means to be a man. It is no more his doing than that of a dangerously thin woman who feels that in order to be a real woman she must lose still more weight. Just as anorexia is frighteningly difficult to treat, so it is extremely difficult to liberate a man from bondage to false concepts of the demands of being masculine.

The Temperature Rises

One thing a man could easily have gathered from his role model is that it is unmasculine to wash dishes or take out the rubbish. Understandably, this subject can infuriate a woman, but just for a moment, try to see what’s at stake. Anything that touches a person’s concept of what it means to be a man or woman can become a highly emotive subject, with that person’s whole sense of self-worth at stake. I think you have some idea of what would be involved in asking a man to walk down the street wearing a dress. He would feel humiliated because that behavior is considered feminine. For him, washing dishes might be no less feminine. Of course, for some men it’s not an issue. It hinges very much on their childhood male role model’s attitude to washing dishes.

Certain household chores can become a dangerously hot issue if it threatens a man’s masculinity and the wife doesn’t realize it. She will simply imagine all that is at stake is a little physical effort. She’ll assume he’s lazy and selfish, not realizing that his whole sense of self worth is at stake.

Remember a woman’s sense of worth as a woman focuses more on appearance, so imagine how she would feel if her husband said, ‘If you love me, you won’t waste our money by removing facial hair.’ It will take no effort whatever for her to follow that request, and it makes economic sense, but most women know what devastating emotional effect it would have on many women to go through life showing facial hair. So now they should know how it can feel to make washing dishes a test of love for some men.

This, of course, is just one example. There are thousands of peculiar possibilities, and identifying the critical factors in your partner’s concept of masculinity can be most difficult. Failure to recognize it, however, will cause enormous marital problems. If it’s intricately bound with their concept of what is required of a real man, something as simple as saying ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m sorry’ can be as shattering to some men as the thought of a double mastectomy would be to their wives.

Stinking Thinking

The way we are brought up affects us far more than we are ever likely to realize, and there are still more factors than that involved in disputes between men and their partners. Consider my reaction when I discovered that a woman I was dating was repelled by the smell of my oily skin and she wanted me to wash before getting close to her. To her, the matter was simple: I was on the nose. I was lazy, dirty and inconsiderate if I didn’t change immediately. For me, unfortunately, much deeper things were involved.

It’s well established that women usually have a more acute sense of smell than their partners and that female physiology causes them to sweat less and so they are usually less exposed to the odor. Added to this physical difference, however, is the fact that in our society mothers teach their daughters to detest the smell of body odor, whereas they are usually more tolerant with their sons, whom they expect to be more active and work up a sweat. The revulsion that western women typically feel toward the smell of body odor is so real that they find it almost incomprehensible that it is actually a learned response. In the words of Julie Bawden Davis, “Smelling is a learned behavior. What smells good to one person can make another nauseated.” It’s just like people almost vomiting at the thought of eating snails whereas other people find snails delicious. Few non-western societies wash as much as we do. People in many cultures find the smell of deodorized westerners repulsive. They much prefer the smell of members of their own society, whom we would regard as stinking with B.O.

Taste and smell are closely related and one reason why I was hurt by this woman’s reaction is that I had proved for myself that one can put aside strong personal aversions. When on a foreign mission field, I taught myself to override food prejudices I had grown up with. Out of love for the people God had called me to, I ate dog, sea slug, pig brain soup, snails, seaweed, duck eggs with the duckling inside about to hatch, and I so changed my mind-set that I was actually disappointed that I missed the opportunity to eat rat. So I knew we are not helpless victims of the aversions we have grown up with.

But my hurt went deeper. Far more than men, western women are taught to see their natural bodies as inadequate and needing to be hidden behind such things as make-up. They also grow up to regard natural scent as something external, like dirt. Although I’m as much a westerner as anyone else, I don’t see it this way. Any student of nature will know how important natural scent is to courting in the animal world. I regard my scent as being as much a part of me as any other part of my body. For a woman to say she does not like my natural scent and that she could only tolerate me if I removed it or covered it with artificial scent, is to me equivalent to her saying, ‘I love you but I can’t stand the sight of your face. Don’t get me wrong: you’re a nice guy; it’s just that your face makes me feel sick. I don’t know how anyone can tolerate it. I don’t want you near me unless you hide your face so that I don’t have to see it.’

I was not exactly delighted to learn that although smell is very important to women, they find a lump of soap much more desirable than me.

I know you’re laughing – and I’m glad you are finding this entertaining – but I still find it a sad fact of western life that women prefer the smell of soap to the smell of their own men. Imagine a man being so corrupted by airbrushed photos of supermodels that he insists that his wife always covers up in his presence because he feels revulsion at the sight of a normal woman. I see the attitude toward smell that the typical woman in our society has as being tragically similar. I don’t expect to change a solitary western woman on this point. Till my dying day, the women I mix with will find the real me nauseating. They will treat me like stinking garbage unless I mask what I am really like. Regardless of whether I comply with their demands and cower in shame behind soap and deodorant, I will continue to feel hurt, and almost no one will understand.

Couples can find themselves looking down the barrel of an equally emotive issue when they discover they have totally opposed feelings toward certain aspects of lovemaking. One can find something repulsive and focus on his/her own feelings of disgust so much as to be barely aware that this reaction sends the other partner reeling under the pain of deep rejection. If you find distasteful an aspect of lovemaking that your partner desires, get inside you partner’s shoes by imagining how you would feel if your partner recoiled at the thought of kissing your lips; regarding it as disgustingly unhygienic and uncouth.

Let’s soar beyond specific examples to uncover the crux of the issue: what one partner sees as a superficial matter, but needing urgent change, can to the other seem like the most painful rejection. And a change that to one seems as easy as breathing, to the other can be like demanding a sex change.

Update: Long after writing the above the Lord finally gave me a wife. There was nothing hasty about our relationship. Although we quickly fell in love and spent very many hours every single on the phone with each other for over three years, we lived on opposite continents and did not meet until we married. I was wondering about the smell issue because it was totally unknown factor. To my astonishment, my wife adores my body odor – even when I haven’t showed for days.

Getting a Man to Change

Now of course I’m not saying men and women shouldn’t try to change. What I am saying is that they should realize that what they are asking of their partner could be far more costly than they ever imagine. I am also saying that the most loving and effective way to bring about change is not to make change a test of love, but to attempt in an unpressured way to change the deep seated view of masculinity that the man has been lumbered with. And wives must realize that to ask their men to do something that shatters their self-esteem is a double whammy for any man who feels that to submit to a woman is to lose his masculinity.

A girl I once dated tried to tell me how good it made her feel if I opened the car door for her. It moved me a little to think it was important to her, but she was way off in assuming I would immediately do it. Of course, I would do it, she thought. After all, I’d want her to feel special. But she didn’t feel awful if I didn’t open the door, she simply felt neutral. She had no conception of how awful she was asking me to feel, just so that she could feel special. She had no idea how unloved she was making me feel, by pressuring me to make her feel extra loved.

For me, opening a car door for a woman was roughly equivalent to bowing down and kissing someone’s shoes in public. (It was the feeling of public humiliation that was the hardest to bear.) What went a huge way toward curing me was being driven to my work a couple of times by a woman manager (many positions higher than me) and she opened the car door for me! That did wonders for showing me that opening a car door was not necessarily telling the whole world that you are under the thumb. Another help was a male friend of mine doing the same thing for me. It wasn’t that I discovered how good it feels to have a car door opened for one. I assume it meant a lot more to my girlfriend. But what it did was enable me to open a car door for her without feeling mortified.

Don’t, however, imagine it’s a simple matter of your man seeing some other men behaving in the manner you would like him to behave. I loved my grandfather dearly, but you will remember that I was utterly unmoved by his attitude to deodorant, etc. It could do the trick if those men acting the way you want are people whose masculinity your man admires. If, however, you deliberately point out this behavior to your man (rather than let him discover it for himself) you could undermine everything.

Here’s why

Some women who leave their husbands are later amazed to see how their former husbands treat their new partners. ‘If my husband had treated me like that, I’d never have left him!’ they exclaim, looking on in wide eyed disbelief. A major reason for the change is that the first wife made a big deal about the behavior she wanted changed. This alerted the husband to the importance of this behavior and increased his motivation to change, but it was still an enormously difficult thing for him. Her nagging, or whatever, didn’t make it the slightest bit easier for him. Moreover, because she made such a big deal of it, for him to then change would make him feel he was proving in his eyes, his wife’s eyes, and possibly the world’s eyes that he was under his wife’s thumb. Now for many a man, this is not simply a matter of pride. Feeling he is under his wife’s thumb makes him feel he has utterly lost his masculinity – that he has failed as man. Giving into his wife on this issue could affect his sex drive, his work performance, even his desire to live. With a new partner who puts no demands on him, however, he’s free to express his love by doing something his former partner had shown him that women like, without feeling emasculated by thinking that his wife has dominated him.

Of course, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the solution is to end the relationship! I am, however, alerting you to the bind a woman can put a man in.

To Your Advantage

You are sure to have sometimes worn a new dress or had your hair done differently and your husband hasn’t even noticed. That irks you. It makes you feel unappreciated. Nevertheless, it is a characteristic of husbands that works in your favor. Yes, he might have missed that more positive change until you drew his attention to it, but it also means he is probably oblivious to your fatter-tummy days, that wrinkle, how you look when you have just woken up, and so on. You needed that boost when you thought you looked good because you almost certainly see yourself through more critical eyes than your husband does. A psychological study showed that men usually see their wives as more attractive than their women really are. The man you really want, and the man you think you want, are quite different people. The last thing you really want is someone who pays close attention to your real physical appearance, because that person will be critical of you whenever you look less than stunning. What you really need is someone with an idealized image of you, and only your husband has that.

Do that bit extra from time to time to make yourself more attractive, but be mature enough in your understanding of men to bluntly draw your husband’s attention to your new dress, or whatever. And realize that he does not have to be greatly impressed because for ninety percent of the time he thinks more highly of your appearance than you do. Moreover, unless you are way above average in knowing your man’s tastes, most of your changes will appeal to you and not to him, anyhow. In fact, most women dress primarily to please themselves rather than their husbands and yet they still expect their husbands to be greatly impressed. It’s the female ego.

If you really understood, you would realize that many things that annoy you about your man actually work to your advantage. To give a totally different example, a woman used to hate the way her husband always double checked on her. ‘Did you remember to put out the cat?’ ‘Are you sure you locked the door?’ And so on. After years of letting this irritate her it finally hit her: this man was a highly regarded accountant. The prosperity she continually enjoyed hinged on the fact that she had married a man who would meticulously double check everything.

Sure your man has infuriating faults, but chances are that you have more of a treasure in him than you realize.

Wrap Up

Being gentle, communicating feelings, spending more time with the kids, being romantic, in fact most things in which you would like your man to be different, have at least one root in a man’s upbringing and has become so much an integral part of who he is, that change is a painful, threatening thing.

Take being romantic as an example. You might think the fact that he sometimes managed to act romantically when you were dating proves he is quite capable of it and it must be mere callousness that keeps him from acting the way you would like. But remember that everyone’s perception of how a dating person should behave is different from their perception of what is expected of someone in a permanent relationship. In your husband’s eyes, the proper difference between before and after is probably greater than you realize.

Furthermore, you may have totally underestimated what he suffered emotionally by acting romantically earlier. Many men see it as groveling. They squirm inside and feel totally humiliated just to buy flowers or say ‘I love you.’

Would you walk down the street in nothing but your underwear to prove your love for your man? You might, if absolutely necessary. But you would not want to make a habit of it. And you would question his love if he continually expected it of you. That’s the sort of emotional cost many women unwittingly expect their men to pay.

I have no wish to leave you with the impression that change is impossible. Not even recovery from sexual abuse and anorexia is impossible. Christians are even lucky enough to have such contact with God that they can pray and see the impossible happen.

We must understand the dynamics of what is involved, however. It is too easy for a woman to mistakenly think something is mere stubbornness in her man and take it as proof of lack of love. Make this error and suddenly more will be at stake than should be the case.

Chances are that your husband is far more loving and caring, and endures far more misunderstanding than you realize.

Final Thought

You know how famous men are for refusing to ask directions. When lost and there are people able to help, who needs a fool who stubbornly insists on finding his own way? When dangerously lost, with no help in sight, who is it that suddenly needs a wise man endowed with navigational skills honed by years of careful practice?

Rather than foolishly despise your partner’s uniqueness, delight in it. One day your life or something you treasure could depend on it.