Women expect men to be emotion readers, not mind readers. However, since a woman’s mind is so much more ruled by emotion than a man’s mind, reading her emotions gives you the most insight into her mindset and logic as well. Reading her emotions is basically the same as reading her mind. That is why I always tell guys that the best way to change a woman’s mind is to change her mood and her logic will change accordingly. To change a man’s mind on the other hand, you must attack and change his logic, and his emotions will react accordingly.
The reason men can’t read women’s minds the way women expect them to is twofold:
Men treat women like men and try to gauge their mindset by reading the linear logic of the interaction and basing their conclusions on that, because that’s how they correctly analyze interactions with other men. So even when they are using linear logical analysis flawlessly, it doesn’t help because they are approaching the job with the wrong tools.
Even if men did focus on trying to read and analyze the emotional progression of the interaction rather than the logic, they are much worse at this than women are and will miss most of the emotional “tells” anyway. So even when they are approaching it with the right tools, they do a worse job using those tools than a woman would because they aren’t as well equipped for using those tools.
Now since women can read other people’s emotions so well, they expect men to be able to do the same, therefore when a man is unable to do so they get frustrated and feel he’s being insensitive or not trying hard enough. And since men analyze the logic and expect their opponent to argue linearly from a logical standpoint, they get frustrated when women seem to just not make sense and are unable to just say what they mean and do what they say.
Women are better at reading emotional states than men for two reasons. First, as the physically weaker sex, they need to compensate for this physical weakness by being better in other areas, like reading and manipulating emotions. Remember, for most of human history women didn’t have the legal and societal protections they have now. They were subject to the whims and physical brutalities of the men they encountered. By being good at assessing the emotions of men, they could tell when emotional states in the men they encountered were escalating and a hostile situation was developing. And by being good at manipulating emotion they had a weapon they could wield against men that made up for what weapons they lacked physically.
Second, as the ones most expected to nurture children, they had to be better at reading the emotional, nonverbal needs of the children. The natural division of labor for most of human history made this the woman’s job while the man focused mostly on security to the family in the form of fighting off threats and providing resources.
Women who were not superior to men in emotional intelligence had their genes weeded out of existence because they not only lacked the physical tools to protect themselves from men but also the emotional tools to assess and defuse threats from men. And in addition, these women of low emotional intelligence would be worse at properly nurturing their children and reading their moods correctly in order to properly attend to their needs. So the women alive today descended from women of superior emotional intelligence, and as a result also have inherited this superior emotional intelligence.
And thanks to our society’s current cultural marxism where everyone is assumed to share the same strengths and weaknesses, we are less likely than ever to consider that some people are just naturally built for some things and some people naturally aren’t. Therefore women expect men to read emotions as well as they do, and men expect women to use logic the way they do, and most relationship headaches originate from this disconnect.
Chris Rock touches on this dynamic in the clip below, when you reach about 2:18.
Men, don’t argue–you cannot win. You cannot beat a woman in an argument–it’s impossible. You will not win. Because men, we are handicapped when it comes to arguing, because we have a need to make sense. Women aren’t going to let a little thing like sense screw-up their argument.
As a man, you have two options. (1) Adapt and train yourself in emotional intelligence so that you can communicate better on her level, thereby learning to read her emotional state, recognize when it’s changing and intensifying and nip the argument in the bud before it even starts, or (2) teach your woman to understand that you are not as good an an emotion reader as she is and to communicate better on your level by being more forthright with you about what’s bothering her in a calm fashion. If she insists on escalating into argument anyway, just playfully deflect, dismissively ignore, or just leave. Whatever you do, don’t waste time arguing logically. It just doesn’t work.
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