urmii asks: How can I relate with a woman?
Hi urmii –
I’m going to guess two things. First, that you’re a man. And second, that when you ask how to relate with a woman, what you mean is how to understand her, to connect with her. (If you’re asking how to get a girlfriend, or how to get a woman to become your relation, those are very different questions!!)
So what we’re dealing with here is the timeless question of how men and women can understand each other. Sigmund Freud, who was probably the greatest genius who ever worked on questions like this, famously said, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” If he was this stuck, how in the world can normal men and women hope to relate to each other?!
A few years ago, a very bright fellow named John Gray developed a view of it, that men and women came from other planets: Men came from Mars, and women came from Venus. And on each of those planets, the people had very different values. To summarize his works extremely quickly, Gray said that men most value success, and their ability to fix things, while women most value security, and their ability to communicate with others. If you’re old enough, his books are well worth reading (and not difficult – they’re made for normal people, not psychologists).
Then, more recently, a quote I just love showed up on a television program called “Friday Night Lights.” A football coach explains to a young man, “Everything I know about women you can stick in this coffee cup here. But I do know you have to have trust and honesty. Without trust and honesty, it is not gonna work.”
Oh urmii, I so wish I could give you much more wisdom than this. But truly, it takes all my doggy brain can muster just to try to understand any humans at all! And so for you to understand each other?! You just need to try. And try. And try and try and try.
And I do believe that if you try, and a woman tries… although you might not understand each other perfectly… at least you’ll appreciate how much the other is trying. And that, my friend, can result in all the love in the world.
Good Luck!
Shirelle