No One Teaches You the Truth About Gender Differences

Have you ever tried to do something important without any previous instruction or training?

When my number one son graduated from high school and got his first apartment with his best friend, he had to learn how to balance a checkbook. I remember him asking me, “Why didn't they teach us this stuff in school? Where are we supposed to learn it?”

I assured him that he wasn't without opportunity to learn since he had a mom who was willing to teach him.

This was the same boy who asked me at age seven, “Mama, why weren't we born learned?”

I'm guessing he asked that because he dreaded facing his very harsh second grade teacher day after day. Honestly, that woman micromanaged all the boys in her class.

Someone should have taught her the truth about the male gender when she was in training at the state teachers' college. Boys are actually amazing when you know how to connect with them.

Hello, I'm Dr. Debi, and I've been helping men, women, and couples grow together for more than twenty five years.

Now it's your turn to learn what I learned and taught as a couples counselor and university professor.

You are the Wise Woman. And this is your personal development podcast packed with instant encouragement and practical tips. And men can learn about women too because this is a safe place where women are valued and men are respected.

We talk about biology, socialization, behavior, emotions, communication, and connection because men and women are different. Always have been, always will be, and that's a very good thing.

Anyway, about four years after the checkbook question, I felt the same way my son did.

Why hadn't anyone taught me about men and marriage?

My dad wasn't around, and my mom was thoroughly confused about men, so neither of them were of help to me.

I'd been to the library and read enough books about marriage to choke a horse, but none of them talked about how men and women are designed to work together.

No one told me what my husband thought or how he felt or why he did the things he did instead of something else. And no one taught my husband about what I needed. Heck, I didn't even know that myself.

Philippians four nineteen said, “My God will supply all your needs.”

Therefore, I concluded that I wasn't permitted to have any needs. It took quite a bit of therapy before I could reconcile that one.

No, my church never taught me anything about love and marriage either.

Instead, marriage seemed to be something mystical that everyone knew about except me.

I guess that if I just never needed anything and served my husband instead of myself, it would all be perfect.

That's another Bible verse that got convoluted in my heart and mind: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

After my divorce, I went to college. They didn't teach me anything distinctive about men or women there either, much less what made a healthy marriage.

Grad school in clinical psychology did a little better on the topic of marriage. We could take a course on how to do couples therapy, and I did.

All these years later, it still seems odd to me—really, really odd—that no one taught anything about gender differences.

Why would they ignore such an important subject?

After all, marriage is comprised of a man and a woman. Shouldn't we know about the components? Yes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but does that mean we ignore the parts altogether?

However, the process of raising those three sons as a single mom made me curious.

Yes, I'd collected enough evidence against men to build a solid case against them. But my curiosity about how to raise boys made me curiouser and curiouser about men in general and why they are the way they are.

And what I discovered set the course for the remainder of my career and my life.

I kept studying men academically, clinically, personally.

Eventually, that made me curious about women too. After all, that category includes me, right?

In case you missed the point of all of this, I'm still amazed that we're avoiding the subject of real life gender differences in academia and in the church.

Of course, it's not politically correct in today's culture to say that men and women are fundamentally different, but that doesn't make it any less true. Just ask any man or woman who's ever been in a romantic relationship.

It's time for us to have an honest discussion about the realities of romance.

Both men and women dream of romance. It's in your DNA. That means God intended romance for you long before you were born.

You also have a vision for what that could look like, even though you don't admit it to yourself, much less tell your mate about it.

And even if you do make your desire clear to yourself and to your mate, you are going to encounter roadblocks along the way.

If you don't know how to interpret and address the roadblock, you'll remain there. If you walk away from a roadblock, you can be sure it will pop up again and again until you do something differently.

The good news?

You can change your response to roadblocks. In fact, you can turn them into milestones.