Because they hurt when we hurt.
When something bad happens in our lives, our female friends are always good for commiseration and advice. “That stinks,” they’ll nod sympathetically. Or, “You should just march in there and give her a piece of your mind,” they’ll say indignantly. When you tell a guy about the latest trauma in your life, he might not be so adept with the hand-holding and the counseling. But most of the women we talked to agreed that men, more than women, feel other people’s pain. Where they’re lacking in sympathy, they usually make up for in empathy.
They’re a loyal bunch, these men. When you come home shaken by a nasty episode at work, he gets personally pissed off for you. You can see it in the way his jaw tightens or how he walks around in circles and hits the wall. When someone does you wrong, they’ve done him wrong, too. “A co-worker once stabbed me in the back and I told a guy friend of mine about it,” a thirty-five-year-old movie agent says. “He was livid. It was as if he were the one who had been betrayed. All my girlfriends had been nice about it, but he was actually hurt. He obsessed over it; he kept bringing it up for weeks afterward. In the end, things got straightened out in the office, but to this day, he still hates that co-worker. He begrudges her my pain almost more than I do.”
Another woman tells of how she once went on a date that ended up bordering on rape. “When I relayed the story to my female friends,” she says, “they were appropriately shocked and outraged. And then we’d start talking about something else. But when I told my male friends about it, the universal sentiment was ‘I’d like to kill that guy.’ They couldn’t get past it. Every one of them wanted to seek revenge—for me. The idea that my physical well-being was in danger infuriated them beyond the bounds of normal friendship. And even though it was a horrible experience, it also made me see how many good guys there are—and how lucky I was to have them on my side.”
Because they shoulder so many burdens on their own.
We women pretty much subscribe to a share-and-share-alike life philosophy. Whether we’ve won or lost, we’re quick to let everyone know the score. Women are famous for their support systems, their coffee klatches, their emotional networks. And experts pretty much agree that it’s the psychologically healthy way to go.
But all this confabulation doesn’t come quite as easily to men. “When my best guy friend’s grandmother died, he didn’t tell anyone for three days,” says one twenty-five-year-old woman. “He walked around looking pained and bewildered but never said a word. When he finally told me the news, I said, ‘Why didn’t you say anything sooner?’ He said, ‘I needed to have it for myself. I needed to sort through it first.’ My heart ached for him—I wished that I could make everything all better, that he could look to me for strength instead of bearing it all alone.”
Men are taught early on to hide their feelings. They’re usually pretty good at it. But every now and then, you catch glimpses: You see them silently registering defeat, speeding off in cars or walking angrily down streets, cursing and brushing away demons that only they can see. They may travel in loud, raucous groups, swinging bravado, but at the end of the day, so much more than us women, they go it alone.
Perhaps men and women need each other equally. But women can express that need more easily. Because of this, as much as we would welcome their heads on our shoulders, more often than not it’s our heads that are doing the leaning. More often than not men will, in their own sweet, clumsy way, do their level best to show us that the world can be a friendly place.
Because they see the good over the bad.
Oh, we can be a critical breed, we women. The wrong color socks can send us over the edge. We notice anything and everything— particularly things that we perceive as bad or ugly or stupid. We sweat the details. We give very little leeway: “Oh, sure, her hair is okay, but she has such a square jaw. And her hips are so lumpy. And did you get a look at those boots?” When we’re with a guy—be it a boyfriend or a brother or a friend— the critical meter goes into overdrive. We—well yes, we nag a little. “Don’t shovel your food into your mouth,” we’ll say. “Stop shuffling around like that, stand up straight. Don’t breathe through your nose.”
Men, on the other hand, have an endearing way of .. . skipping over the bad parts. “You don’t have a big butt,” one might say to you. “It’s curvy. It’s sexy. I think it’s great.” What’s more, they really mean it—since men don’t know from etiquette, you can pretty much count on their sincerity. “A friend of mine used to listen to me and my girlfriends complain about all manner of cosmetic ills,” says a twentyeight-year-old writer. “We’d bemoan this or that—crooked teeth, a scar, a cowlick, laugh lines. And every time, he’d shake his head and say, ‘You’re crazy. It gives you character.’ We would laugh him off, but it still made us feel good to know that he could see something nice in what we perceived as terrible flaws.”
In other words, men don’t go searching for the blots and stains that we so eagerly seek out. When they look at us, they instinctively see us as the good, whole, desirable people that they really believe we are. And by and large, they treat us accordingly. So even if you do hit upon the occasional bad apple in the bunch, once you get your bearings, you’ll find that there are still bushels of men who are willing to show you how wonderful you are. Let them. And then don’t forget to return the favor.
