Venus & Mars

Other than the obvious physical differences between boys and girls, there is one difference that just drives me crazy. Women typically talk a lot more than men, they have a lot more emphasis on communication, both verbal and otherwise. Men on the other hand don't have such a strong focus. They are a lot more concise and do not really notice a lot of the details that women notice. This becomes obvious when retelling stories.

If you're a woman like me and your boyfriend talks about something that relates to you (as in what his parents/friends think of you) you expect detail. You expect him to repeat the story word for word like it happened. You expect all those juicy details so that you can take all that information and analyze it, turn it upside down, and analyze it again until it's completely dissected, over-analyzed and all the possible hidden meanings are uncovered. That's just how we work, we need to information to have a better, more complete picture (it's completely irrelevant whether that information is actually necessary or not. What's important to have the information).

Men on the other hand (or most men, just to be fair) have a hard time remembering these details, retelling them, and caring about them. They filter out all the "irrelevant" information and just come out with the final conclusion, which to a woman is entirely unsatisfying. And it's completely useless to try and convince said man to retell the story in detail. He never will.

I've told my boyfriend before that he should tape all important conversations that I would be interested in and just play them back to me but he's not convinced. Of course it's my fault for dating a guy who already is of little words, one of the silent mysterious types, but I think we should've been passed this stage already. Somehow, he should've learned that I need the information, and IN DETAIL please.

Pay attention men, let us do the filtering.