When counseling married or partnered couples, psychologists often face the fact that a number of misunderstandings and conflicts between partners can arise due to ignorance or underestimation of the difference in the psychology of men and women. And we are talking not only about the acquired socio-cultural stereotypes of behavior that depend on generally accepted social norms and expectations, but also about certain psychological (psychophysiological) differences that are caused by genetics, neurobiology, hormones, etc.
Why misunderstandings arise between partners.
You can often hear from your partner: "He/she doesn't understand me!", "How could he/she do/say/think that?!". Men and women expect their partners to behave similarly to themselves, or at least to follow their own logic.
One of the reasons for these differences is quite "simple": men and women are different. Equal, equal rights, equivalent, equivalent, equally talented and capable, but different. And even if their interests belong to the same sphere, the ways of their realization are quite different.
The psychological traits of modern people are an echo of the survival mechanisms that our distant ancestors were forced to develop. And these mechanisms were different for men and women.
Some scientists disagree with this purely biological explanation of human behavior - in their opinion, this approach does not take into account the socio-cultural factors that determine our personality and behavioral patterns.
No doubt, these social factors play a huge role. Nevertheless, a number of reputable cross-cultural studies have managed to identify certain average differences between men and women that have little to do with society's expectations based on traditional gender roles. We are talking about some general features of the nervous system functioning, ways of interacting with the outside world, building relationships, and some important personality traits.
The key word here is "average". Whichever theory we prefer, there are still more similarities between the two sexes than differences, and the range of individual differences is much larger than the gender-specific ones. In addition, it is believed that about 20% of women are characterized by a "predominantly masculine" way of thinking and behavior, and about 20% of men are characterized by a "predominantly feminine" way of thinking and behavior.