The phrase men are from Mars and women are from Venus, owing to John Gray's book, has become the coined avenue to highlight the innate emotional differences between the male and female. Both sexes, although part of the same species, differ significantly in regards to all aspects cognitive.
It is often not until marriage when a man and woman for the first time fully begin to realise the great extent to which the two genders vary when it comes to ways of processing and expressing emotions as well as differing in the preferred approach to solving everyday dilemmas.
Read on as we dissect the multiplex that is female emotions and how brothers can approach understanding and living with them.
Understand The MAIN Difference
Although men and women are dissimilar in respects to many areas, there is one defining difference that if both sexes worked on understanding, a whole multitude of marital conflicts could be avoided: men are predominantly practical whereas women are more so emotional.
Struggling to understand this significant difference often leads to a great deal of frustrated confusion from the husband’s side. A female will often place greater weight on emotive value due to her nature of prioritising the feelings of an issue over the solution. A husband who struggles to understand this will wrongly blame her for purposely overcomplicating, what is to him, a very linear path to the resolution.
Therefore, it is encouraged for the husband to yield the floor to his wife to vocally express how the situation is emotionally affecting her/her loved ones/ household etc before the husband takes the matter into his now hands to deal with it head on.
Confusion Can Lead To Hurt
A husband learning how women cognitively differ to men gives him the potential to prevent several marital disputes, which makes this rule of thumb so important to understand.
Educating one’s self and growing to accept that a woman’s approach to a problem will almost always involve more emotion than your own approach means that you’ll limit frustration and any hurt you could cause as a result of that frustration.
Although, marital arguments can never completely be prevented and are a normal part of marriage, they can be kept far less explosive when the area of misunderstanding between the husband and wife is minimised. There are many simple ways to shrink this area of misunderstanding for instance, just by the brother asking ‘how does this make you feel?’ He’s allowing her to explicitly express her state of mind instead of casting away her emotions as something unimportant in the quest to find a solution which will only leave her feeling brushed off and hurt and the husband feeling confused as to what he’s done wrong.
Islam’s Approach To A Woman’s Emotions
Islam, being our ultimate source of wisdom and guidance, of course didn’t leave out how men can go about learning patience and kindness when it comes their womenfolk.
“Treat women kindly, for woman was created from a bent rib, and the most crooked part of the rib is the top part, so treat women kindly.” (Al-Bukhari)
Furthermore, men can find a great example in how the Prophet ﷺ dealt with an emotional outburst from ‘Aisha causing her to smash a plate in front of his guests. To which he ﷺ responded by calmly gathering the pieces whilst ushering his guests to eat, ‘eat, your mother (Aisha) became jealous’ (an-Nasaa’i)
“live with them in kindness. For if you dislike them - perhaps you dislike a thing and Allāh makes therein much good.” (Quran 4:19)