"but I am skeptical that any man fully understands women or vice versa"

Oh, for heaven's sake -- do you really believe this? If so, that explains a lot.

I'll admit, I once thought something similar... back when I was 16 years old and was growing up in a mostly female family. It took me maybe five or six years past that point to catch on to the fact that (surprise!) men are people. They are people just like any other people, and their individual abilities, interests, and social roles are far more useful cues for guiding most social interactions than is their biological sex. In fact, looking at interactions prospectively, biological sex has exactly one use: determining potential sexual partners, for those of us who happen to have a preference.

If teenage me with my limited social skills can learn this lesson, surely anyone can.

I am not denying the existence of psychological differences that correlate with sex. I respect Tooby & Cosmides as researchers and I'm married to an evolutionary biologist, so you're not going to see me trying to claim that millions of years of selection have not left their imprint on our brains. But (let me emphasize again), these differences tend not to be terribly useful as prospective cues for how to conduct any given relationship.

Spending a lot of time with small children (especially your own small children) is an excellent way to get a rough sense of psychological sex differences. It is, of course, no substitute for structured, empirical, peer-reviewed research, but here in all its potentially-biased glory I present to you one of my personal observations: boys tend to be more entranced by big shiny things that move fast, than girls are. The mean difference is small and the overlap between the two distributions is massive, but I believe that difference exists even apart from the social pressures that bolster it.

So what? Knowing this is not going to tell you whether your new girlfriend wants to go to a monster truck rally with you. ASKING HER if she wants to go will tell you that. It's not going to tell you that NASCAR races are a bad place to pick up chicks: the overlap in interest between men and women is so large that there will still be plenty of women there, and if you happen to be passionate about cars, wouldn't you enjoy dating someone who shares that passion?

Okay, all of this is just the wind-up to my ultimate point, but since I understand there is a preference around here for short comments, I will conclude in another installment.

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