The Mars-Venus Bullshit

These days, the Mars-Venus framework is so entrenched in our politically correct milieu that when a woman complains that a man is trying to solve her problem instead of just listening, he immediately shuts up, feeling guilty. I never quite understood what I was supposed to do in that moment, other than keep nodding, and what the supposed benefit of those nods was.

Given that ChatGPT has absorbed a near-infinite amount of conversation on this topic, I figured it would know better than anyone how I’m supposed to listen. Here’s what it gave me:

Her: “I felt so dismissed in that meeting today. Every time I tried to speak, he interrupted me.”

Him: “That sounds really frustrating. You put effort into your ideas and didn’t get space to share them.”

Her: “Yeah, exactly. It made me feel small.”

Him: “I get that. Anyone would feel that way in your position.”

Her: “Thanks. I feel good that someone understands me.”

Let’s apply a bit of critical thinking here. The key line, “Anyone would feel that way in your position,” sums it all up. The goal is to justify or validate her feelings by normalizing them. Her feelings are “valid” because everyone would feel that way.

But feelings don’t need to be justified, validated, or normalized. It’s like scraping your elbow, feeling pain, and then going around asking if it’s normal to feel that pain. The more you rely on others to confirm the normality of your experience, the more dependent you become on external validation. It may ease the pain for a moment, but in the long run, it breeds anxiety.

Now imagine you feel pain in your elbow, but doctors find nothing wrong. You might be tempted to search for others with the same mysterious symptom, to normalize it. But what if you really are the only person on earth with that sensation? What would you gain by finding someone else to confirm it? Would you stop trusting your own perception because it’s unique?

Many of our feelings are precisely that: unique. Suppose you asked hundreds of people and found that no one in your situation felt the same way. Would you then decide you were abnormal, therefore wrong?

The Mars-Venus framework rests on a misdiagnosis. The problem isn’t that men offer solutions while women seek empathy. What women often object to is the way some men turn the situation into a stage to show off their competence. The conversation becomes about him, not her. The spotlight shifts. He could easily keep the focus on her while still offering ideas. Likewise, another woman could just as easily steal focus by proving how deeply empathetic she is. The real issue isn’t solutions versus empathy; it’s who the conversation is about.

And yet, this leaves us in a bind. If you empathize, you risk collusion, reinforcing the person’s dependency on external validation. It can slip into co-rumination, where two people dwell endlessly on problems without ever reaching understanding or resolution because it becomes a form of shared enjoyment. If you problem-solve, you risk making them feel incompetent; if they yield to your competence, they become dependent on you as a guru. If you withdraw, they feel abandoned.

There is, however, another way: help the person symbolize their feelings in their own words. To do that, you have to set aside your own worldview and judgments, and ask questions that bring the unconscious to the surface. In ChatGPT’s example, instead of saying, “Yes, that’s understandable,” you might ask, “What does being dismissed mean to you?” You don’t know the answer either, but you’ve noticed that “being dismissed” carries weight for her. You’re helping her translate that feeling into language she owns.

The problem is that almost nobody today welcomes that kind of dialogue. It feels intrusive, even aggressive, because it destabilizes the ego. Without explicit consent, it’s experienced as an attack. And virtually nobody today consents to being unsettled.

That, I think, is the root of our current loneliness epidemic. We are in constant contact with everyone through social media, yet no real understanding is achieved because nobody wants to risk being misunderstood. In the name of empathy and safety, we’ve created an emotional quarantine where we silently agree to keep each other locked inside our personal fictions. Each of us has written a story of ourselves that we can live with, and we protect it fiercely. We don’t want friends to challenge that story, only to affirm it. We claim we want to be understood, but what we really want is confirmation of our own understanding.

Social media has perfected this arrangement. It allows us to control what we share and filter out what we don’t want to hear. We live in a world where everyone says, “Understand my understanding. Don’t understand me in your own way.” And that’s why we remain so alone.