Men are from Mars and Women Are from Venus. The book was sitting on my coffee table from the past year. As a joke, on of my roommates picked it up from a garage sale, and it sat on the counter ever since.
One day, after making sure no one else was home to see me do so, I picked up the book and read it. While it seemed oversimplified at parts, some sections admittedly rang true. So when Valentine's Day started to come around (as it inevitabley does once a year, whether we are in a relationship or not) I looked for a person who could clarify the questions that daunt many this time of year. The questions about love.
Dr. Louann Brizendine M.D., author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain sat down with me and spoke about her findings about the "love brain".
The love brain is the part of our cognition that controls emotions and reasoning surrounding love.
This love brain changes in men and women. While she claims that men and women are "more alike than they are different" it seems that they two view relationships and love differently and understanding these differences can help resolve disagreements that may come from miscommunication.
For myself, one of the most interesting differences between a man and a women's love brain is the idea that women are more perceptive of feelings and emotions based on evolution. Women who could pick up on non-verbal cues were more likely to be better mother's to their infants before the children mastered language. The women who were perceptive of their child's needs survived, raised healthy children who survived and thus the women that exist today are perceptive by evolution. Men on the other hand did not need to do this in order to ensure the survival of their offspring, and therefore they are less perceptive of non-verbal cues.
After I learned this, I forgave a certain someone in my life for not being able to read my mind.
We spoke about the miscommunications between couples, the way the love brain may work differently in same sex couple versus heterosexual ones and much more.
This is a pre-recorded interview on February 8th and aired on Valentine's Day February 14th.
I began with a lead up question about the feminist movement in the 1960's that claimed men and women's brains were the same so that women would not be seen as subordinate. Dr. Louann Brizendine begins by answering this question.
Listen to the full interview here