So . . . I'm not from Mars!!!

[kazz]

Well . . . . all these years we've been told we're so different from the fairer sex . . then we had SNAGS . . . . does this mean people are just people . . . nah!! =/

Woman and men not hard-wired to be different, university study finds. Men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. It turns out we are all from the same planet after all. A Deakin University study of 75 couples has found no evidence of gender differences. Women and men, it seems, are not hard-wired in opposite ways, nor do they think, react and behave differently within relationships.

A team headed by Deakin researcher Gery Karantzas questioned the couples about their relationship satisfaction, attachment style, trust, level of support, modes of communication, conflict and intimacy. Any differences were not stereotypical, they found. This means John Gray, author of the 1992 best-seller Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, may have been wrong. He argued that men valued power, competence and achievement; women valued feelings and the quality of relationships.

The 150 men and women in the Deakin study were secure, and had low levels of destructive, conflict-centred communication. They had high levels of partner support, trust and intimacy.
Researchers suggested the couples had not grown more like each other over time, but had been attracted in the first place because of similarities. Melbourne couple Peter Hamblin and Naomi Dawson, 24, have been dating almost two years.

Naomi said they had similar attitudes because they came from similar backgrounds "We've got the same education and we're both going to be doing the same job so it's been pretty smooth," she said. Peter believed men and women mostly wanted the same things from relationships. The couples in the study, published last week by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, were aged 19-63 and had been together for 15 years on average.

A link about Men are from Mars . . . ~ Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[SANE-A30]

Ha! I bet the person that actually did the study has never lived 10+ years with a man.... just saying.....:D

[retdetsgt]

Sounds like a feel good story. Male and female roles and values throughout the animal kingdom differ. Why should be humans not be wired for specific roles?

Granted, as we have become more "civilized", women's roles have become more assertive and they have more opportunity to move into male dominant occupations, etc. and men's roles as "breadwinners" and such have become more diminished. But that's doesn't change some of the thinking.

One example of what society has done is to create the artificial stage of adolescent. In primitive cultures, that doesn't exist, people went from children to adult, usually marked by some ceremony around puberty. Our culture has become so complicated and advanced that people need more time to prepare than they used to. Hence the problem we face with teenagers, they're wired to consider themselves as adults and we still view them as children because they aren't prepared to deal with the world and are still dependent on us. That's what creates most of the conflict we have with them. In a primitive environment, they would be adults and that's how they're wired to think.

That culture has more or less done the same thing with male/female roles. In primitive cultures, they are designed that way for survival, today just surviving isn't something we worry about. Well, I guess we do, but on an entirely different level. Frankly, I don't recall ever worrying that I might starve to death if I don't accomplish some task in the next few days as I might have a few thousand (or maybe even a few hundred) years ago. Our opulence has allowed us the luxury of merging our roles in ways our ancestors could have never done well. But that still doesn't change the biological wiring that evolved.