Rabbi Simcha Cohen
We all know that no two people are alike. Everyone has a unique personality and their own needs. At the same time, according to the Jewish worldview, a man and a woman are two halves of one soul, and if so, at first glance, they ought to resemble one another. This very assumption leads spouses to believe that, because they are one soul, they should be alike in their feelings and actions. So when they notice differences between them, they feel that, in all likelihood, they are simply not right for each other.
This is a mistaken approach. Anyone even slightly familiar with the psychology of men and women knows that they differ considerably from one another. Yet despite all these differences, the Almighty wants us to live together in love and harmony. We should distinguish between two kinds of differences: individual differences unrelated to married life, which naturally exist between different people, and differences arising from their being of different sexes. In this article, we will discuss the differences between the male and female psyche, and between men's and women's needs.
Married life, like any other serious undertaking in life, requires study and preparation. Someone who has never studied the “profession of being a spouse” cannot understand their spouse's needs. A husband cannot simply guess what his wife needs, and a wife will find it difficult to understand exactly what her husband is missing, even if both are virtuous in character and by nature and passionately wish to help one another.
Naturally, each of us forms an idea of another person's needs based on self-knowledge and an understanding of our own needs. If a person likes something, they assume that the other person likes it too. If something bothers them, they conclude that the other person also objects to it. This makes it difficult to recognize a need they do not have themselves, greatly complicating the task of understanding their partner's needs. We can observe this phenomenon in married life even after people have lived together for decades and have explained to each other many times what they expect. None of these explanations helped until a marriage counselor explained the differences between the male and female psyche.
Moreover, there is an additional difficulty. Some of a husband's particular needs conflict with his wife's needs, and some of a wife's particular needs conflict with her husband's. Experience shows that, because men's and women's needs differ and they are unaware of this difference, whenever one of them has a need that conflicts with the other's, the other spouse interprets it as insensitivity, selfishness, and a lack of consideration.
If conflicts between a husband's and wife's needs arose from malicious intent, it would be very difficult to improve anything in their married life. But since the difficulties spouses encounter stem from a lack of knowledge, the problem becomes much simpler: it is relatively easy to learn the basic differences between the male and female psyche and how to meet a spouse's needs even when they conflict with your own.