Rabbi Simcha Cohen
Women like to tell their husbands how their day went. These accounts are often emotional and full of details. They are presented as though the events are happening right now, prompting the wife to tell her husband what happened to her. Why is this less common among men?
At the beginning, we explained that the “partnership-oriented” structure of a woman’s psyche is better suited to the marital bond and meets the needs of a long and complex relationship more fully than the “non-partnership-oriented” structure of a man’s inner life.
This premise helps us understand why a woman talks more than a man: she is inclined toward emotional partnership and therefore “connects” with her husband through the means intended to create a connection—communication and conversation.
So she shares with her husband the thoughts that pass through her mind. When she asks her husband for advice or a solution to a problem, she begins describing in detail everything that happened before the incident under discussion, even events that have no connection to it whatsoever. She responds verbally to many things and even asks rhetorical questions simply to share her thoughts, feelings, and doubts with her husband, or to receive his confirmation or support for her decisions.
Apparently, a husband’s listening to his wife’s accounts also reinforces her sense of partnership.
This is related to the properties of memory. When a person sees or experiences something, it is imprinted in the memory cells of their brain. When they recount an event they witnessed or experienced, two things happen. From the brain’s perspective, the event happens again, and it is also recorded anew in their memory. When it is recorded anew, information about who listened to the account and where it was told is also recorded.
Accordingly, in theory, a woman who recounts events is “there” again and experiences them again. When her husband listens to her accounts of being at the bank, at school, or at a store, the fact that he listened to her accounts of these places is also recorded in her feelings and memory. As a result, she feels—and it is stored in her memory—as though her husband had been with her at the bank, at school, or at the store. This is the sense of partnership she had been missing.
This feeling of a lack of partnership built up as she visited these places alone. Her husband’s attentive listening and appropriate responses to her accounts ease her emotional strain and strengthen the emotional bond between them.
The Chazon Ish advises a husband not only to listen to his wife, but also to let her in on what happens to him: “to tell her, when leaving, where he is going and, upon returning, what he did, and all similar little details.”
There is another profound idea here. When a person reads a book describing various features of the natural world—mountains, plains, streets, or cities—the reader feels that they are “walking” through the places described, as though they were there. When a story contains drama, a person feels emotional tension, even though they know that everything will turn out well and can even look at the end of the book to find out how it all ended. This feeling of tension exists even when the reader knows that the story is fictional and nothing like it actually happened. The reason is that a person becomes emotionally attached to the narrative they are reading and feels as though they are in it themselves, because reading passes through the brain, which “sees” the descriptions come to life, as though they were real.
Let us consider the process that takes place within a woman when she has experienced an event that affected her emotionally.
For example, her little daughter gave a clever answer to her question. Her daughter’s answer moved the mother at that moment, but she experienced it alone, because her husband was not home at the time.
The event was imprinted in her memory with the label “I was alone.” Her disposition toward partnership awakens a need to go through this experience together with her husband. So she reconstructs the entire scene for him: what she said to the girl and what the girl answered. She refreshes the conversation in her memory, adding a description of her positive emotions.
Something similar happens when something has upset her and she has experienced this distress alone, without her husband’s support.
She needs to tell him what she experienced in order to feel her husband’s presence alongside her in that unpleasant situation. So when she describes the event to him, you can see that she is reliving everything that happened as though it were happening now. Her face expresses suffering, and her hand rests on the part of her body she banged, or she clutches at her heart if the distress was emotional. Now, if her husband listens to her properly and expresses sympathy or shares her joy, the experience will be recorded anew in his wife’s memory as though she had experienced it together with him, and she will immediately feel better.
Here is another example of women’s capacity for partnership. When women listen to a lecture and hear something surprising or an idea that they feel concerns them directly, they turn toward the woman sitting beside them and nod to express agreement with the lecturer’s words. This behavior also occurs among men, but to a much lesser extent.