Review: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

Outdated pseudoscience or a classic tale of alien encounters?

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray has two things to say. The first: you thought there’s only one type of guy, but actually there are TWO. Men and women are different, communicate differently, love differently, and need different things to feel loved. The golden rule is fool’s gold. You have to treat the other like they want to be treated, which is not at all how they should treat you.

The second: you thought there are many types of guys, but actually there’s only one. Every adult is a scarred child carrying emotional wounds that get triggered in intimate relationships, and all everyone wants is to feel loved.

You may ask: do I need to read 363 pages or could MMWV be an email two blog posts?

Yes. MMWV repeats itself a lot. Every chapter has dozens of examples of “common women’s complaints that are misinterpreted” or “warning signs for a man that a woman goes into her well” that are all essentially the same example. Finally, on page 359 out of 363, Gray explains:

Education theory states that to learn something new we need to hear it two hundred times.

The goal of MMWV isn’t to present a cool new theory, but to save your relationship. If the two lessons are true and important and will fix your marriage, then two hundred more examples would still be of value. If it’s bunk, then it doesn’t matter how long the book is.

Unevolved Psychology

The majority of the discourse around MMWV since it was published has focused on the first idea, that women are different from men. MMWV has twice as many 1-star reviews on Goodreads as Mein Kampf. It did a sexism. It did a stereotyping. It did a patriarchal reductionism. It did a cisheteronormative gender essentialism — two terms that didn’t exist when the book was written in the blissful interbellum between the second and third waves of feminism.

[Note: I’ll mostly use “sex” in this review because that’s what MMWV does, not bothering to differentiate it from gender. This less because of any “essentialism” and more because it simply doesn’t care whether sex differences are innate or part of a culturally-informed performance.]

But if you’re expecting red pills, MMWV is sunny and egalitarian. It stresses the differences in each gender’s intimate emotional needs, but doesn’t suppose any differences in capacity in, e.g., the workplace. It paints the ideal relationship as one where each sex contributes equally and recognizes the equal worth of the other. It doesn’t pass judgment on either sex’s tendencies. It doesn’t even question where these differences come from.

This last thing is a major, albeit inevitable, weakness of the book. The important historic context for MMWV isn’t that it missed Naomi Wolf and bell hooks talking about intersectionality, but that it missed the entire field of evolutionary psychology by a few months. The two years after MMWV came out in 1992 saw the publication of the foundational works in the ev psych of sex differences: The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992), The Red Queen (Matt Ridley, 1993), and The Evolution of Desire (David Buss, 1994).

Possessing tenuous academic credentials but extensive familiarity with other people’s relationship problems, Gray is just like me fr fr and also relies on his own experience instead of on Science™. This gives MMWV much more potential to help selves than the sort of “science-based self help” slop that exists to monetize shoddy social science in the short window between its publication and failed replication.

But the varied gendered observations in the book lack the sort of unifying framework that evolutionary psychology provides. The proper use of ev psych is not to extrapolate just-so stories about what men and women are from some anthropological factoid, but to understand how men and women actually are through the logic of social survival and sexual selection. Without it, a lot of MMWV comes across as inexplicable as an alien encounter.

For example:

A man thinks he scores high with a woman when he does something very big for her, like buying her a new car. He assumes he scores less when he does something small, like opening the car door, buying her a flower, or giving her a hug. […]

When a woman keeps score, no matter how big or small a gift of love is, it scores one point. […]

In Chuck’s mind, the more money he made at work, the less he needed to do at home to fulfill his wife. He thought his hefty paycheck at the end of the month scored him at least thirty points. When he opened his own clinic and doubled his income, he assumed he was now scoring sixty points a month… Chuck didn’t realize that from Pam’s point of view, the more he earned, the less she got. (p. 236)

I think this is broadly true. But to a lot of guys, this just sounds like bitches be crazy, deal with it.

A basic application of evolutionary logic shows that bitches aren’t crazy. In a world where women have little ability to enforce male loyalty, and this is true of both our environment of evolutionary adaptation and of the 50%-divorce-rate 1990s, women care about the product of a man’s capacity and his devotion to her, not just his capacity to provide value right now. Small acts of love are a costly signal of his devotion, not the direct cost of a flower or a hug but the cost of attention. They are a demonstration that he is always thinking about her and not someone else. If a man doubles his income but thinks of his wife fewer times each day, she’s worried that his success just makes his next wife richer.

If you want to understand why men and women are the way they are, MMWV does little to help you. But if you’ve already learned from personal experience that bitches (non-gendered) be crazy and you want to love and live with them anyway, MMWV offers you an interplanetary dictionary.

Mars-Venus Dictionary

On Mars, men are what they do. They value independence, achievement, and competence in other men and, importantly, in themselves. They want to be encouraged and trusted to solve problems independently, and to be admired and respected when they do. When faced with a serious problem, men withdraw to be able to devote their full attention to it. Men prefer ask culture, and don’t share their troubles unless they are explicitly asking for help. They value fairness in relationships and keep the ledgers balanced. Martians would’ve been quite happy living in their Martian man-caves, if it wasn’t for the Venusian-shaped hole in each of their hearts.

On Venus, women are who they’re with. They value communication, connection, and emotional expression. They want to be cared for, understood, and validated. Women build rapport by talking about and helping with everyone’s problems all in parallel. They measure self-worth by the quality of their relationship and freely-given mutual support. They prefer guess culture and show caring by offering unsolicited advice and interest. They value unconditional devotion. Venusians were quite happy chatting with each other in Venus’ well-kept gardens, if it wasn’t for the unexplained love they immediately felt for the Martians when they landed.

When they first met, Martians and Venusians were shocked to discover that they were speaking what sounded like the same language. Unbeknownst to them, Martian and Venusian dialects only sounded the same. In fact, every utterance is interpreted entirely differently on each planet. This is at the heart of all interplanetary conflict.

For example: when a man says “I’m fine” he means “I can handle it myself”, but a woman hears “he’s shutting me out because he doesn’t love me”. When a woman says “I’m fine” she means “I’m upset but don’t feel safe expressing myself yet, show me you care by asking me more questions.” A man hears “she’s fine.”

Or when a woman says “we need to talk”, she means “I want to connect by sharing how I’m feeling”, but a man hears “I’m in trouble”. When a man says “we need to talk”, he means there’s a specific problem that requires a solution or decision, but a woman starts asking about his feelings because she assumes he just wants to share.

All relationship problems would be solved if men learned to listen without fixing, and women to appreciate before advising. Women should say “I know you can handle it” and “wow, thanks for handling it” at every available opportunity; men should say “how are you feeling, honey?” and “I understand how you feel” instead of whatever they were going to say if they were talking to a man.

Whether this is good advice or not really depends on where you’re coming from. If you’re experienced enough with the opposite sex to tell the 10% of the time when a girl actually wants advice instead of empathetic listening, you don’t need the book. But a vast number of people operate as if the opposite sex is merely a defective version of their own, and that includes many married people. I do believe that internalizing MMWV is a significant step in the right direction for them, the “zero to one” of types of guy who aren’t like you. Once you’re made that step, it’s not hard to add specific nuance on top of the simplistic Mars/Venus model of what each sex is like.

By “nuance” I mean a richer experiential model of a specific person you know. I don’t mean “types of guy” frameworks that conspicuously ignore gender so as not to offend modern sensibilities. I’m looking at you, Tumblr.

A mainstay of all contemporary books on dating and relationships is attachment theory, explaining that anxious types and the avoidants always fall for each other because of some complicated dynamic from their childhoods. These books somehow fail to notice that by sheer coincidence, the vast majority of the “anxious-preoccupied” are women and the “dismissive-avoidants” just happen to be men.

Though it also blames many relationship problems on childhood trauma, MMWV has no use for a typology with more than two types:

Men are like rubber bands. When a man loves a woman, periodically he needs to pull away before he can get closer. It is a natural cycle. […]

A woman is like a wave. When she feels loved, her self-esteem rises and falls in a wave motion. When she’s feeling really good, she will reach a peak, but then suddenly her mood changes and her wave crashes down. When her wave hits bottom she is more vulnerable and needs more love. […]

To expect a man who is in his cave instantly to become open, responsive, and loving is as unrealistic as expecting a woman who is upset immediately to calm down and make complete sense.

I don’t think there’s a clear fact-of-the-matter about whether attachment theory is “more correct” than just putting it all on gender. But I do believe that “men sometimes withdraw and women sometimes crash emotionally and that’s ok we work through it” is a more helpful frame than “there are 4 types and 3 of them mean years of therapy to undo the damage your mom inflicted”. MMWV’s strongest point is its unrelenting focus on acceptance and improvement, not on feeding you frameworks that justify your unwillingness to change.

All You Need Is Love?

That the sexes are different is only one half of the book’s message, the obvious half. There’s another key idea that runs throughout:

With love and good communication, most problems, even the “big problems”, can be solved and resolved. (p. 16)

…if she feels loved and supported, she will automatically start to feel better. (p. 156)

When a man feels loved, trusted, accepted, appreciated, and so forth, automatically he begins to change, grow and improve. (p. 198)

Most of our complex emotional needs can be summarized as the need for love. (p. 181)

The only caveat is:

This book doesn’t directly address the challenges of a “dysfunctional relationship”… (p.16)

So, does “dysfunctional” cover every relationship that has any “challenges” beyond a spouse not feeling the love because of some communication mishap? Gray doesn’t say this in so many words, but MMWV takes it for granted throughout. Is a relationship “functional” when one of the partners is an irresponsible loser who can’t get shit done but is A+ at communicating their unconditional love?

One reason I personally don’t find this second message compelling is, ironically, because it feels very female to me. Are there women who truly want nothing aside from being heard and loved? Maybe. But I’m certainly happy that my wife is competent and agentic and does things that make our physical lives better every single day. Neither of us is A+ at loving communication, but it’s nice that we can work on gendered empathy after there’s money in the bank and food on the table and friends on our couch and kids on our lap.

I was nodding along to most descriptions of how men are and what they like in the book, until the chapter on how “women score relationship points with men”. Only a full-page screenshot can do it justice:

Can’t be mad at a guy for putting a num on it, but what the actual fuck?! Not a single one of the dozens of examples of a woman “earning points” in a relationship involves her actually doing anything for guy. Maybe I’m the only man on Mars who feels both secure enough not to mind my wife giving me shit sometimes, and also to expect her to contribute something more to our marriage than tactful silences.

Gray’s personal history is worth mentioning here. His first marriage, which isn’t mentioned once in the book, lasted only a few years (ironically, both ex-spouses became relationship self-help authors following the divorce). He met his second wife, Bonnie, just as his personal counseling practice was taking off. That marriage hit a rough patch, but the insights collected in MMWV saved it in the nick of time and they stayed happily married until Bonnie’s death in 2018.

I suspected that personal experience gave Gray real insight into women, more so than into other men. Like a physicist feeling the shape of an equation before any of the parameters are fixed, Gray has to have his theory to be perfectly symmetrical, a desire I 100% understand. As a result, the book is meticulous in devoting equal space to each sex, starting with the title. Ironically, while the lessons in the book are more useful for men, it has been mostly read and appreciated by women who feel seen and validated by it.

However, the two female friends who recommended this book to me both said that it greatly helped them date men. However however, most of my female friends aren’t very female-typical. They hang out in male-normed spaces (like TPOT, or the Second Person comment section) with mostly male friends and read male self-help books… I’m still on the fence on whether it’s possible to write self-help for women that they would actually be helped by.

I think there may be an important gendered difference in our ability to understand mental genders very different from ours. Venusians may be more predisposed to understanding Martians with empathy, while Martians may need to memorize 200 examples of what to say to a girl who’s upset.

Here’s one final example that really stuck with me:

I remember once leaving for a vacation with my wife. As we drove off in the car and could finally relax from a hectic week, I expected Bonnie to be happy that we were going on such a great vacation. Instead she gave a heavy sigh and said, "I feel like my life is a long, slow torture."

I paused, took a deep breath, and then replied, "I know what you mean, I feel like they are squeezing every ounce of life out of me." As I said this I made a motion as if I were wringing the water out of a rag.

Bonnie nodded her head in agreement and to my amazement she suddenly smiled and then changed the subject. She started talking about how excited she was to go on this trip. Six years ago this would not have happened. We would have had an argument and I would have mistakenly blamed it on her. (p. 234)

Six weeks ago, if I had seen this story in isolation, I would’ve thought wow, bitches do be crazy. Now that I’ve read, annotated, and reviewed Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, I get it. Bonnie is a Venusian, they’re just built different, that’s why we love them. And if you too love crazy people, this book can help.