Why Can’t We Just Go To Sleep?

She is saying: “In order to think this through, I need to talk it through—and I’d like to do that with you.”

What you can do: Cultivate understanding of how her brain works . . . and help her process out loud.

You may have seen from experience that men and women sometimes process emotions and thoughts in different ways. And in this case, actual differences in our brain wiring may be behind two specific things that are going on.

First, in general, most men (more than seven out of ten) prefer to think things through internally—in other words, think about something and then talk about it. Most women are the other way around—due to their brain wiring, most women instinctively want to talk something through in order to think it through. Which is why 95% of women don’t want a solution handed to them before they have had a chance to process and think out loud for themselves.

So if your wife is a process-out-loud sort of person, instead of you jumping straight to the short cut of the solution so you can go to sleep (“Well, let’s just offer to take the grandkids to church with us next week”) recognize how her brain works and that she is actively wanting to think it through.