Women Are Not Weird, and Neither are Men

After 18 years of marriage and having counseled thousands of women, I can tell you emphatically that women are all basically the same. There may be a few external or internal differences here and there, but the primary equipment is the same.

Some men keep trading in wives like automobiles, hoping each time to get a newer or better model—one that performs 100 percent of the time and never needs any maintenance. Such a man is headed for disappointment.

Most people understand the basic sexual and physical differences between men and women. But not all of us understand or accept that women are different from men in almost every area, and vice versa.

That’s why so many spouses become frustrated by each other not long after tying the knot. Early in my marriage, I’d become frustrated with everything about Karen.

She was so different from me. How could she be normal? I wanted a woman who had all the right physical and sexual attributes but who thought and acted like a man.

So I spent the first five years of our marriage trying to make her be like me. I would lecture her, browbeat her, try to show her what I wanted—but she just wouldn’t catch on.

Finally I gave up. I thought I’d made a mistake in marrying her. Out of billions of women on the planet, I figured I had picked the only weird one.

Of course, I was operating out of ignorance and arrogance. I was fighting against God’s perfect design. Like a child trying to assemble a nuclear bomb without instructions, I thought the best way for our marriage to work was by making Karen listen to me.

I was unwilling to accept and honor the essential differences God had designed in my wife to make her a woman.

This isn’t just a male thing. Many women feel the same way about men. Observing the inherent differences, they take a “men are weird” attitude.

Both sexes need to realize that neither is weird. We are exactly what God made us to be.

We can accept this truth and learn to function within it, or we can enter another generation of frustration and fighting.

In Jeremiah 1:5, the Lord tells the prophet, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”

Psalm 139:13 says, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

God created us with a plan for our lives and a design for our marriages. He created men and women with unique differences and particular needs, but he also created us with the capacity to meet those needs.

That’s why marriage is such a holy, nurturing part of life. It is a blessing not in spite of our differences, but because of them.