You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman

The sociologist Max Weber is credited for the concept of Verstehen, which literally translates from German to English as "understanding". In sociology Verstehen is a concept by which those who follow it study and observe societies and cultures by taking in full account how whomever they are studying perceives the world around them and tries to understand why they do the things that they do. This, of course, is counterintuitive to how we non-sociologists observe the world and people around us. We are for the most part self-centered people. We observe any given person's actions in a situation against how we would act in that same situation. We judge rather than understand, and then we make claims that we can't understand.

Too often I hear friends tell me that they don't understand women. While I do believe that they are trying I don't believe that they can't. I, just like these and most guys on the planet, used to claim the same; however, in the past few years of my life I've realized that women aren't all that mysterious. Women are just as understandable as we are. All we have to do is look through their eyes and try to see things the way they do. This is not simply the "put yourself in her shoes" concept. It is more than that. The shoes concept only puts yourself in their situation. You need to go further. You need to go into their mind-set and personality. You need to see how everything in the world is represented to them and not to you. I admit it is easier said than done, but it also isn't as hard as we make it.

I realize guys mostly make that statement out of frustration, typically after a fight with the girlfriend or wife, or during a chase that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, or during the driest of dry spells in all the land, but it is also said casually. I don't want to take anyone's right to be frustrated at frustrating situations away. I just feel that maybe with a little Verstehen we can make things a little easier on ourselves. We can keep calm when being nagged about how we don't listen (when we know we are). We can hold back when she says she doesn't want to be in a relationship right now. We can deal with the fact that maybe the dry spell has more to do with us than it does with her. We can understand.