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Communication Breakdown Part 4

By Johanna Lyman. Posted on May 24th 2009.

This is the fourth in a series of five.
“What’s on your mind?”
When a woman asks a man that and he says, “nothing” she doesn’t believe
him. So she makes up all kinds of
stories, or sulks that he doesn’t trust her enough to share his deepest
thoughts with her. It’s inconceivable to
a woman that her man might actually be thinking about nothing, or at least
nothing significant.

Listen up ladies, they’re telling the truth!
Our brains are programmed differently than men’s brains. We’re wired to multi-task, they’re not. That’s true for our thoughts as well. We tend to have ten or twelve tracks of
thought happening at any one time.
They’ll have one. Their brains
are more linear than ours (again, a generalization, but a good one). This doesn’t mean they’re simple, just
focused.

More from YourTango: 5 Ways Abandonment Issues Can Ruin Your Relationships

It took me years before I finally believed my husband about this. This doesn’t mean they’re incapable of deep
thought, but if they’re engaged in a line of deep thought, that’s all they’ll
be doing. If your guy has just come home
from work and flopped onto the couch, he’s likely “dumping” all thoughts of
work and clearing his mind. It’s kind of
like a computer—the memory gets full and you have to delete the old files
before you can work on new ones; whereas a woman’s mind is more like a network
computer. She can go out into the ethers
and store files, all while still engaging in a conversation, making dinner, and
keeping track of the kids.

A perfect example of this occurred between my husband and me just the other
day. We were sitting at a lakeside
restaurant, having a drink. We had just
been talking about marriage and divorce.
I’ve been trying to convince him that we should get a divorce…
unsuccessfully. I love him deeply; I’m
just not that fond of being married. He
knows it has nothing to do with our love for each other, so we were having a
really good discussion about it. There
was a lull in the conversation, and I noticed he was staring down into the
lake. I asked him what he was thinking
about, and he replied, “Fish.” I
looked down, and sure enough, there was a school of fish! I believed him, but there was a time earlier
in our relationship when I wouldn’t have.
I would have been worried about what he was “really” thinking; had I
somehow upset him? Was he angry at me
for bringing up the subject again?