Men Are Not From Mars

Quick-fixes are nice. When you've got a headache this big, you know exactly what's written all over it: directions on how to pop a pill and say good-bye to the pain. When your stomach hurts, you expect to find relief faster than the time it takes to spell it. A child-proof cap is usually all that stands between us and physical well-being.

Unfortunately, Americans have started seeking out the same kind of miracle cures for emotional illnesses, particularly in relationships. Instead of soothing gel-caps, heartache medicines come in either hardcover or paperback. The popularity of self-help books on relationships and the mysteries of man-and womanhood has certainly served to entertain, but at the same time, it has also over-simplified and limited people's conceptions of love and gender.

Few of us would claim it is easy to be someone's partner in life. Even being in a relationship for a few months can be more than trying. In these situations, we naturally look for help in identifying the problems and figuring out solutions. But how can we expect to find all these answers in one often slim volume of pop-psychology?

And yet Americans have been doing just that. We have made writers such as Barbara DeAngelis, author of the New York Times #1 bestselling book, Are You the One For Me?, if not emotionally secure, certainly very rich. Subtitled "Knowing Who's Wrong and Deciding Who's Right," this volume belittles the complexity of human relations by claiming it can spoon feed love's secrets to anyone with the $5.95 cover charge. First of all, after reading her works one can't help but feel that a lot of the material is self-evident, unless, for instance, someone believes communication and affection is bad for a relationship.

Beyond the obvious advice, however, we find theories on individuals' motivations that can hurt just as much as they might help. What happens with the reader who doesn't recognize the limited nature of this literature? These pat explanations can then create biases and place limitations on how an individual views and listens to the opposite sex. After hearing a few words of explanation, we can already picture the corresponding text and pigeonhole the problem regardless of the real situation. People jump to conclusions and assume they understand what is going on simply because they read about it in a book, rather than because they have thought about it on their own.

At least some of the millions of Americans who have already bought DeAngelis' latest book, Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know, must now be looking at their partners with smug glances, confident that they have figured out the mysteries of male machismo. It is this false sense of knowledge, based not on experience but on easy answers and ready-made explanations offered by escapist non-fiction, that can truly be damaging. Logically, it would seem that problems would be better solved looking at each relationship rather than trying to fit our jigsaw pieces into someone else's puzzle.

Indeed, how much do these books then fulfill their own prophecies? How much do people change or change others to match these neat, much more easily handled packages? John Gray's amazingly popular bestseller, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, is another example of pop-psychology literature that fails to address the complexity of relationships and gender. Based on the notion that there are fundamental emotional differences between the sexes, this book, with its chapters on what happens when you fall in love with a "Venusian," effectively stereotypes gender psyches the way no one would allow with regard to gender abilities. Such literature also increases rather than decreases distance between men and women by focusing on arguable behavior patterns that Gray feels we should use as subject matter for some sort of mutual, ethological study rather than recognize as part of any human condition. Ultimately, Gray wants us to accept these observed characteristics as traits of a different species rather than try to understand them and empathize with the opposite sex.

Still, the allure of self-empowerment must be too much for the bookstore romantics who have made pop-psychology literature a million-dollar industry. Based on the limited and often superficial conceptions of relationships and gender taught by these McTherapists, it is no wonder their audiences have to keep coming back.

Pop-psychology fails to recognize the complexity of our relationships.