John Gray’s series about Women Are From Venus and Men Are From Mars are intensely popular and has made the New York Times best sellers list plenty of time, but the truth is – whether men and women are from Mars, Venus, Jupiter or beyond the solar system as we know it – we’re all aliens to one another. We are all products of our individual cultures.
Consider for a moment, that when someone is born in the Southern United States and they meet someone from the Northwestern Portion of the United States – there are many cultural differences between the two. Yes, they are both Americans, yes the chances are they may even have some similar experiences to draw on, but their overall there are a number of things they may have in common, but there are an equal number that they won’t.
For example, do they call it soda or do they call it pop or do they call it a coke? After all, it all means the same thing, but how we reference it in dialect is a part of our different subcultures. Our culture begins with our family and extends beyond that to the area of the country and the portion of the world. For example, my parents were British, but I grew up primarily in Texas and other areas of the southern United States.
We’re all aliens to one another; my life experiences and my upbringing are not like another. I have a great deal in common with my British cousins and a great many differences. The same can be said for my husband and myself, we both grew up in Texas and we know many of the same places and had many of the same experiences – yet we also had radically different experiences at the same time.
So to say that our problems come from our differences in gender is to forget that our differences is a part of whom we are as human beings. It is what makes it so hard for us to learn to work together and at the same time, it is those differences that teach us how to form communities by relying on our differences to help feed us, clothe us, reach further and more. Yes, like reaches out for like – but if we were all identical – there would be no challenge, there would be no beauty, there would be nothing to work towards.
I like that we are all alien to each other. I like that our differences, differences that can seem so deeply profound, help us to create a better world, a better place to be and more. Do you enjoy our differences as much as our similarities?
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