It seems many women look down on men for their supposedly frail egos. There is some justification, to be sure, as we are generally overly sensitive to some types of comments, but I would like to both point out why we are and that the situation isn't nearly so one-sided as it may seem.
I have a friend who told me she annoys the men at her workplace and her father by providing information about various options after a decision has been made. As a guy, when she told me what she was doing, I didn't hear the message of, "I really just want to make sure we're doing the best thing here," which is what she was trying to communicate; I heard, "You don't know what you're doing; if you did, you wouldn't have made that decision. Let me explain it to you." Overly sensitive? Probably, but it's because we men get our sense of self-worth from our perceived competence.
For guys, it's all about respect. One survey done asked men and women whether they'd rather have love or respect. Over 75% of women answered love, and about 75% of the men answered respect. Many men complained that the choices were the same thing. Since we need respect this badly and since we seek it with our competencies and our jobs, we are sensitive to anything that implicates we don't know what we're doing.
A lot of guys, though they naturally won't admit it freely, feel that they're not really good enough at their jobs or as husbands and fathers and that it's only a matter of time before they make a major mistake and are found out for the impostor they feel they are. It leads some to attempt nothing, either at work or at home, and others to bite off more than they can chew to live up to impossible standards they feel others have for them.
Our egos aren't really the result of us feeling so great about ourselves; they're the result of us fearing we're not good enough and not respected. In my example above, my friend could have simply asked her boss, "What do you want to do if such and such a problem springs up?" That would have made him feel better because:
A. It comes across as assuming he's already thought of the problem.
B. He's getting another opportunity to make a decision and have it trusted.
C. It doesn't question whether his initial decision was right.
Perhaps, if you're a woman, you're thinking, "Why should I have to wear kid gloves around men?" There's some justification to that. We are being overly sensitive, I'll admit, but there are areas where women tend to be overly sensitive, too, the most common of which are their physical appearance and relationships.
How many times have you seen or been in this scenario?
Man: You look pretty tonight.
Woman, getting offended: You mean I don't look pretty every night?
I've asked women why they want to look good if they're happy being single. They tell me that they want to look good in front of other women, too (and yes, they're straight), and some just want to look good for themselves. Dozens of outfits, countless hours at the gyms, all the fad diets and pills, hundreds spent on hair and nails - all to look good.
And for relationships, women can act very desperately to save them. Some go so far as to get pregnant to save a relationship they feel is fading.
In short, though we men have fragile egos in one sense, women's egos are every bit as fragile, simply in a different way. Neither of us is right to have such a fragile ego, just like neither is right to step on the other's ego. The key point of this blog is that neither men nor women are better than the other; we're of precisely equal value, but vastly different. This blog is one man's attempt to explain some of these differences, so that we can understand each other better.
