Gray assures us that neither is superior. Martians, who enjoy the big game and being left alone after work, are simple creatures, and so are Venusians, who “listen to self-improvement tapes” for their kicks and share wine with friends. I thrilled to imagine the joy that would come when he discovered PowerPoint. He bolds main ideas and makes liberal use of lists and tables. In addition to having a dazzling command of metaphor, Gray uses repetition as a key rhetorical tool. (They range in their specificity from “Validate her feelings when she is upset” to “Offer to build a fire in wintertime.”) We are told that the correct number of hugs per day is four. (Tell him the ending first.) At one juncture, we’re introduced to a points system and given 101 ways to score them.
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Women get advice on how to tell a story so it won’t irritate her man. In the course of our joint study, Mark and I learned that while “Martians tend to pull away and silently think about what’s bothering them, Venusians feel an instinctive need to talk about what’s bothering them.” As if the book’s central planetary metaphor weren’t enough, Gray invokes, among others, a dragon, a cave, a wave, and a rubber band to describe how people tend to operate in heterosexual relationships.
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Gray followed up with a series of seminars both public and private and speaking engagements across the globe. Nonetheless, it spent 235 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sold seven million copies in the U. S. The book is not a scientific one but a work of pop psychology. The book was a huge hit right around the time of Princess Diana’s separation-when game night was Trivial Pursuit and sushi restaurants started showing up in strip malls-and no wonder, with an opener like that. They fell in love and quickly invented space travel and flew to Venus. Just glimpsing the Venusians awakened feelings they had never known. One day long ago the Martians, looking through their telescopes, discovered the Venusians. It begins like this: Imagine that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But could spending the spring of my thirty-second year with the marriage advice on (aggressive) offer to my parents when they were thirty-two teach me and my husband anything-even by counterexample? Could it teach any of us anything? Couldn’t hurt to try. We’re not the types to get wrapped up in self-help books. My hope was that I’d read the terrible advice they’d gotten and be able to confirm something: Of course they split! With advice like this? They were doomed!Īnd what about us? We’re cool, we’re skeptical. This might have been a comforting thought for some, but for me, it was a little menacing: My parents ended up divorcing, and not amicably. My suspicion was that advice for a happy marriage hadn’t changed much in thirty years.
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If I was being honest with myself, the project was more than ironic. In other words, we could pretend we were our parents, who seemed to have had it all so together at our age. Besides, it was Covid-what else were we doing? We could even commit to the bit and order a fondue set and some royal-blue wineglasses to drink pinot noir out of like it was really the nineties. I viewed it as an ironic little joint reading project, and Mark was game. I don’t want to kill him, but I don’t not want to kill him. Not to mention, Mark had recently started saying “Cool, cool, cool” every time one of his coworkers asked him to do anything, a habit I loathe. It’s not like we were having problems qua problems when I picked up a hardcover copy of the 1992 self-help best seller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships, by John Gray, Ph.D., but after a year of quarantine, we weren’t exactly in any position to be turning down marital advice in any form. There is no door separating the bedroom from the living room in my 650-square-foot apartment, where my husband, Mark, and I have spent the past year together.