Believe it or not, lovers underestimate the significance of gender. During courtship men will claim that they want a woman to think and behave like them, and women will imply that they want the men to think and behave like women. So it becomes great short-term strategy, on both sides, to deceive the other — men becoming "sensitive New Age guys" and women becoming hiking boot mammas. Then comes: "I thought you were different" and "I was doing what you said you wanted me to." You can see this courtship deception throughout nature if you've got your eyes and ears wide open, which is seldom the case when you're head-over-heels in love. When nature lovers observe nature they often see yang and yin and seldom see male and female. Yin and yang are fondly thought of as harmonic, balancing principles, and being in love seems like perfectly interlocking lumps of play dough. Male and female is anything but that. Male and female is a reproductive strategy, created by natural selection, which ensures genetic diversity. Since natural selection (nature) doesn't care how difficult it is for humans trying to get along in modern times, this is what it came up with: Females want the best they can get; males want the most they can get. That's about as succinct a statement of what we resent in one another that I can think of. Humans have been trying to overcome that for millennia without stopping to wonder:
why is this so difficult? It would help to understand the origins and function of this dilemma if, in fact, we
really wanted to change it. Think about that. The answer goes back a couple of billion years when asexual gametes produced by algae differentiated slightly into a small mobile variety without much nourishment and a large, juicy variety with limited movement capability — in other words, prodigal sperm and scarce eggs.
/Nature Lover by John Wymore/
