He is the plug, she is the socket,

She is the picture, he is the locket,

She is the earth, and he is the sea,

He is the rain, and she is the breeze,

She loves clothes, and he loves cars,

She is from Venus, he is from Mars,

She is the body, while he is the head,

She is the butter, he is the bread

Its a complicated formula, complete the sum,

Different jobs but function as one. (By Kerisha Leone)

They say men are from Mars and women are from Venus because often times the sexes struggle to understand one another. The popular book with the same title by John Gray has given many couples an insight into different communication styles and emotional needs of men and women. The title suggests that the opposite sex is so different they are from completely different planets and while I agree that men are DIFFERENT and when I say different, I mean DIFFERENT!!! I would say that differences of the sexes should be celebrated because its the nature of reality. Yes, the nature of reality is duality and that duality is always opposite, i.e sun/moon, hot/cold, up/down, good/bad, left/right, ect. Each of these examples exist relative to the other, if everything was all good (which we often find ourselves saying a lot of the time) then we would never understand the purpose or the nature of good, without the bad. So I guess simply put male and female need each other to understand themselves.

According to ancient Roman religion, Mars was the god of war, he was the head of the military and also was in charge of agriculture. The month of March was named after him. In greek mythology he is known as Ares, and this where the zodiac sign Aries gets its name. In Greek mythology he was a destructive force and he had an affair with Venus aka Aphrodite. The Roman goddess Venus I just mentioned represented the opposite of Mars, which was love, peace, beauty and fertility. Although I don’t think the author had this scandalous love story in mind while writing the book, the nature of opposites are prevalent throughout the book in how males and females handle things. I’m going to briefly list some of the things he talks about in his book below;

1. Men like their abilities to be recognised and women like their feelings to be recognised. Men loved to be appreciated for the things the do for you, whether its fixing things around the home, giving you money or speaking to that mechanic who tried to rip you off last week. Women like their feelings to be appreciated by men being sensitive to their emotions.
2. When it comes to problems women like to talk your ears off, while men…don’t! They prefer to go into their little man cave so they can figure out the best way of how to deal with the situation, but women could talk to a girlfriend (or sometimes their husbands) and start to feel better.
3. When it comes to needs a man will easily sacrifice others to look after himself, while women sacrifice themselves to look after others. If men learn to attend to women needs and women learn to let the man look after her, we’ll all be onto something big here.
4. When it comes to speech, women talk in an artistic, dramatic often story teller way and men are often straight to the point, logical and very literal. Men say what they mean and sometimes mean what they say, while women apparently go round the houses and speak in riddles.
5. Men are like rubber bands, they often retreat only to return at a later date. The problem lies when they do this without forewarning and this makes the woman cling or even chase the man. This can be irritating for their male counterpart and sometimes pushes him further away, however this can be avoided if the man provides some assurance that he will return or if the woman is strong enough to allow him to have his space.
6. Women are like waves, often going through waves of emotions from depression to elation (but not to be confused with the bi polar disorder lol). During these times men should be careful not to be annoying by making fun of her and at the same time not trying to prematurely pull her out of this state.

The unity of warring opposites can be summed up in the ancient Chinese yin/yang symbol, I briefly touched on this in my post on Soulmates. Herakleitos (Greek spelling) suggests in his theory of relativity that the recognition of opposites are the inseparable halves of the same thing. Its in the realisation of opposites that you can experience the whole of reality. I guess thats why they say…

“In that case the unity and the balance of the opposites is realised by their simultaneous operation, their momentary co-presence” (from the book, The Art and thought of Heraclitus, page 150).