Mind Moves: Men and women usually see the social world through different eyes. This provides two perspectives on any event, typified in the car conversations between husbands and wives as they journey home together from social outings: the cinema, the pub, the opera or theatre, formal or informal functions or a dinner party with friends.
These post-event exchanges are a companionable aspect of married life, for they allow men and women to process their worlds together and for each other. They are one of the joys of coupledom: having a partner to talk to on the journey home. There is intimacy in chatting about mutual friends, safety in sharing observations with one's spouse about an evening out.
However, when a woman is unable to attend a social event, she must rely on her husband's account when he returns home. And what an interrogation that proves to be. Most women complain that trying to extract what to them is "pertinent" information from their man is a painful procedure requiring patience, tenacity and the investigative capacities of the CIA.
Of course, men will answer questions about who was there with the accuracy of a telephone directory, which mutual friends attended and whether they had the opportunity to converse with them. An anecdote overheard may be retold: jokes worthy of remembrance repeated accurately, humorously and well. Spectacularly inappropriate behaviour will be observed; otherwise men are more likely than women to dismiss misdemeanours as not warranting detailed recall.
In the post-party search for information, men will usually be able to provide their wives with an update on the prosperity, productivity and progress of colleagues, their house moves and career moves, and perhaps what motor, make, date and model, they drove away in when the evening came to an end.
Surely, all that is enough information for anyone? Of course not! For little of that is of interest to the majority of women. And that is when the problem begins. It is when a woman asks a man for diminutive detail that the gender differences in what is noteworthy emerge. It is then that a man finds that his answers are insufficient and his observations deficient.
Women like to know who spoke to whom, with what signs of cordiality or frostiness, with what exact verbal exchanges about what topics. They are interested in the atmosphere, the interactions and the emotional lives of their friends. They are curious about the house decor, the variety of food, what their husband ate and if he enjoyed it. They are interested in what the women wore, the style, colour, length, suitability and impact of other women's attire, what accessories they chose, and the style of shoes and size and shape of handbags.
And they are amazed when they receive generic monosyllabic answers; amazed that their partners cannot supply such simple, unavoidable observational detail; amazed that their men do not relish providing these particulars of the event.
Answers to questions such as "how did she look" will receive non-descript replies like "very nice". Now what information does "nice" contain? Where are the adjectives? Where are the details? What emotional, social, psychological and interpersonal sequences occurred at the function? That is what women usually want to know. And usually men cannot tell them and can't understand why they would want that information in the first place. This is not gratuitous griping. It is just that women generally despair of getting the kind of information from their husbands that another woman, without even being asked, would automatically supply.
Most research on gender identifies how women are different to men on measures of socio-emotional, expressive and interpersonally oriented traits and on speed, accuracy, decoding of cues and interpretation of non-verbal information.
Women tend to have a wider colour vocabulary. That is what generates the questions that husbands find unanswerable because of the male propensity to more instrumental task-oriented activities, to hierarchies that tell who is getting ahead, rather than interpersonal information, and to signs of competition rather than communal cues.
That is why the new job, the type of car, the business progress and overall current status of others is of interest to him, not what intimate social exchanges took place between other people wearing what attire, of what colour and attractiveness at a party.
Women who wait for their men to return with all the news they believe to be newsworthy are frequently disappointed. Men cannot fathom why women seek such irrelevancies when there are so many other things that could be discussed. But despite the moans of each about the other, these different ways of approaching the world are what make each engaging to the other. Difference is charming. Difference is disarming. Besides, what woman would want her husband to have noted every detail of every other woman's dress when he was out alone, without her?
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview in Dublin.