I enjoy spending time with my woman friends. We care about each other, and we show it by supporting each other's ideas and emotions. We'll let each other vent, making suggestions for possible solutions, but without denigrating the other's feelings or indicating that we know more than her on any topic.
Men, on the other hand …
The most telling movie scene, I believe, comes from "City Slickers", where the characters—several men and one woman—are all sitting around the campfire. The woman is questioning why the men only ever talk about sports. They ask what she and her friends talk about, and she answers, "Oh, relationships…".
This morning I sat down at my desk, and heard a conversation taking place over the cube wall. One guy's heat pump quit over the weekend, and I could hear various male voices offering solutions. I walked down the hall and past where they were standing, just to observe. There were no fewer than five guys clustered around the homeowner's cube. All were speaking, simultaneously at times, in loud, I-know-everything-about-everything voices. The conversation went on for, fully, ten or fifteen minutes. Every party to the conversation had advice for the homeowner, and each was sure his was the ultimate answer.
Now I will freely admit I am the Patron Saint of Repairmen. I'm not going to get on my back under the sink to fix a leak, or dig into the wires in the wall to change an outlet. I make a decent salary, and I spend a good chunk of it repairmen, who fix the problem and make it right. But even if I knew more about fixer-uppering than I do, I certainly wouldn't insist that my way was the only way.
I found it quite amusing that all these smart software developers had so many strong opinions about heat pumps and spent (wasted?) so much of the morning advising one of their own.
I guess it's all about the bonding, whatever form it takes.
As we discussed my recent speeding ticket before staff meeting this morning, a colleague told me about the day his wife got a speeding ticket on the way to work, then another, in the same location, on the way home. From the same trooper!
I thought I was fine with yesterday's speeding stop, and that it was just another fact of my everyday long commute.
This week I'm listening to "Olive Kitteridge," the Pulitzer Prize-winning "novel in stories" by Elizabeth Strout. The narration on the audiobook is beautifully performed by Sandra Burr, who nails the Maine accents.
The babes and I had our regular Tuesday night dinner date last night—Denny's, of course—while their parents attended board meetings and book clubs. 
I enjoy spending time with my woman friends. We care about each other, and we show it by supporting each other's ideas and emotions. We'll let each other vent, making suggestions for possible solutions, but without denigrating the other's feelings or indicating that we know more than her on any topic.
The poor little guy has had diarrhea since about eight hours after he arrived. I've tried various different foods, including all the tried-and-trues for stopping diarrhea. And yet the flow continued, unabated. He didn't like using the litter box, no matter how frequently I scooped. So he would empty his intestines on my bed, on Ridley's bed, on the comforter I laid on the guest room floor for him to sleep on, on both rugs in my family room, and so on.