What We Think We Know

So I’m sitting in my health education class and the professor starts talking about what causes stress.  I could write a whole blog post about what causes stress for a college student, but that’s not what I’m going to do right now.  Instead I want to look at how the students responded to this topic.

So the professor asks us what we think causes stress.  We spout off a bunch of answers.  Then he asks what causes stress for males.  We start to list off things and I hear causes like, “Money,” “Competition,” “Future.”  The list continued, but I noticed that the people giving answers tended to be males.  After we had discussed this question the professor asked what causes stress for women.  Once again the responses started to flow.  People said things like “Roommates,” “Relationships,” “Tests.”  The interesting thing about these answers is that, once again, I heard them coming from males.  So why do guys think they know how girls think?  Sometimes I think that I know why girls act the way that they do or why they behave the way they do (I think this way less now that I have a real relationship), but why is that? 

I don’t know that I have a good answer to this question, but maybe it’s just something that we can all think about (especially we males).  Maybe we should try to find out more about what other people are thinking before we pass judgment about why they are the way they are.  This can even apply to the people who we think we know best.