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it will be a liability in marriage if it comes at the expense of
understanding the emotions behind his wife's perspectives.
This difference in training is heightened by the fact that as they

get older, boys rarely play with girls, so they miss the chance to learn

from them. Although about 35 percent of preschool best friendships

are between boys and girls (like Naomi and Eric), by age seven that

percentage plummets to virtually 0 percent. From then till puberty

the sexes will have little or nothing to do with each other. This is a

worldwide phenomenon. Many explanations have been given for this

voluntary segregation. One intriguing theory, by psychologist

Eleanor Maccoby, Ph.D." at Stanford University, dovetails with my

findings on accepting influence. She found that even at very young

ages (1/2 years), boys will accept influence only from other boys

when they play, whereas girls accept influence equally from girls or

boys. At around ages five to seven, girls become fed up with this

state of affairs and stop wanting to play with boys. From that age

until puberty, our culture (and virtually all others) offers no formal

structure for ensuring that boys and girls continue to interact.

By the time Naomi and Eric are grown, the difference in their

knowledge of homemaking will be apparent. Once a couple move in

together or get engaged, the groom-to-be is suddenly immersed in

what is probably an alien world. In the Broadway play Defense of the

Cave Man, a man says that when he was first married, he saw his

wife cleaning the bathroom and asked her, "Are we moving?" In his

bachelor days, that was the only time he and his roommates bothered

to clean the bathroom. Many young husbands discover they have a

lot to learn from their wives about maintaining a home.

You can see the shell-shocked look on the face of the typical

young fiancé in any home furnishings store. He neither knows nor

cares about the difference between taffeta and chintz. All of the china

and silver patterns look remarkably alike to him. Most of all he's

thinking that this is taking an awfully long time, and if he turns