day no. 15,332: assigned language

"Men are often offense-givers and women have a tendency to be offense-takers. Here is something that may help you as you sort this out—and all godly wives do have to sort it out. The temptation for women is to impute motives. In other words, you think something like this. 'If I ever said something like that to one of my friends, it would be because I was being cruel in the most calculating way possible. He just said that to me. Therefore he is being deliberately cruel to me.' The reasoning seems valid, but notice that the entire argument depends upon the false idea that men think and speak the same way that women do. But they do not, and one of the best things a wife can learn at the earliest possible time is that men say these things because they are Labrador retrievers, and Labs like to bark. For no particular reason. Another way of saying this is that dogs aren’t very good at being catty. So my charge to you is this. You both believe that you speak English, and you both do, after a sort. But he speaks men-English, and you speak women-English." -- Douglas Wilson, Bone of My Bones

We know that we are to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But sometimes we take this as far as to mean that what someone else did to us can only be why we would have done it to them. It is an inverse of the same logic. We impute to the other the same motives that would have been necessary for us to do or say what they did or said. But we are often wrong when it comes to this, particularly when we are talking about interacting with someone of the complementary gender.