Women and men and all of us

Sixty-three years of age — my age — is a careless time to make proclamations about human behavior: One has enough wisdom to recognize patterns and enough foolishness to believe one can make assumptions about those patterns.

Of all the assumptions someone of any age is prey to, the most hazardous — outside of race — are comments about how women and men differ. The forces that govern the relationships between, and among, the sexes are as complicated as a teenager’s emotions and as unknowable as a cat’s intentions, and a wrong step while talking about those forces can drop you in a pit where sunl...