The Woman is Always Right! a b r g dAn Excerpt from Abandoned Shopping Carts: Personal and Spiritual Responsibility

by William Bezanson

I regret that I didn’t understand this earlier in my life: in any sincere man-woman partnership, such as a marriage, the woman is always right.

Now that’s a huge statement! It is controversial, open to misinterpretation, seemingly sexist, cosmic in its significance, accusable of triteness and of being a cop-out, and perhaps silly. Coming from a woman, the statement could be considered driven by a feminist agenda. Coming from a man, it could be considered preposterous, misled, and henpecked. But I believe it.

The reason I believe that women are always right has to do with the different ways that men and women make decisions.

Men are predisposed to use left-brain thinking, which means using logical analysis, and inductive reasoning: taking particular knowledge and expanding it to be more general. This style is useful in many circumstances, but it is nearly always based on incomplete information, since all of the information about a situation is rarely available.

Women tend to use right-brain thinking, which means using logical synthesis, and deductive reasoning: recognizing general patterns and applying them to particular situations. This is women’s intuition. Intuition taps into the infinite wisdom of the universe and therefore has access to all knowledge. For example, intuition can see what will happen in the future, whereas logical analysis might never predict some specific, relevant future event.

In short, men tend to use their heads and women tend to use their hearts. Information available to the head is limited, often leading to ill-informed decisions. Information available to the heart is unlimited, and so decisions based on using the heart are mostly right.

My point here is not to suggest that women are better than men, or vice versa. They are simply different. They were designed to be different, and

the manufacturing process is generally true to the design. The differences should be celebrated and honored.

Of course, many grey areas exist in real situations. Some men are more intuitive and some women are more rational. Also, I have written from an idealized point of view, for example: “sincere … partnership” and “intuition … has access to all knowledge”. In real situations, there might be some lack of sincerity, pride might interfere, intuition might be wrongly interpreted, and other such tendencies might mess up my nice, clean theory. But I am convinced that if each partner in a relationship can do their very best to take the high road with integrity and sincerity, then each of them will agree that the woman is always right.

And, of course, we should recognize that “always” is impossible, so a more realistic title for this article could perhaps be “The woman is nearly always right!” but I like the snappiness of my chosen title. And, I’ll bet that (nearly) all women would agree with me.

I include this article in this chapter on civic responsibility because it belongs here. Recognizing that the woman is always right is one of our civic responsibilities, and it has the potential to save our society. Happy relationships and families make for stable civilizations.

Do the right thing! If you are a man, defer to your female partner; you can learn a lot. If you are a woman, hold your ground; you are very likely right.