Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

A week after his daughter Lauren was born, John Gray came home to find his wife Bonnie in agony. She had been injured during the delivery, the painkillers had run out, his brother had forgotten to refill the prescription, and she had spent the day alone with a newborn and a body that would not stop hurting. Gray walked in, completely misread the situation, decided she was blaming him for something, and turned to leave the room. That was when Bonnie said the sentence that would change his career. She told him she only seemed to need him when everything was going well, that the moment she stopped being sweet and easy, he walked out the door. And then she asked him, plainly, to come back, sit down, put his arms around her, and say nothing at all. He stayed. He held her. And in that one quiet minute he realized that any woman would have known what to do, and that he, as a man, had no idea touch and listening were what she needed.

That moment kicked off seven years of research, twenty-five thousand seminar participants, and the book that has now sold more than fifteen million copies. Whether or not you buy John Gray's central metaphor, almost everyone who picks up this book recognizes themselves in at least one of its scenes. The premise is simple and a little ridiculous on purpose. Pretend, for the length of the book, that men really did come from Mars and women from Venus. That they flew to Earth together, fell in love, and then woke up one morning with a kind of selective amnesia in which they forgot they had ever been from different planets. From that day on, every man assumed every woman would react the way he would. Every woman assumed every man would feel the way she would. And so the fights began.