My sophomore year of college, I took a class in Gender and Communication. It was the mid-nineties; this was groundbreaking stuff. Our Bible was Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand. There I learned something that has stayed with me all these years later. Women like to talk. Men like to solve problems. This causes stress because when women are talking about a problem, they just want someone to listen. Men try to solve the problem. As the years passed, I’ve realized that the assumption that “men do this, while women do this,” is a generalization. I’ve encountered women who are also problem solvers. How they somehow missed out on the whole brutal female socialization ritual and ended up this way is a mystery. But my late mother ...