Greetings, Earthlings

Hey, gay folks...tell me if you've heard this one before: "Being gay must be so easy. Since you're both guys/girls, you must get each other so well." I have a problem with this.

From a very early age, most of us are taught that men and women are two completely different species...that men are from Mars, and women are from Venus. Older women teach younger women that men operate very differently than they do. Older men proudly boast to younger men about how they'll never understand women.

Well, this may shock you, but we are actually all from Earth.

Since I started my work in sex education, it has dawned on me that these attitudes are seriously hindering the growth and development of our society. Rather than actually trying to communicate with our friends, partners, and family members of the opposite sex and actually try to understand their point of view, the majority of us dismiss their thoughts and feelings entirely as something that cannot be understood so there's no use trying, which puts up a horrible mental block between us.

I have noticed that almost every time somebody, whether a friend or a customer or whatever, asks me for dating or relationship advice regarding a partner of the opposite sex, their primary obstacle is that they think they don't know how the other person's mind works. I usually don't know the person in question anyway, so I have no idea what to say. But I empower them to consider the fact that their partner is probably thinking the same thing they are. It's not like they're trying to communicate from different planets, as some idiot "relationship experts" want you to believe. Those people are simply capitalizing on your own insecurity.

Sure, as human beings we are animals, and we have those occasionally conflicting animal mating instincts. But because we have knowledge of these things, we also have the power to reconcile them and make sense of our differences. To disregard another person's thought process as incomprehensible is really just an insult to one's own intelligence.

Life is a collaborative effort. By disregarding your team mates over their genitalia (or assumed genitalia, even) you are only making the journey more difficult for yourself. If we keep in mind that we're all from the same planet, and we all work the same way, we will have a much easier time functioning as a single race.