Sweeping statements

Oh dear, the sweeping generali-sations people make, conveni-ently brushing all our individual differences under the carpet. In this latest case, the question of who is happier? The married or the unmarried? Those with children or without?

Professor Paul Dolan of the London School of Economics tells us that women are generally happier if they're single and childless, while the opposite applies to men.

Well, that may be true in general, but of course it all depends on the individuals and how they behave and what they expect.

Someone married to a kind, gentle, thoughtful, considerate spouse will obviously be happier than someone whose spouse is violent, domineering, arrogant and selfish.

Likewise someone who's single but poor, jobless, unhealthy and badly housed will be less happy than a single person in luckier circumstances.

Personally, I'm very happily married, but if I was married to someone who criticised me non-stop and always demanded the impossible, it would be another story.

Not to mention that Professor Dolan's conclusions are based entirely on self reporting, and people aren't necessarily truthful. He noted for example that when their spouse was present, women usually said they were happy being married, but if their husband wasn't around, they often confessed they were miserable.

I could tell Professor Dolan that I hated being married and my wife was a pain in the arse, and how would he know I was lying?

Also, whether you're happily married depends on whether you chose "the right person" in the first place and you're compatible over the long term. Obviously if you made the wrong choice and everything turns sour, then you're going to feel rotten.

So here's my sweeping generalisation - controversial research findings should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

No shorthand

It's been pointed out to me many times that I generalise too much about men and women. That we're all complex individuals, sometimes very different, sometimes very similar. Generalisations are hazardous.

So I'm going to try not to generalise about men and women in future. I'm going to treat them as individuals with their own particular identities. I look male, you look female. But maybe I swoon over my favourite lip gloss, while you swoon over the latest football scores. We can't be pinned down that easily.

It's a tempting shorthand to say men are emotionally repressed or sex-mad, while women are hopeless with machines or incurably romantic, but it's all half-baked nonsense that's probably false as much as it's true. It's the stuff of tabloid newspapers rather than real life.

People may say their man or their woman is "absolutely typical" of the gender stereotypes. They may say "Men - they're all the same." They may say "You know what women are like." But they don't really mean it. They know the actual men and women in their lives don't fit neatly into any gender boxes and have all sorts of unpredictable quirks and tastes. The throwaway statements are just lazy thinking.

So I've vowed not to generalise any more. Whether I'll stick to it is another matter. I might forget myself and slip back into easy clichés. I might forget that suits and ties or dresses and heels do not always a man or woman make. People are not what they seem. Appearances are deceptive. The public persona is not the private zeitgeist. Scratch the surface and glib assumptions quickly crumble away.

If I start backsliding, let me know. And none of that feminine shyness, girls.