PR.com (Allison Kugel): Your new book, Venus On Fire, Mars On Ice, describes 100% the issues that I was having in my own relationship, and it has helped us quite a bit.

John Gray: Hooray!

PR.com: We have a fourteen month old. I don’t know if you have seen this pattern in the therapy that you do, but having a child accentuates the differences between men and women, tenfold.

John Gray: It magnifies it dramatically, and it makes you more dependent on each other. It brings up those issues.

PR.com: I particularly love the two page cartoon in the center of this book. It’s spot on! But what I didn’t know is, hormonally, men and women are actually wired to think and behave in different ways. I always believed it was just our preferences.

John Gray: It gets to the root of the matter, and then we can honor those differences because many of them are physiological. Some of them are preferences, some of them are simply temperaments. People are unique and different, but when you get down to the level of how we are coping with stress, this is a hardwiring that goes on in our bodies. We are naturally drawn to situations that help us cope with stress. And we assume our partner would be thinking and feeling the same way, when quite often it’s different. Then, that gives rise to misunderstanding. So the greater the stress in our lives, the more the differences [between men and women] will tend to show up.

PR.com: How did you come to these conclusions, regarding hormonal differences, in the way men and women express and diffuse their stress? And when did you first conduct the research for this book?

John Gray: Back in the early eighties is when I first started developing the ideas of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Everybody kept saying, “Why? How do you know?” My answer in those years was, “I’ve got a counseling practice, and I’m married myself, and women almost all say the same things (laughs) about their husbands, and about themselves.” There were themes that are very universal in almost every household. When we are under stress is when these differences show up the most. When women are under stress their brains tend to speed up, and men’s tend to slow down. In the nineties when the book was very popular, that is when most of the universities began having gender studies departments. Brain scans were developed and every department had brain scans and you could start seeing how men’s and women’s brains reacted differently in situations. They would call me up and say, “What does this mean?” because I was a well known expert on gender. I continued to follow the miles of research, which has been done showing the differences between men and women. What I do is put it together in a coherent package to apply it in useful ways. No one has really done that. What inspired this book (Venus On Fire, Mars On Ice) is the research that was done at UCLA on oxytocin. It’s the hormone that lowers stress for women. In the nineties the drug companies discovered that oxytocin was not only the nurturing hormone, but was also the hormone responsible for women’s sexual response.

click to read interview with John Gray