A man's emotional world is like a tackle box. It has 500 little compartments in it with all kinds of little nifty lures and hooks and old junk that's been saved and new things that nobody knows about. And he's got all these strategies. And he goes from one compartment to the next, to the next, to the next. Most of the men I know, including myself, can jump from one little compartment to the next a hundred times in a day, and our jobs often demand that of us. So we think it's neat to live in all these little compartments.

But a wife's emotional structure is totally different. It's more like a river. And the river flows, and it flows and it flows. And what we need to learn how to do, men, is close the tackle box with all its neat little stuff, stuff that will probably never really be appreciated by our wives, close it up, take off the waders, and get into the river. We spend all this time fishing out of the river and keeping dry from the river; we need to get into the river.