An editorial in the paper last week mentioned the way men's heads swivel around when a woman comes into view. It described how women don't do this — we notice men just as much as they notice us and can describe their charms if you ask, but we don't turn our heads in an obvious way to get our information. The author went on to say the male head-swivel was a signal to women — a man's particular woman, or any woman watching — that he was not to be tied down, he was looking to see who appealed to him and could move on at any time. It's an exit strategy.

I've been hanging out with a man recently for the first time in years, so I'm getting a fresh education in guy-ness. The first thing I noticed was how close his moods were to mine: happy, depressed, loving, irritable — we were not dissimilar. This is reassuring, since I've sometimes thought men were so strange as to be from another planet. I noticed other points in common: we're both good drivers and passengers, we can cook and start a fire in the woodstove. He knows how to do laundry like I do. We love music, fried-egg sandwiches, looking words up in the dictionary. We're both poets.

Physically, as you probably know from your own research, we're not alike. He has body parts that in no way resemble my own. Sometimes I find these erotic, sometimes humorous, and other times, like a curious six-year-old, I wonder where he puts them. I worry about zippers on his behalf.

Where I'm seeing the biggest difference is in how we think. I'm a perfectly smart cookie in a general way: able to understand things, converse pretty well, etcetera. My emotional IQ is high, I easily read how people feel. Stylistically, I gather information like a crow going after what glitters. Once the pile of loot is high enough, ideas form naturally and I string them together into opinions and theories. This man, on the other hand, is a proponent of logic. In minutes he can lay out any argument, pro or con. He uses numbers and letters for sub-headings as he speaks, arrays the finite number of possible outcomes before me like Solomon. Even as I admire his skill, I'm often rendered speechless by the information at his beck and call, and also at times by his tone: the amassing of facts can give it an authoritative sheen. When we disagree, both of us feel misunderstood.

One of our questions involves the style of our togetherness: should it be monogamous or otherwise? Sometimes this is so hard to talk about I'm tempted to design an exit strategy. I don't want to end this dance before the music's over — I really like this guy. I don't have a back-door man in mind. But now and then when I see a man swivel his head at a woman, I want to imitate him out of sheer bravado.

The truth is, exit strategy or no exit strategy, men and women are pretty much in agreement. None of us wants to be hurt, in the end.