I've observed that many women have an approach to storytelling akin to Kevin Costner's philosophy in Wyatt Earp, which is to take as long to relate the story as it took for the story to actually happen. Many men, on the other hand, prefer just to hit the major points, under the theory that most experiences not involving food or sex are boring enough the first time, and barely worth the retelling, except insofar as not sharing them with one's mate can impact the probability of having food and sex in the future.

I've always been curious about why this is, and I think part of the answer lies in the fact that many women seem to be more empathetic than men. During a recent restaurant outing my wife told me about a conversation between two of our married friends, and she was actually speaking as if she were the wife in the story:

Wife: "So she said (adopts a loud, angry tone) 'if you think I'm going to pick up your dirty underwear and keep my mouth shut while you ignore me and our children, you've got the wrong idea about marriage!'"

Me: "Honey, do you realize that everyone within a 20-foot radius thinks you were talking to me, and that they are all now speculating on exactly how dirty my underwear is?"

Moments like this can be acutely humiliating. But my wife doesn't mean any harm, she simply feels the emotions of the people in her story. So when she tells me about a conversation with the grocery store clerk, or how some children behaved in the park, she is reliving it, which compels her to describe details and nuances that I wouldn't bother to communicate were it my story.

This can have other interesting consequences. For example, our church has a prayer chain, which is simply a group of women who call each other, one after the other, to pass along any immediate requests for prayer that surface throughout the week in our church community. The problem is that the more people talk, the more embellishments and inaccuracies creep into a story. Because women tend to take longer to tell a story, this creates more opportunities for a predicament being prayed over to become increasingly grave. Last year a fellow who fell off a ladder and broke his leg ended up with his foot amputated by the time the prayer chain women got done with him. Had it been men passing along the story, his leg would have healed miraculously and he would have gotten off with just a "stinger," which is football parlance for "some undefined but manly pain." I've instructed my wife, should I ever get sick, that she is not to put it on the prayer chain unless she is confident that she and the kids can get by on my life insurance money.

So men and women are different. (Isn't it interesting, by the way, that it took the apparently androgynous author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus to tell us that?) And even though we men don't listen, and nod repeatedly to get them to hurry up, women still faithfully persist in telling us their unabridged stories. I think that's one reason we love them, because they put up with us when what we really deserve is a punch in the nose.