Lord Alfred Tennyson, coping and grieving the death of a friend, sparked perhaps one of the most famous pieces of literature.

An A, B, B, A rhyme scheme with each line delicately containing eight syllables; a natural and satisfying flow.

The spiritual journey of “In Memoriam,” widely full of Christian ideology, echoes in my head as I sit across from X as she cries. No, not because of a religious breakthrough, but because she is drunk and unloading over unrequited love. We’ll return to this.

Women are slowly learning that in this game, we should never show what hand we are holding. Essentially, this takes re-wiring of what was wired in the womb. It takes going against our own nature, acting against biology. I mean, isn’t it all just biology running in the background? The thing that guides our impulses. The thing that takes responsibility for us.

Neuropsychologist Louann Brizedine explored this in “The Male Brain.” She utilized data from hormonal biology, primatology, cognitive neuroscience – you know, all the fun stuff – to basically say, yeah, men and women are fundamentally different.

The cover of the book is duct-tape resembling a brain – men like to fix shit. They are quick to find solutions to problems. Women on the other hand, (first) want empathy and to talk about how that problem makes us feel. But Brizedine pervades, men are just as complex as women, as well as misunderstood.

These differences begin at the level of every cell and by eight weeks after conception, enough testosterone is produced to “marinate the brain.” According to Brizedine, men have two and a half times the brain space for sexual drive in their hypothalamus, but also larger processors in the amygdala, which is where fear and protective aggression is generated.

I won’t digest it all for you, but the read is a stark realization that we are far beyond just flesh, bones, and blood. But also, an understanding why we shouldn’t flip shit at our boyfriends/husbands when they don’t get mushy-gushy with us like we crave.

Yet, it is still so hard to accept we have different aptitudes. But after all, it is diversity that keeps an ecosystem prospering. It is the canning emotion we are told to be weary of…vulnerability. It’s fine, scary, but fine to be exposed. It is the resilience in our very own ecosystem that is crucial though. How can our cells react to perturbations? Ecosystems need to be able to recover quickly. (So many analogies today.)

And what if we can’t? Love is the most influential emotion in our society. The wrath and breakdowns, the joy and ecstasy, everything between…does it not spawn art? We are swallowed by its Janus-faced harmonic heaven. Perhaps it is just the writer in me dissecting every subtle syntax in people’s words that can dictate the subject’s mind. But then who could account for Browning, Tolstoy, Wilde and Plath? What other emotion provokes so much power? Why are you still reading this? Why should you leave or stay when you feel unrequited? There is a lot to poke at.

In every novel, the protagonist stumbles into mishaps and foes, but it always implies they are heading in the right direction. It’s a life lesson and you grow from it, or whatever they say.

As Tennyson reminds us, “I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”