I have been listening to members of my sex complain about men not sharing their feelings for a long time. I felt that way myself once. That is, until they started to.

I have never heard anything I really wanted to hear when I asked a man to share his feelings. What I heard were things like "I feel like I need more space" or "I feel like I’m being smothered" or "I feel like the chemistry isn’t working between us any more."

We are very selective in what feelings we want you to share. In a word, they’re the ones about us. About how wonderful, sexy, exciting, fascinating and hot we are. How much you love us. How happy it makes you to see us and how sad and miserable and lonely you are when you can’t.

We really aren’t interested in any other feelings, no matter what we say (although if your voice trembles when you tell us about your dog dying, we won’t ask you if you think this dress makes us look fat – at least, not immediately).

The fact is that our feelings are nuanced, complex, and interesting, which you’d know if you asked us. And even if you didn’t, since we can’t seem to shut up about them; you see, we really believe that self-disclosure is the same thing as intimacy, even if only one of us is doing the talking.

By contrast, your feelings are really quite simple. You’re either horny, hungry, pissed off, jealous, sentimental, turned off, bored, tired, and/or sick of us asking you how you feel.

(We know that, of course. We can tell by the way you always want to have sex when we’ve just spent a fortune at the hairdressers, get out of bed right afterward and graze the refrigerator instead of cuddling, yell at us for being late when you spent a fortune on those tickets, see red when a man stares at our tits, roll your eyes when we’re telling a story, tear up when they play the national anthem, or just stop returning our calls.)

While we’re the ones who are always talking about boundary issues, we’re also the worst offenders. We not only tell our girlfriends your sexual secrets – we eat from your plate, use your razor, read your cell phone bills, criticize you in front of your friends, throw out your favorite chair or shirt, go through your wallet, and speak in the royal We. But the most grievous example of how we violate our lovers’ boundaries is our recurring demand that they share their feelings.

You could explain it that way, of course. We might even listen. Or you could just give us the headlines – horny, hungry, pissed off, etc. You could even tell us why – your team lost, your colleague took credit for your idea, an asshole ran you off the road, you haven’t eaten since breakfast, your mother loved your brother more, your dog died. You don’t need to go into detail. Remember, the only feelings of yours we really care about are the ones about us.