When I first began writing relationship advice, I wanted to know how best to reach my audience.

So I went directly to the source and asked a range of women how they preferred to learn about dating and relationship skills.

There are so many products on the market that profess to teach women to attract more men and have better relationships than the ones they’re in. Women can go to seminars, buy books, listen to CDs, and purchase packages discretely online.

So what makes one product better than another?

I kept hearing the same themes over and over again.

• Women wanted to talk with other women.
• Women wanted to hear stories about other people’s experiences that they could relate to. They wanted to hear step-by-step how that person turned his/her life around.
• Women wanted to feel as if they were participating in something: they wanted to dance, to laugh, to make personal vows.
• Women wanted to feel honored by the person teaching them, and they wanted to honor—not belittle—the men they loved.

All of which makes for some interesting conclusions about female epistemology.

Female episte-what?

How women learn. How women come to know something. How women distinguish between fact and belief.

Believe it or not, I actually studied feminist epistemology in college.

“Epistemology” is the study of knowledge, how we know what we know.

Back then, my classmates and I read Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, Mary Belenky’s Women's Ways of Knowing, Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves, and Susan Babbitt’s Feminism and Objective Interests.

It was all philosophy and disputed psychology at that point. Do women have a different built-in moral code than men? Does patriarchy devalue the female “sixth sense” or intuition?

I wrote papers, and papers, and more papers.

Seven years later, science has stepped in to replace conjecture. The truth is out. Women’s brains ARE wired differently from men’s. In a very real way, women DO experience the world differently from men.

Barbara and Allan Pease write about masculine and feminine brains in Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps: How We’re Different and What to Do About It. They claim that the amount of hormones received by the developing fetus determines the extent to which the brain becomes “gendered.” A woman can have a brain wired in a masculine way despite having female genitalia, and, similarly, a biological male can have a brain wired in a feminine way. The Peases assert a correlation between sexual preference and the gender orientation of the brain.

Questions of sexual preference aside, one thing is certain. Boys and girls DO learn differently. Boys excel at mathematics, building, and puzzles because their brains are wired to make these ways of thinking easy and therefore pleasant. Girls excel at language, speech, and reading.

Gone forever are the days when feminists could assert that the only gender differences that existed were those society has constructed. Gender is built into the brain. (Kate Bornstein would be horrified.)

So when it comes to teaching women about relationships, you’d think that dating experts would get it.

If women learn differently than men, then training programs should teach material in ways best suited to women’s natural learning style. Such a program would give lots of context, provide examples that women could relate to, allow women time to talk and communicate, and create an environment where the women all felt part of something.

Many don't.

It's a much trickier business, teaching dating skills to women as opposed to men. Women don’t respond to “alpha females” like men respond to “alpha males.” They can be highly judgmental of the people professing to teach them something.

Women look at their leaders from all angles, picking apart a speaker’s fashion sense, body language, experiences and attitudes to determine whether or not they want to listen to this person. Women are great “readers” of other people; the wool can’t be pulled over their eyes lightly. Women also want to be the center of their leader’s attention and know that their leader cares deeply about them.

Oprah Winfrey is successful because she understands this. She presents herself as one of us, someone who is human and makes mistakes. She lets women talk, draws out their stories, and shows that she truly cares about them. She creates community. At the same time, she has an excellent professional polish with an eye for details.

Those of us in the relationship business could learn a lot from Oprah. Instead of giving women a map to a better relationship, we should create a space for women to talk and share their experiences. Instead of creating systems to build attraction, we should create stories about how attraction develops.

I love writing and talking. No wonder: I'm a woman.