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Wrong Headline:

The AFP has put the headline "Men Do Have Trouble Hearing Women" on this story:

Men who are accused of never listening by women now have an excuse - women's voices are more difficult for men to listen to than other men's.

Reports say researchers at Sheffield University in northern England have discovered startling differences in the way the brain responds to male and female sounds.

The research shows men decipher female voices using the auditory part of the brain that processes music, while male voices engage a simpler mechanism.

That is to miss the point entirely. The right headline is this:

"When I said that your voice was like music to me -- a song to soothe the savage beast -- I was but speaking God's own truth."

I've never said those exact words to anyone, but we've all said something like them, to certain special women of whom it was really true. That truth has lain hidden and unproven until now, but it always was true.

Why is there no room for this romanticism, which has proven out in the harshest light of science? Why, here, do we first look to the cynic -- "Men really don't hear you!" -- rather than the romantic, whose promises bind his heart and his life? It is just easier? Or have we stopped believing in love? -- our society, I mean, not each of us.

Pray, now, believe the other things we say. For those of us who are honorable men, at least, say only what we mean: and we will keep our word to you.