The term black box actually comes out of the science of cryptography, in which breaking codes often required one to figure out how to get a desired result from a particular encryption device without ever opening it to see how it actually worked. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, an intriguing open-source experiment in the sharing of knowledge, offers a useful definition of the concept known to philosophers as the black box theory of consciousness, which "states that the mind is fully understood once the inputs and outputs are well-defined, and generally couples this with a radical skepticism about the possibility of ever describing what goes on inside the mind." (Since you asked, "A black box is a system where we have a well-defined understanding of its inputs and output characteristics, but no idea what's going on inside." (For more on this, go to Wikipedia.)

This concept expresses, as succinctly as anything I know, the relationship of most men to women. We do observe (and often provide) their input. We certainly observe (and are frequently subjected to) their "output characteristics." Most of us will readily confess that, insofar as it concerns women, we have "no idea what's going on inside." Consequently, over time, we do indeed commonly develop "a radical skepticism about the possibility of ever describing what goes on inside the[ir] mind[s]." (Hence the classic riddle, "If a man speaks in a forest, and there is no woman around, is he still wrong?")

Nonetheless, like cryptographers and philosophers, we men can derive satisfactory results by learning how input governs output while setting the mechanics thereof aside entirely. Case in point: I go down to my little bistro for lunch. The waitress on duty, Veruschka, is new to me: attractive, twenty-something, chatty. She doesn't look the ethnicity her name suggests, and it turns out that my surmise is right: She's part Native American as well as part Russian. This starts us talking while I wait for my panini, and the subject of her boyfriend comes up, because they've just had a fight.

Women often confide in me: I listen well and closely, I'm empathetic, I don't judge, and I give advice with no strings attached. So I asked Ruschka what happened, and she explained: Her boyfriend told her that he loved her. ("Used the L word," as she phrased it.)

You can understand how this would upset a woman. Say what? You can't? Men think that women want their men to tell them that they love them -- because women tell them this. So an increasing number of men have learned to declare their love to women. (According to one author, women respond more to verbal cues, men to visual ones -- so women like to be tell and be told, men like to show and be shown. Even though it goes against the male grain to tell rather than show, we strive to please.)

But this is only half the story, and in some ways the least important half. A woman doesn't just want a man to tell her that he loves her (even if it's true); she wants him to tell her that he loves her not just when he feels like it or think it's the right moment, but exactly when she wants him to tell her. When is that? If you were a woman, you'd know without asking. And if you're a man, you'll never know for sure.

To be continued . . .