Empathic men aren’t softer or more sensitive than other men, they’re often the boys who grew up in houses where someone had to read their father’s footsteps on the stairs and decide what kind of evening it was going to be

David, a forty-three-year-old structural engineer I’ve known since college, can tell you within three seconds of his wife answering the phone whether her morning meeting went well, whether she’s hungry, whether something her sister said is still sitting in her chest. He does this without thinking about it. He has done it his entire life. What most people don’t know about David — what I only learned over a long dinner about his father — is that he developed this skill the same way other children learned to ride bikes: by needing to.