Last night in the pub, my oldest friend showed me his new tattoo. In these days of Celtic rings and New Age body art, it was a return to the more traditional motifs of bulldogs, mermaids and snarling tigers. Christopher had plumped for an elaborate anchor design with a flag swirling from its top. The flag was emblazoned with the words Mum and Dad. Nothing unusual in that, except for the fact that Christopher is an orphan.

Those of you in touch with the feminine side of your personality, and those of you who actually are feminine, will have thrown your arms in the air with a shout of, 'Get that poor man into therapy!' But Christopher doesn't need the attentions of a well-meaning analyst, he's doing just fine. It's not a cry for help. He's coping with the traumas of a miserable upbringing as most men do, by making a joke of it. Or in this case, an elaborately worked piece of irony.

Women are convinced that if only their men would address the 'unresolved issues' which haunt their subconscious minds they'd be much happier, more sensitive and more in touch with their emotions. 'If only he'd open up and talk about it...' is a sentiment which echoes round the country's wine bars.

But that's just where the difficulty is. Men don't talk about their problems, or attempt to resolve their issues, or reflect on their motivations, because we don't have issues or problems that we feel we need to deal with. It's not that we are in denial, or lack imagination, it's just that... well, life's baggage doesn't seem to present the same obstacle to us. We just step over it and off we go.

Of course, the traumas that Christopher experienced in his adolescence and the sense of longing he still feels for his absent parents is real, but how he chooses to deal with it is very different. He's found that laughing it off and turning 'Christmas all alone in the care home' into a hilarious pub anecdote works as well for him as half a lifetime of psychoanalysis. The cynical may say that by refusing to confront his past he is laying down problems for the future. But he would say, and he speaks for most men, that denial, avoidance, burial and an aversion to confronting the past is exactly what's working for him.

When I put my thoughts to Harriet Sawyer, a psychotherapist based in south London, she snorted with disbelief, before wondering what terrible hurt I must have suffered as a youth 'to be so blocked as an adult'? She then went on to say that, 'Men are more fragile than women and therefore have to develop a more rigid facade with which to meet the world...' But then she would say that - she's a woman and a therapist, after all.

I'd actually go as far as saying that Christopher is one of the more sensitive among us. He subtly uses humour and tattooing to keep his past in the past. Most men wouldn't come close to such skilful emotional manipulation, because most men simply don't have an emotional life at all. When women look into our eyes and wonder what dark thoughts are lurking there, what grievances we are nurturing, they'd be shocked to discover that the answer is... none. It's like looking into the care-worn eyes of an old Alsatian and guessing that there lurks intelligence and compassion. But actually, the mutt's just wondering where his next Bonio is coming from.

A recent study, which I read in one of those little books of incredible facts that have no scientific validation at all, reported that women, on average, say 7,000 words a day, while men only say 2,000. Of those, he chooses to waste most of them on football, cars, DIY and schoolboy tales of seeing the neighbours having sex. There are few words left to deal with our emotional wellbeing. We do appreciate that the tiny nuances of behaviour and interactions between people require day-long vigilance from women, but we also know that our brains work in broader strokes. It's more black or white, good or bad, than shades of grey. We think that 'sweeping things under the carpet' and 'papering over cracks' have nothing to do with the careful nurturing of relationships, but are in fact straightforward DIY terms.

Women seem to be born with an instinctive need to vocalise. Men are often characterised as speaking through their actions. However, the reason men are being silent is not because they are being strong, but because they can't think of anything to say. A male friend once observed that after making love, his girlfriend enjoyed nothing more than talking into the small hours, whereas he 'just wanted to get his zeds in'. Talk versus sleep... a man knows what he'd rather do. Besides, after making love, what could there possibly be to talk about?

All women are familiar with that look of, 'What now?' in their partner's expression. It's a look which hasn't, as they think, been honed to cause the maximum amount of annoyance, but a genuine look of surprise and non-comprehension. Conversations between men and women exist in a two-tier world. She says something like 'Are you going out again tonight?' - a statement loaded with implicit assumptions about guilt, loneliness and selfishness. He, however, takes it to mean 'Are you going out again tonight?'

A college friend used to joke that he knew he didn't have any personality problems, because he didn't have a personality. The real joke is, that he's not that far from the truth. Men skirt round 'personal' issues not because they are difficult, but because they don't know they are there.

Women should also realise that men's finely evolved 'issue avoidance skills' shouldn't be tampered with. Sarah, the wife of a good friend of mine, was so concerned about the fall-out from Tim's previous marriage that she insisted he talk to a therapist. This he did, but rather than laying her perceived ghosts to rest, it confirmed Tim's belief that it was Sarah who was stuck in the past and that it was her not him who needed help coming to terms with his ex. What Sarah had failed to understand was that Tim has been able to walk away from a failed 10-year marriage with never a backwards glance. As he says: 'She couldn't believe it had all meant so little to me.'

I mentioned Sarah and Tim's problems to Harriet Sawyer as an example of a 'non-issue' that a woman was trying to turn into a 'live issue'. As I expected, she responded that Tim's 'deprivations may be too painful for him to even acknowledge'. Which I thought rather proved my case. If Tim's break-up was so painful that he couldn't even recognise it as a problem, then surely it isn't a problem... It's difficult for women to take on board our clinical lack of depth. Try and think of us as a mirage. From a distance it appears to be a rich source of life-sustaining refreshment, a sparkling geezer. However, as you get closer, you realise it's just an illusion.

But don't be despondent. Accepting that men have limitations will open new doors of opportunity for you. Yes, you'll have to depend on your girlfriends for warmth, but you probably do that already. Don't treat us as equals, but as passably lifelike mannequins. And just as men float free from a sea of anxiety by failing to connect with our social milieu, so you, too, can leave the world of man problems behind by accepting that there's no such thing as a man. And when you start fretting about whether we've confronted 'our issues', take a deep breath, lie back and console yourself with the thought that a man's issues exist only in a woman's mind.