This Is Why Women Live Longer Than Men
Our Relationship to the Body Begins Early
Before puberty, children move through the world in much the same way.
They are essentially a head on a stick — moving, acting, not monitoring.
The body is there, but it isn’t something they have to pay attention to.
Puberty changes our relationship to the body. But not equally.
For girls, the change is immediate and non-negotiable.
A menstrual cycle cannot be ignored.
It arrives, it repeats, and it demands attention.
It’s not just bleeding. It’s timing, anticipation, discomfort, bloating, planning.
It’s a constant awareness that something internal is shifting.
This is not optional. It is necessity.
And it’s not just a few days.
It’s a continuous awareness that peaks monthly.
Five to seven days of bleeding are only the visible part. The rest is lead-up, consequence, adjustment.
There are practical realities. Clothing. Leakage. Embarrassment. Planning your life around your body.
You cannot remain a head on a stick.
You are in your body, whether you like it or not.
Boys are not given this.
Their development is real, but it does not impose the same internal demands.
They can remain, to a large extent, a head on a stick.
The body is something they use, not something they are required to read.
Adolescent Physiology Shapes Behaviour for Life
We forget what it was like to be young. But for girls, adolescence is the beginning of compulsory bodily awareness.
Not personality. Not preference. Repetition.
Month after month.
You learn to notice.
You learn to anticipate.
You learn to manage.
By adulthood, the difference is established under the pull to prepare, and the disruption that trains you in care, noticing, and response — capacities that extend directly into motherhood.
One group has spent years responding to internal signals.
The other has not had to.
After years of observing people in hospital, a pattern becomes obvious.
Many of the men I have cared for have very little sense of how they became unwell, or how to care for themselves once they are.
It is not confusion in the moment.
It is a long-standing absence of engagement.
There is often little curiosity, little sense of authority over the body, and very little habit of noticing change early.
This is not rare. It is common enough to be recognised socially, even joked about.
But its roots are rarely examined.
This may be one of the reasons women live longer than men.
Not because they are better.
Because they have been trained, through necessity, to pay attention to their bodies.
To notice change. To respond earlier. To adjust.
Medicine Does Not Come From This Place
Women learn early to notice change, to respond early, to adjust.
This is built through repetition. It is not abstract. It is lived, month after month.
Medicine does not come from this place.
It approaches the body from the outside in.
Measurement, imaging, intervention.
It is not trained in continuous internal attention.
It is trained to detect when something has already become measurable.
The Assumption of Shared Understanding
There is often an unspoken assumption that medicine shares the same interest in prevention, or the same connection to the body.
That it would recognise early change.
That it would value subtle symptoms.
It does not.
Because it was not built from that kind of experience.
Early Signals Are Often Dismissed
Women frequently present earlier.
They notice shifts.
They report change before it becomes obvious.
This is not anxiety.
It is familiarity.
It is the result of years of attending to internal variation.
A Mismatch in Interpretation
This is where the gap becomes visible.
What is, for the patient, a meaningful early signal
can be interpreted, within medicine, as vague or non-specific.
Sometimes it is dismissed.
Not because it is irrelevant —
but because it does not yet fit what the system is trained to recognise.
Different Training, Different Outcomes
If one group has been trained to notice early change,
and the system they present to is not built to value that noticing,
then a mismatch is inevitable.
A gap forms.
Between lived physiology and observed medicine.
Between internal knowledge and external measurement.
This is not personality.
This is early physiological training.
And it starts at puberty.