The comment was met with raucous geek laughter.

"I don't get it," I thought to myself.

After about 20 minutes of trying to think of a setup for which the punch line is, "They've load-balanced their servers," I was forced to admit that there are some things I'll just never understand.

As a married man, I have to make that admission almost daily.

My wife has been suffering a tremendous amount of stress this past week, as her semester nears its end and she tries to balance master's degree work with volunteer work and responsibilities at church. As a result, she's a little ... uhm ... unstable. She'll swear like a longshoreman as she loads bread in the toaster and will be close to tears if it comes out burned.

As just about every hack comic, advice columnist and TV psychiatrist has pointed out for the last 40 years, men are not particularly good at simply offering sympathy in these sorts of situations. When we see our wives struggling with everyday stresses, we think: "This is a problem."

Sympathy is not a response to problems. With a problem, you must either fix it or ignore it.

The "door ajar" indicator light in my pickup has a tendency to go on while I'm driving; that's a problem I've chosen to ignore. It beeps at me, I offer a few choice words in the direction of the Ford plant where it was made, and I just keep on driving.

Obviously, I can't do the same thing where my wife is concerned. If she's on the verge of an emotional breakdown, I can't simply curse the manufacturer (her parents) and go back to watching professional bull riding. No, this is a problem that I need to fix.

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But it's hard to fix a problem where a woman is concerned, because the answer isn't the same every time.

While beating up the guy who designed my pickup would certainly make me feel better, the solution is probably as simple as replacing a wire. And if I were to meet a bloke who had the same problem with his pickup, I could say to him: "Hey, you just need to replace such-and-such wire." And that would fix the problem every single time, until Ford got wise to the fact that people were learning to repair their own pickups and hired some drunken Nazi to redesign their vehicles so as to make them impossible to work on without having first earned a doctorate.

When men are stressed out, women can fix the problem with nookie. Again and again and again and again, this fix will work. If I've had a hard day, my wife can fix it with nookie. If I'm suffering from low self-esteem, my wife can fix it with nookie. If my entire family has been killed in a petting zoo stampede, my wife can fix it with nookie.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work with women.

For one thing, stressed women rarely want nookie. This is something that I find unfathomable, but my wife insists that it's true and Oprah will back her up on it, apparently.

"Bring her some flowers," is one bit of advice I've heard. But unlike nookie for me, and a new wire for my pickup, there's no telling whether that will work on any given day. It may work on a Monday, but not on a Wednesday. And even if it does work on either a Monday or Wednesday, it won't work on both Monday and Wednesday, because women don't respond to the same fix over and over and over again.

So you have to come up with multiple fixes: chocolate, a CD, dinner, a live mariachi band performing "Don't Worry, Be Happy" beneath her window. And at any given time, there's no guarantee that any of it will actually fix the problem.

Perhaps, that's because a woman can't be "fixed," as if she were some random piece of machinery. My wife's wires can't be replaced; her servers can't be load-balanced. Indeed, approaching my wife as if she has a "problem," is likely to only make things worse. So, I'm forced to admit that there are some things I'll just never understand.

Flowers and chocolate and CDs and dinners and mariachi bands may help, but perhaps the best solution to an unfixable non-problem is to admit to my wife that I don't understand what it's like to be spread so thin -- doing so many things -- but I still love her, and I'm still proud of her. And I do, and I am.

Chris Cope is married, with no children. His column appears every other Tuesday.