Well said, David. I suppose that many men don't use words to express their desire and their need for love. That's partly because most people have come to assume not only that love is an emotion but also that emotion itself is "female" (which explains the feminized vocabulary of pop psychology and clinical psychology, let alone some forms of Christianity.) But love is not reducible to sentiment. It's highest expression is not an emotion at all, in fact, but a freely chosen act of self-sacrifice by a man or a woman. I agree with you, therefore, that love (like respect) is a universal human need, not a "gendered" one.

I'm dissatisfied by the vague word "empathy," by the way, because it's ultimately meaningless. No one can actually experience more than partially what others experience (although trying to imagine how others experience the world is certainly a desirable goal). Once again, moreover, this word usually amounts to nothing more substantial than benevolent but shallow and transient feelings of the particular kind that many people consider innately female. But if women were so reliably guided by empathy, how could we explain the fact that women's movements are demonstrably devoid of empathy for boys and men, including their own sons?