Actual man here:

The original image above, the color is so close that my brain is willing to write off any perceived difference as an optical effect; one page might be held at a slightly different angle to the light and slightly more in shadow or something. The cropped side by side image with most of that context removed, yeah the left one is slightly darker.

Imagine I was painting a room. A big room, enough to need more than one gallon of paint. if I got halfway through a wall, ran out of the first can, opened the second can, and the color was that different where it left a visible seam...yeah that would irk me. On the other hand, if they told me they've only got one can of each of these two colors...I could make that work. I could plan ahead and put the seam in a corner or something where again the angle of light will probably trick you into thinking it's not there.

That's not what women do to me though. What women do to me is scamper up with a handful of swatches/lipstick tubes/nail polish bottles/whatever, and say "Which do you like better? Totally Tiffany, Neon Bruise, or What Barbie's Black Friend Wears?" All three are similar shades of purplish magenta. They're close enough that one being slightly farther back in her hand or at a slightly different angle to my eye can change the difference. She intends to choose one, buy (or sometimes wear) it, and leave the others behind. Once it's on her hands/face/walls, you'll never see the others.

Now, in the case of makeup...It's genuinely not "that's girl stuff, being interested in that threatens my masculinity" or however many pop psychology feminist blame words you want to stack up on it. It's how vehemently negative women react to men expressing opinions on makeup. I, like approximately 4 billion other men, don't really like how women look when they're wearing a lot of makeup, and have been bitched out at length for saying so. As a result, A: I no longer see women as "pretty" or "beautiful" because one way or another they really aren't, and B: I'm going to shut down any question here as abruptly and angrily as possible. Probably with a "How fucking DARE you ask me this?" Starting out trying to be nice and diplomatic "It doesn't matter to me, go with the one you like" is just a waste of time, because she will not accept it.

In the case of house paint, there's a 45% chance that she's in the same "there is a perceptible difference but it's so close that it won't matter in the finished product, but I've got to tell the guy behind the counter to make just one of them" headspace he's in, and the real dispute is that neither of you are willing to make the pointless decision neither of you cares about, and a 55% chance she's already picked out a favorite and she's "testing" you to see if you're going to pick the same one, because this month's issue of Cosmo told her to. Most of the time you can tell which scenario you're in if she's asking about the primary or trim color.

Then when he says "They look the same to me" she interprets this as "I am strongly asserting that these are precisely the same CMYK shade" and not "they're so close that it's not worth the effort you're asking me to put in."

Meanwhile this whole time I've been two aisles down on staring at the cans of Minwax stain utterly convinced that the little sample window they put to show you what color the stain is are all the same shade of brown with different patterns of wood grain in them.