Understanding you partner: Role of Gender differences in Relationships

 

When it comes to gender differences, one of the top subjects that strikes my mind is relationships. From childhood, we’ve seen clear gender roles in our Indian middle-class households that portray the mother as the primary caregiver, who expresses her emotions and provides care. In contrast, the father is the secondary caregiver who is the breadwinner of the family and provides security. Or in another scenario, when you imagine someone going on a date, one often expects the male counterpart to drop the female off at her home and maybe kiss her goodbye. Why are these specific differences present between male and female roles in a relationship or the dating culture?

One reason for this difference could be dating scripts. These are the routines, behaviours, and patterns you find yourself repeating in dating and relationships, even when you are dating someone fresh. For example, going for a certain personality type when looking for a partner. Sometimes unhealthy dating scripts can lead to toxic as well as abusive relationships that are hard to escape from. A very common dating script–– that I'm sure you've all come across–– is “opposites attract”. Certain people believe this is false and agree to the contrary– that one should always look for similarities in a partner. Dating scripts can change with time and circumstances but it is often a minor change. A few common dating scripts for men and women are as follows.

For men: Ask for the date, decide the itinerary, pay for the date, initiate physical contact, kiss goodnight, ask for another date, try to impress the date and open car doors.

For women: Check appearance, groom and dress, wait for the date, introduce parents or friends, tell the date about the good time she had, joke, laugh and talk, build conversation and welcome the date home.

Suzanna Rose and Irene Frieze who studied dating scripts on the first date found that men are expected to play a more rigid role than females. The dating script they are associated with is of initiators and decision-makers. Men are expected to initiate plans, pay for the date and are seen as sexual “fiends”. Women are supposed to assume a subordinate role by facilitating conversation and expressing a very covert, “shy” attitude toward sexual activity., McCormick and Jesser argued that this pattern is changing among college students. They believe that dating partners both have equal say when it comes to sexual activity and the taboo around women engaging in premarital sex is reduced. These scripts have changed to the level that even women nowadays ask out men for dates, a very common practice in the era of online dating. 

During this research, the stereotypes around dating were examined too. The results showed that traditional dating stereotypes persisted even after dating scripts had some changes. The overall results of the research concluded that even though gender roles did see a change due to feminist attempts, the dating scripts did remain mostly conventional.

Numerous studies have also found that women are more emotionally expressive than men. We’ve all heard this but what does one mean when they talk about emotional expressivity? Emotion, according to Kring and Gordon, is defined as having a mixture of expressive, experiential, and physiological components. Emotional expressivity is defined as the extent to which a person expresses emotions outwardly, independent of intensity or medium. It is a stable, individual difference trait.

Emotional expressivity is one aspect of communication that was investigated in a study done by Melissa Ubando. According to the findings, women believed they communicated more personal information with their partners, but they were less trusting of their partners than men. Despite the fact that males self-reported being more intimate in their relationships, their relationship satisfaction score was lower in their findings.

According to Duncombe and Marsden, Many women report unhappiness primarily due to the perception of men's unwillingness or incapacity to 'perform' emotional intimacy, which appears to them as a necessary aspect to sustain close heterosexual relationships. 

Tannen(1990) established that masculine and feminine forms of speech are best understood as two unique cultural languages, rather than as inferior or superior ways of speaking, simply because men and women are raised differently. She defines six major contrasts between the ways men and women use language in her book, You Just Don't Understand: status vs. support, independence vs. intimacy, advice vs. understanding, information vs. feelings, orders vs. proposals, and conflict vs. compromise. She talks about what separates men and women on the basis of communication. For example, men seek status, whilst women seek connection through communication. The way each gender communicates and perceives an interaction might cause inequalities in their relationships often leading to differences in opinion. 

Research suggests that women experience negative emotions such as melancholy more than men. Furthermore, women reported feeling more worried and unhappy than men, whereas males reported feeling more excited and peaceful than women. Conflict often arises if each partner has different expectations of emotional expression in their relationship. The general perception appears to be that men express their emotions exclusively through physical forms. These findings support the conclusion that certain emotions have been stereotypically attributed to each gender. 

To conclude, in a relationship, male and female partners often have differences in expectations that lead to a difference in behavior. The way to solve any conflict that can arise due to this is by communicating along with mindful listening and understanding. When the requirement of a need in a relationship is communicated clearly by both men and women, it often leads to a successful and healthy relationship. Dating scripts are ever changing but it takes generations to see the actual change because of fixed stereotypes that have been engraved into an individual's consciousness via society, culture and individual upbringing. 

About the author

Muskaan Kalaria is a second-year student pursuing a BSc in Psychology at NMIMS SDSOS. She is passionate about creating art which is expressed in the form of painting, graphic designing and writing. Her passion for writing started as a method of expressing herself which later progressed into devotion towards scientific reading and writing. She enjoys her free time listening to music along with exploring and reading about topics that fascinate her.

Reference

Duncombe, J., & Marsden, D. (1993). Love and Intimacy: The Gender Division of Emotion and `Emotion Work’. Sociology, 27(2), 221–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038593027002003 

Gender and Emotion in the United States: Do Men and Women Differ in Self-Reports of Feelings and Expressive Behavior? (2004). American Journal of Sociology, Volume 109(Number 5). 

Gender Differences in Intimacy, Emotional Expressivity, and Relationship Satisfaction. (2015). Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research, Vol. 4, Article 13. https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/pjcr/vol4/iss1/13

Hess, U., Blairy, S. & Kleck, R.E. The Influence of Facial Emotion Displays, Gender, and  Ethnicity on Judgments of Dominance and Affiliation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 24, 265–283 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006623213355 

Kring, A. M., & Gordon, A. H. (1998). Sex differences in emotion: Expression, experience, and physiology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 686–703. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.3.686 

ROSE, S., & FRIEZE, I. H. (1989). YOUNG SINGLES’ SCRIPTS FOR A FIRST DATE. Gender &Amp; Society, 3(2), 258–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124389003002006