READING

His Marriage and Hers: Childhood Roots

Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman holds a PhD in behavioral and brain sciences and has published a number of books on psychology, including The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights (2011), and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence (2011). Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years and was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his efforts to bring psychology to the public. In his book Emotional Intelligence (1995), from which the following selection was taken, Goleman describes the emotional skills required for daily living and explains how to develop those skills. As you read the selection, notice how he uses comparison and contrast to explore his subject — differences between the sexes — and highlight his key points of comparison. Because he was writing for a general audience, he cited his sources in end notes that readers who were not interested in his citations could skip. An article in a scholarly journal would have included in-text citations and a list of works cited.

As I was entering a restaurant on a recent evening, a young man stalked out the door, his face set in an expression both stony and sullen. Close on his heels a young woman came running, her fists desperately pummeling his back while she yelled, “Goddamn you! Come back here and be nice to me!” That poignant, impossibly self-contradictory plea aimed at a retreating back epitomizes the pattern most commonly seen in couples whose relationship is distressed: She seeks to engage, he withdraws. Marital therapists have long noted that by the time a couple finds their way to the therapy office, they are in this pattern of engage-withdraw, with his complaint about her “unreasonable” demands and outbursts, and her lamenting his indifference to what she is saying.

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This marital endgame reflects the fact that there are, in effect, two emotional realities in a couple, his and hers. The roots of these emotional differences, while they may be partly biological, also can be traced back to childhood and to the separate emotional worlds boys and girls inhabit while growing up. There is a vast amount of research on these separate worlds, their barriers reinforced not just by the different games boys and girls prefer but by young children’s fear of being teased for having a “girlfriend” or “boyfriend.”¹ One study of children’s friendships found that three-year-olds say about half their friends are of the opposite sex; for five-yearolds it’s about 20 percent, and by age seven almost no boys or girls say they have a best friend of the opposite sex.² These separate social universes intersect little until teenagers start dating.

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Meanwhile, boys and girls are taught very different lessons about handling emotions. Parents, in general, discuss emotions — with the exception of anger — more with their daughters than their sons.³ Girls are exposed to more information about emotions than are boys: when parents make up stories to tell their preschool children, they use more emotion words when talking to daughters than to sons; when mothers play with their infants, they display a wider range of emotions to daughters than to sons; when mothers talk to daughters about feelings, they discuss in more detail the emotional state itself than they do with their sons — though with the sons they go into more detail about the causes and consequences of emotions like anger (probably as a cautionary tale).

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Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, who have summarized the research on differences in emotions between the sexes, propose that because girls develop facility with language more quickly than do boys, this leads them to be more experienced at articulating their feelings and more skilled than boys at using words to explore and substitute for emotional reactions such as physical fights; in contrast, they note, “boys, for whom the verbalization of affects is de-emphasized, may become largely unconscious of their emotional states, both in themselves and others.”⁴

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At age ten, roughly the same percent of girls as boys are overtly aggressive, given to open confrontation when angered. But by age thirteen, a telling difference between the sexes emerges: Girls become more adept than boys at artful aggressive tactics like ostracism, vicious gossip, and indirect vendettas. Boys, by and large, simply continue being confrontational when angered, oblivious to these more covert strategies.⁵ This is just one of many ways that boys — and later, men — are less sophisticated than the opposite sex in the byways of emotional life.

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When girls play together, they do so in small, intimate groups, with an emphasis on minimizing hostility and maximizing cooperation, while boys’ games are in larger groups, with an emphasis on competition. One key difference can be seen in what happens when games boys or girls are playing get disrupted by someone getting hurt. If a boy who has gotten hurt gets upset, he is expected to get out of the way and stop crying so the game can go on. If the same happens among a group of girls who are playing, the game stops while everyone gathers around to help the girl who is crying. This difference between boys and girls at play epitomizes what Harvard’s Carol Gilligan points to as a key disparity between the sexes: boys take pride in a lone, tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves as part of a web of connectedness. Thus boys are threatened by anything that might challenge their independence, while girls are more threatened by a rupture in their relationships. And, as Deborah Tannen has pointed out in her book You Just Don’t Understand, these differing perspectives mean that men and women want and expect very different things out of a conversation, with men content to talk about “things,” while women seek emotional connection.

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In short, these contrasts in schooling in the emotions foster very different skills, with girls becoming “adept at reading both verbal and nonverbal emotional signals, at expressing and communicating their feelings,” and boys becoming adept at “minimizing emotions having to do with vulnerability, guilt, fear, and hurt.”⁷

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All of this means that, in general, women come into a marriage groomed for the role of emotional manager, while men arrive with much less appreciation of the importance of this task for helping a relationship survive. Indeed, the most important element for women — but not for men — in satisfaction with their relationship reported in a study of 264 couples was the sense that the couple has “good communication.”⁸ Ted Huston, a psychologist at the University of Texas who has studied couples in depth, observes, “For the wives, intimacy means talking things over, especially talking about the relationship itself. The men, by and large, don’t understand what the wives want from them. They say, ‘I want to do things with her, and all she wants to do is talk.’ ” During courtship, Huston found, men were much more willing to spend time talking in ways that suited the wish for intimacy of their wives-to-be. But once married, as time went on the men — especially in more traditional couples — spent less and less time talking in this way with their wives, finding a sense of closeness simply in doing things like gardening together rather than talking things over.

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This growing silence on the part of husbands may be partly due to the fact that, if anything, men are a bit Pollyannaish about the state of their marriage, while their wives are attuned to the trouble spots: in one study of marriages, men had a rosier view than their wives of just about everything in their relationship — lovemaking, finances, ties with in-laws, how well they listened to each other, how much their flaws mattered.⁹ Wives, in general, are more vocal about their complaints than are their husbands, particularly among unhappy couples. Combine men’s rosy view of marriage with their aversion to emotional confrontations, and it is clear why wives so often complain that their husbands try to wiggle out of discussing the troubling things about their relationship. (Of course this gender difference is a generalization and is not true in every case; a psychiatrist friend complained that in his marriage his wife is reluctant to discuss emotional matters between them and he is the one who is left to bring them up.)

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The slowness of men to bring up problems in a relationship is no doubt compounded by their relative lack of skill when it comes to reading facial expressions of emotions. Women, for example, are more sensitive to a sad expression on a man’s face than are men in detecting sadness from a woman’s expression.¹⁰ Thus a woman has to be all the sadder for a man to notice her feelings in the first place, let alone for him to raise the question of what is making her so sad.

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Consider the implications of this emotional gender gap for how couples handle the grievances and disagreements that any intimate relationship inevitably spawns. In fact, specific issues such as how often a couple has sex, how to discipline the children, or how much debt and savings a couple feels comfortable with are not what make or break a marriage. Rather, it is how a couple discusses such sore points that matters more for the fate of their marriage. Simply having reached an agreement about how to disagree is key to marital survival; men and women have to overcome the innate gender differences in approaching rocky emotions. Failing this, couples are vulnerable to emotional rifts that eventually can tear their relationship apart. . . . [T]hese rifts are far more likely to develop if one or both partners have certain deficits in emotional intelligence.

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Notes

1. For a useful overview of the research into the separate worlds of boys and girls, see Maccoby, Eleanor, and C. N. Jacklin. “Gender Segregation in Childhood.” Advances in Child Development and Behavior, edited by H. Reese, Academic Press, 1987.

2. This data comes from Gottman, John. “Same and Cross Sex Friendship in Young Children.” Conversation of Friends, edited by John M. Gottman and Jeffrey G. Parker, Cambridge UP, 1986.

3. This and the following summary of sex differences in socialization of emotions are based on the excellent review in Brody, Leslie R., and Judith A. Hall. “Gender and Emotion.” Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland, Guilford Press, 1993.

4. Brody and Hall, “Gender and Emotion,” 456.

5. Girls and the arts of aggression: Cairns, Robert B., and Beverley D. Cairns. Lifelines and Risks. Cambridge UP, 1994.

6. Brody and Hall, “Gender and Emotion,” 454.

7. The findings about gender differences in emotion are reviewed in Brody and Hall, “Gender and Emotion.”

8. The importance of good communication for women was reported in Davis, Mark H., and H. Alan Oathout. “Maintenance of Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships: Empathy and Relational Competence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 53, no. 2, 1987, pp. 397-410.

9. The study of husbands’ and wives’ complaints: Sternberg, Robert H. “Triangulating Love.” The Psychology of Love, edited by Robert Sternberg and Michael Barnes, Yale UP, 1988.

10. Reading sad faces: The research is by Dr. Ruben C. Gur at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.