By Laurence Roy Stains
With a sigh of relief, you pull into your driveway at the end of another 12-hour day.
You're ready to unwind. Already, your blooFd pressure is falling. But inside your house, your personal life is waiting. Maybe you have a girlfriend or wife who craves your companionship, and children who demand your attention. When you walk through that door, you may be thinking in terms of haven and escape. But in these next few hours, you're really undergoing a transition. You're going to make the switch from work to love, from ambition to emotion, from power to intimacy.
This transition is a big job—and the ramifications are bigger than ever. So you need to handle it well.
What if you don't? Hey, no harm done. You'll simply join the legions of the angry and depressed, with half your money gone to your ex-wife, your kids mad at you, your few friends slowly drifting away, and a vague sense of shame that keeps you from making social connections. Not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything. Okay? Now you can loosen your tie. But don't open the car door just yet. I want to talk to you for a while longer.
I'm not that crazy about the word "intimacy." I bet you're not, either. It's a department-store word. (Third floor: Intimate Apparel.) And, come to think of it, I'm never happy to hear the word "emotion." It means that pretty soon I'll be hearing the word "feelings," as in I've hurt her feelings, or I don't seem to have any feelings, unless team X comes from behind to beat team Y. When men hear about "emotion," we're usually about to be scolded.
I'm being more than a little defensive, but you and I both know that our apparent difficulty with the whole feelings thing bothers women. And, further, they grow testy over the fact that it bothers them more than it bothers us. But how's this for an idea? Men should stop being defined by what we lack. Instead, let's take a clear-eyed look at emotions, the unique ways in which we experience them, and their role in who we are today. Wouldn't it be cool if we understood that, and why we are the way we are? Wouldn't it be cool if we could finally explain ourselves to women? If only so they'd stop asking us?
Fortunately for all of us, some serious scien-tific and psychological discoveries of the past decade can help us do just that. So let's push beyond the gauzy metaphor of Mars and Venus. Yes, men and women are different, but it's no longer enough to categorize men by the words they fail to say.
And let's concede one point straight off: Men are not as emotionally articulate as women are. It's not out of spite; we don't stubbornly refuse to spend hours talking about feelings. We just can't do it. That is, the inner architecture of our brains just can't do it. New technology, such as functional magnetic-resonance imaging (better known by its abbreviation, fMRI), allows neuroscientists to virtually open up the skull and see what's happening inside. This means you can show people photos of mutilated bodies, for example, and watch their brains react.
It may sound cruel, but that's exactly what a team of Stanford scientists did. They showed brutal images to 12 men and 12 women. In the women, nine different areas of the brain showed higher activity, both when viewing the pictures and when recalling them three weeks later. Nine different areas! In the men, only two areas lit up. The comparison says it all.
Thanks to neuroscience, we now know that the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped region deep in the brain, plays a key role in both emotional reactions and emotional memories. And, wouldn't you know it, the female amygdala is far more efficient. That's why women can recall more emotional memories more quickly (have you noticed?), and their memories are richer and more intense. (No wonder she still remembers that hurtful remark you made last Christmas.) The amygdala may also play a role in women's greater tendency to engage in what scientists call ruminative thinking, the repetitive focus on negative feelings and events. (You've noticed that, as well.)
Psychologists now know that a lot of rumination actually confuses people about how they really feel—but you won't want to tell her that when she's ruminating.
There are other key brain differences. The female brain has a better connection between its left hemisphere, which is involved in speech, and its right hemisphere, which is involved in emotion. (That connective tissue is called the corpus callosum, and females have more of it than we do, in relation to total brain size.) When most women talk, both sides of their brains are activated; men use only their left hemispheres for speech. It's emerging details like this that are leading scientists to theorize that, yes indeed, women seem to have a greater built-in facility for talking about their feelings.
By simply observing little kids' behavior, we get the picture that our differences are innate. A whole slew of psychological studies have gathered data on the habits of preschoolers, and here's a sampling:
By age one, girls make more eye contact than boys do. A couple of years later, the paintings of young girls will almost always contain one or two people; little boys' renderings commonly depict rocket ships, bicycles, and cars.
At play, boys were 50 times more competitive over toy sharing, while girls were 20 times more likely to take turns.
Could a horribly sexist culture be to blame for those differences? No—at least not entirely, says Simon Baron-Cohen, PhD, a psychologist at UK's Cambridge University. In multiple studies, he has looked at the amount of testosterone babies are exposed to in the womb, and then looked at them at 12 months, 18 months, two years, and four years of age. The results have been startling. The higher the baby's level of fetal testosterone, regardless of gender, the less eye contact the child makes at age one, and the smaller his or her vocabulary is at 18 months. By age four, those with the highest fetal-testosterone levels score the lowest on a test of social skills and the highest on a test showing deep interest in a narrow range of topics.
Testosterone in the womb could be the big key to our interests and behavior as adults. "More specifically," Baron-Cohen writes in his book, The Essential Difference, "the more you have of this special substance, the more your brain is tuned into systems and the less your brain is tuned into emotional relationships."
There's the taproot of the male condition.
Baron-Cohen has marshaled all this evidence into a grand theory, which he lays out in his book. There are basically two kinds of brains—the empathizing brain and the systemizing brain. If you have an empathizing brain, you're exquisitely good at understanding how someone else might feel, and furthermore you want to alleviate their distress. You're good at identifying people's inner emotions simply by looking at their facial expressions. (Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have catalogued 412 discrete emotions. Oy.) You're good at relationships, and you maintain those healthy relationships by sharing feelings. And you have a flair for language, so you can express all 412 of those emotions.
If you have a systemizing brain, says Baron-Cohen, you're driven to understand systems—anything from plumbing fixtures to the NBA rule book, from patent law to the bond market. Systemizers specialize in events with predictable consequences, so that when you act, you can be pretty darn certain of the result. Such systems can take a long time to learn, but if you have a systemizing brain, that doesn't bother you—you can spend endless hours observing all the details, to the exclusion of everything (and, oops, everybody) else in your life. You're more interested in organizing principles than in the social world. You're good with mechanical things, not people. You cultivate an expertise. And you love sports, because it's a combination of four systems: an organizing system (S-P-U-R-S!), a system of rules ("He was nowhere near the paint!"), a motoric system ("...a 360-degree slam..."), and a statistical system ("...that keeps their playoff hopes alive if the Suns lose, the Jazz win, and the Lakers get lost on the way to the Staples Center!").
In the past, systemizers have been good at tool making, hunting, and trading. Now they're good at engineering, inventing, coaching, computer programming, and leading a corporation along a "critical path" toward "key metrics."
In their daily lives, these people tend to be independent, driven, successful individuals who do well in business because of their expertise and their ability to take decisive action. They do well socially not because of their power to empathize, but because they've reduced the pecking order to a system of rules and know how to manipulate their way through it. If they're men, as they often are, they're very attractive to women—the very same women who, after a few years, wonder why these guys aren't better empathizers.
Sound like anyone you know?
You don't have to be male to have a systemizing brain—but it helps. (Remember, your fetal- testosterone level helped shape your brain.) Baron-Cohen has come up with 60-question tests to identify people as empathizers or systemizers, and from the thousands he's administered to date, he figures that 44 percent of women have empathizing brains, 17 percent have systemizing brains (which accounts for the many brilliant female scientists), and 35 percent have brains that are roughly balanced between the two poles. Four percent exhibit an "extreme female brain" type.
Baron-Cohen says that 53 percent of men have systemizing brains, 17 percent have empathizing brains, and 24 percent are roughly balanced. The remaining 6 percent have an extreme male brain—and these men, he theorizes, exhibit behavior that's labeled autistic.
But just because your brain isn't tuned in to emotional relationships doesn't mean you can blow them off. Rather, it means you have to pay attention to emotions—those of others, and your own. Otherwise, when the chips are down, you'll find yourself sitting at the table alone, with no one to help you and no idea how to help yourself.
The psychologist Ronald F. Levant, EdD, has spent two decades conducting research in the field of men and their emotions. Having grown up in South Central Los Angeles, an area "that was tough and is tough," as he says, he experienced firsthand the ways in which traditional cultures teach men to stifle their emotions. As a researcher, he knew of a clinical condition called alexithymia (uh-lexa-THIGH-me-uh), which literally means the inability to put emotions into words. It was originally applied to the severe emotional constriction of drug-dependent posttraumatic stress disorder patients. But in his counseling practice, he saw a more "garden-variety" form of alexithymia. His male patients often exhibited an inability to know what they were feeling—especially if those feelings were in the tender and vulnerable vein.
As a professor of psychology at the University of Akron, Levant has devoted his research to showing that a mild-to-moderate form of alexithymia is widespread in our society. As he says, "It's normative for many men in our society to be genuinely unaware of some of their emotions."
He gives one quick example: In his practice, he saw a man who had been caught cross-dressing—by his grown children. So the man came to a therapy session with his wife. Levant asked him how he felt at the moment he was discovered. And the man turned to his wife and asked, "How did I feel?"
Levant believes we experience emotion on three different levels: the neural, biochemical level, expressed in heartbeat and breathing pattern; the physical and behavioral level, revealed in facial expression and body language; and finally the level of conscious awareness. Typically, alexithymic men lack the third level, and may even lack an awareness at the second level.
Whether this emotional checkout is hardwired or pounded into you, it can be crippling. Levant believes that the cost of repressing your emotions—or, worse, dissociating from them completely—leads to alcohol abuse, anger and aggression, thrill-seeking behaviors, and psychosomatic illness. To avoid these fates, it isn't required that you become a master of emotional fluency; awareness by itself is sufficient.
But this is not just about making sure you don't wind up in a wheelchair. If you know how to feel, you know how to act. "It helps us live better lives," says Levant. "It enables us to respond more quickly and more appropriately to events that arise in our lives, both at work and at home."
In my own marriage, I suspect that my wife uses emotions to avoid action. (I told her that. You can imagine how well it went over.) I suspect a lot of guys think of emotions that way, as the opposite of action.
Wasn't that Hamlet's problem?
But emotions are not useless. They can motivate us to action. Did you see Tiger Woods—a few months after the death of his father—annihilating all challengers in the final nine holes at Hoylake at this year's British Open? On the last fairway, with victory nearly secured, his caddy said to him, "This one's for Pops." And Tiger was wracked with big, gutsy sobs. Then, more to the point, he blubbered in the arms of his beautiful blonde wife.
Remember, Hamlet didn't get the girl or the claret jug. But Tiger did. Be glad it's 2006. Emotions are now part of the manly formula for success: acting with head and heart and hands. Or, in the words of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, PhD, "Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do."
You have a lot to cram into these next few hours. If you're going to nourish your rich personal life, you have some ground to cover. At any given moment tonight, the average guy will be juggling the following:
Friends. As men, we commonly base our friendships on shared activities. It's a pattern established in late boyhood, when we made friends on the basis of common interests, such as skateboarding or heavy metal. It's how we do intimacy. It's good fun, and it's good for our health: In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam lists the many health benefits of having friends and concludes that not having a posse is as big a health risk as smoking.
Parents. If you've gotten closer to your parents recently, you're not alone. According to the US Family Caregiver Alliance, up to seven million are caring for elderly people, and the number of men providing the primary care may be on an upswing. One report documents the number of males becoming primary caregivers as rising 50 percent between 1984 and 1994. With the aging of the boomers and the parents who sired them, that number can only be rising.
Children. By their early 40s, 78 percent of American men have fathered at least one child, according to the 2002 US National Survey of Family Growth. And among men ages 15-44 who haven't had children yet, another 78 percent say it would bother them at least a little if they never had a child. Clearly, children are important to us—so important that, in the same study, more men than women say a man's kids should come before his career! And, for many separated men, their kids are their only family. (Ditto gay divorced cowboys, like Heath Ledger's character in Brokeback Mountain.) Sociologist Paul Amato, PhD, of Pennsylvania State University, has analyzed 63 studies dealing with divorced dads and their kids. He found that if the kids felt close to their fathers and if the dads provided authoritative parenting, the children did well in school and were less likely to get into trouble after school.
Wives—or girlfriends who might one day become wives. By age 35, 70 percent of us have gotten married. So marriage is important to most of us. Unfortunately, marriage is becoming less important to women. The latest evidence comes from the same survey. The 12,000 men and women who participated were asked to agree or disagree with the statement "It is better to get married than go through life single." Two-thirds (66 percent) of men agreed—but only 51 percent of women did. In other words, one in two women thinks marriage isn't such a sweet deal for her. Maybe your wife.
So where are you going to find the time to rekindle old friendships, look in on your parents,help your kids with their homework... oh, and do something that'll cause your wife to thank her lucky stars she married you? There's the problem: Time is scarce. You don't have the time. Experts blithely refer to this universal modern bind as "work-family conflict." And it's not just a girl thing. "Work and family is almost always viewed as a women's issue," says Joseph Grzywacz, PhD, an associate professor at Wake Forest University school of medicine. "It's equally important for men."
Grzywacz's most recent research focuses on the opposite effect, what he calls "positive spillover" from work to home, and vice versa. Your home life helps your work when you can talk about job problems and seek advice about solving them; it also helps if you can relax and recharge at home, and if you aren't interrupted by family disruptions at work. Conversely, work helps the family by making you a more interesting person, and by providing a good salary and benefits that the entire family wants to protect. "That's the best mental-health scenario," says Grzywacz.
The worst scenario is when work conflicts with family, and vice versa. That conflict leads to a greater likelihood of depression, anxiety, and problem drinking, he found upon analyzing the results of ?3,032 responses to the 1995 US National Survey of Midlife Development.
And, apparently, how men handle that pent-up frustration has everything to do with their ability to recover from it. Emotional spills, surprisingly, may not be the answer. Marc Schulz, PhD, a clinical psychologist and professor at Bryn Mawr College, conducted a study of 42 married couples with young children; the men worked an average of 43 hours a week, and the women averaged 25 hours a week. Among those with the happiest marriages, the man would withdraw after a bad day—and his wife would let him. "They need time to unwind," says Schulz.
"Some evidence supports the idea that men are far from unemotional—that in fact they're exquisitely sensitive to emotions. They might in fact feel them too strongly. And so they just need some space when they're filled with negative feelings. There's something about good marriages that gives each partner the space to do what he or she wants to do."
As you've gathered by now, marriage is the linchpin of a happy life for most men. But to succeed in it, you'll have to balance a man's two greatest needs: the need for power and the need for intimacy. So says psychologist Gordon M. Hart, PhD, in his book, Power and Intimacy in Men's Development.
A common male mistake, he says, is to seek power and avoid intimacy. Some men just work and work and work—and never switch gears. We spend all day honing our lightning-fast problem-solving abilities—and then we take those skills home with us and try them out on the wife and kids: Hey, I get props all day for doing this stuff! Why aren't you guys impressed? Or we get scrappy with our wives in the same way we'd spar with a rival manager at work: No, I'm not selling my motorcycle! We reflexively approach everything as a power struggle: She's not going to tell me what to do. But she may think of it as an intimacy issue: I can't be your partner if you've splattered yourself on the highway.
Hart notes that in the average office environment, we have to keep our emotions in check, "otherwise we're seen as vulnerable. If we're seen as emotional, we're seen as out of control—and of course that's the kiss of death." But unless we trade in our emotional distancing for emotional responsiveness when we get home, we will lose that home. The guys who have figured out the secret of modern masculinity will come home and "take off the emotional armor," as he puts it.
Or they won't—and they'll get separated. Roughly two out of every three breakups are initiated by women. Sanford Braver, PhD, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, surveyed hundreds of divorced men and women for his book Divorced Dads. The top reason women gave for a divorce was "losing a sense of closeness."
Marital researchers are saying lately that emotional closeness is the only thing the contemporary marriage has left. If she doesn't feel connected to you, is there any reason for her to stick around?
Most women would say no. Not practically, not morally, not financially. She had better feel close to you. If not, there's the door, and a lawyer is propping it open for her. When she goes, the children will follow.
Ironically, women still start out their marriages thrilled to be Mrs. You. Then comes Junior in a baby carriage, which nobody's ready for. According to a Univer-sity of Washington study of newlyweds, nearly two-thirds of wives suffer a big decline in marital satisfaction within about two years after a baby is born—despite what you see in diaper commercials. After year 10, satisfaction rises again—but only for men; it takes women 15 years to see a bump in satisfaction.
Men are rather famous for coming on strong before marriage and putting our feet up afterward. Marriage researcher Howard Markman, PhD, author of Fighting for Your Marriage, once told me that, after men get married, a sort of? "benign neglect" sets in, as they turn their attention to other things. "It's the biggest error men make," he said. "The man just starts taking the relationship for granted. He's assuming it's going to take care of itself." But, clearly, it doesn't.
We've had a nice little chat, sitting out here in your driveway. Now, before you go into the house, tell me: What are you going to do differently?
First off, you're going to take charge of this transition. If you need 20 minutes to decompress, take it. If you need 20 minutes sitting quietly with your wife in the den with a glass of wine and absolutely no children, do that. (My friend Kathy made that a house rule. She's still on her first marriage.) Whatever you need, man, just make it happen. "Nobody has to be a victim," says Marianne Legato, MD, author of ?Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget. "Eventually, people learn to wait a minute."
Okay, your 20 minutes are up. Let the games begin. Your wife wants a word with you. Sit down. Listen. Let her talk. You don't have to match her level of emotional intensity. "If other things start cropping up—like all your offenses for the past 15 years—just stop and say, ‘This doesn't help. What is the issue today?' Stop a discussion that is counterproductive," Dr. Legato says. But do it respectfully. And be patient. "Gently guide her to the issues she really wants to talk about. Give her room to calm down." In short, let her feel close to you.
A recent major study of 5,010 couples found that women are happiest in their marriages when they get their husbands' attention. The single most important factor in her happy marriage is her husband's emotional engagement. What does that mean, exactly? I put that question to Steven L. Nock, PhD, a University of Virginia sociologist and the study's coauthor.
He says it simply means "men showing interest in the routines of their wives' lives—the routine, mundane things that men normally don't talk about." Granted, it's not most men's style to do this, an acknowledgment Nock makes personally and professionally.
"I don't know about you, but for me it doesn't come naturally," he says. He wonders how many men find it perfectly natural, after several years of marriage, to sit down every day and say, "Tell me about your day." "It is an effort," he says.
Nock is sympathetic, but adamant: "Get over it," he says. Your marriage is important to you. You earn more money because of it, you live longer, you're in better health all around, your chances of having an active sex life are way better, and your standard of living is higher. If your marriage is happy, you're more productive at work than if your marriage is unhappy.
Plus, there's a more intangible but nonetheless important benefit: "Marriage is a standard of masculinity for guys," Nock says. It shows the world that you've grown up, that you're a stand-up guy. In short, marriage is a better deal for men than it is for women.
He comes to this conclusion after years of studying marriages and writing academic books like Marriage in Men's Lives. His bottom line to you: "If a guy is smart, he's going to realize he's getting a great deal, and he's going to put in a lot of effort to keep his wife happy and keep those benefits flowing."
One of the biggest trends in marriage studies of the past 30 years is videotaping couples talking and fighting. Researchers draft a bunch of undergraduate work-study grunts to watch these tapes and write down what they see, and five years later, you follow up with the couples to see who's divorced. Well, guess what? The couples who split are those who clearly ignored each other or were downright hostile. It's not the couples in which the guy actually listened to his wife when she spoke—listened and showed interest and affection. Five years later, those marriages are okay.
Five years from now, will your marriage be okay?
Now you're ready to walk in the door.
