What’s love got to do with it?
The New Position
February 8, 2012 7:00 AM ADT
“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” – Dr. Seuss
Valentine’s Day is less than one week away and love is in the air. Cue images of frazzled men buying roses and heart shaped chocolates in the hopes of pleasing their partners.
We tend to think of women as being obsessed with love and romance, and think of men as being indifferent to the whole romance thing. Of course we know that there are plenty of guys out there who are in great relationships, are happy, and care about their partner. But in general they just can’t be bothered with all that mushy-gushy, lovey-dovey stuff. Right?
Wrong!
The truth is that compared to women, men tend to fall in love faster, usually say “I love you” first, and are more likely to say they believe in things like love at first sight. Shocked? Surprised? Think I’m making this all up?
Marilyn Montgomery and Gwendolyn Sorell, researchers at Texas Tech University, asked high school students about their experiences with love. In every grade, more boys than girls said they had been in love at least once. The boys also reported falling in love for the first time at a younger age than the girls, and were more likely to say they were in love with someone they were dating.
And this isn’t just something we find with teenagers. Joshua Ackerman, a researcher at M.I.T, and his colleagues conducted a very clever series of studies looking at gender differences in the expression of love.
First they asked people who they thought would most likely to say “I love you” first; men or women. Not surprisingly, most people thought women would be the ones to say it first.
Next, they asked people about their actual relationships. In contrast to what people expected, in about two-thirds of past relationships, the man had been the first one to say “I love you.” Not only that, on average, the men they asked said they had thought about telling their partner they loved them about a month and a half earlier than the woman did.
The researchers were also interested in looking at how happy people are after a partner tells them that the love them. In line with all of their other research they found that, on average, men were happier than women after a partner said, “I love you.”
However, the researchers did find one interesting twist when they looked at the timing of the “I love you.” The difference between men and women was biggest when a partner expressed their love before the couple had sex. If a partner expressed love after the couple had sex, the women tended to be slightly happier than the men.
Overall, the research just doesn’t support the stereotype of men as being indifferent to love and romance. Sorry boys…the jig is up!
Of course, whenever we talk about gender differences it is important to remember that we are talking about average behaviour. There are obviously some men out there who are more or less romantic than some women, and some women out there that are more or less romantic than some men.
One of my favorite Valentine’s Day stories is about one of my female friends. She had been dating her partner for few months by the time Valentine’s rolled around and was worried about getting him just the right thing. In a Valentine’s-fueled panic she went out and bought him a whole pile of gifts (in various sizes and degrees of sentimentality), wrapped them all, and only decided which one to give him after seeing the present he picked out for her. (Side note: It clearly worked because they’re still together three years later and now laugh about the craziness of that first holiday.)
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
Add a comment