How to build happy, healthy unions
Rather than judging Pete Buttigieg’s marriage, straight America may want to take a cue or two from it
Rather than fretting over whether straight America is ready to accept former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s happy, loving, gay marriage — as talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been doing — straight America may want to take a cue or two from same-sex marriages, which are statistically some of the happiest around.
Social scientist Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, analyzed data from several recent studies on the satisfaction and stability rates of couples in heterosexual, gay and lesbian marriages. Men married to other men reported the lowest levels of psychological distress in their marriages. Women married to men reported the highest levels of strain.
Gay and lesbian couples, Coontz found, tend to approach conflicts with more humor and affection, spend less time criticizing and lecturing each other and offer each other more praise and encouragement, compared with their heterosexual counterparts.
“As a marriage historian,” Coontz told me, “it seems to me we’re totally entering uncharted territory. Never before in history have we tried to do marriage in a way that is totally free from dictation by our biology — whether we can or can’t have babies; whether we have to have babies — or by legal assignments that only husbands can do this and only wives can do that. It’s the first time we’ve really tried to build marriages that were not laid out for us by law and hundreds of years of customs.”
Why not build them into the happiest, healthiest unions they can be?
“Since same-sex couples can’t use imputed malefemale differences to sort out who does what, they rely less on stereotypes,” Coontz wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece. “Heterosexual parents tend to see tasks such as child care and laundry as part of a package that is handed to one partner. Same-sex couples are far more likely to each take on some traditionally ‘feminine’ and some ‘masculine’ chores.”
She cited a 2015 time-use survey that found 74% of same-sex couples shared routine child care equally, compared with 38% of straight couples.
“It’s not a question of good or bad, villains or victims,” Coontz told me. “It’s a question of whether we can look at other models and say, ‘Huh. How do you do it when you don’t know that women’s work is this and men’s work is this?’ ”
The University of Texas sociologist Debra Umberson co-authored one of the studies Coontz analyzed. Umberson’s work focuses less on the division of housework and child care and more on emotional labor.
Women spend more time taking the emotional temperature of their partners and their marriages than men do, Umberson found, and that’s true whether women are married to men or women are married to other women. Men — gay or straight — tend to do less preemptive emotional wellness check-ins with their spouses. (“How are you feeling? Do you need to talk?”)
Neither style is inherently good or bad. But conflict can arise when one partner’s style differs dramatically from the other partner’s, and that tends to happen more, statistically speaking, in heterosexual marriages.
“It’s kind of stressful to constantly be aware of someone’s emotional needs and respond to them,” Umberson told me. “But even if it’s a little bit hard and a little bit stressful, if it’s reciprocated and there’s love in the relationship, then it can be a really positive thing.”
But not always an easy thing.
“Because of 200 years of rigid socialization, these roles have been around long enough that we fall into habits even if we want to do things differently,” Coontz said. “We have 200 years of driving our wagon down exactly the same road, and the ruts have gotten pretty deep. So it takes some effort to pull into the new lane, so to speak.”
Coontz says it’s valuable to keep those centuries of socialization in mind when we’re interacting with the opposite sex.
“Men have been told for 200 years that the way you show love is to explain things, to protect and to provide,” she said. “And women have been told to listen and check in and do all these emotional care tasks. We’ve been socialized to think that we’re so different from one another, and it’s easy to slide into defensiveness.”
Same-sex couples, on the other hand, are partnerships between two people who haven’t spent their entire lives being told how mysterious and unknowable (and unreasonable) their partners are.
Now that same-sex marriages have been legal across the nation for close to five years, all marriages can benefit from research that explores their ins and outs, ups and downs.
“Relationships are so variable, and you can’t say one group does it all better and one group does it all worse,” Coontz said. “But the more we can look at each other’s styles of problem-solving and relating and mix and match — not try to imitate, just mix and match — what works for us in our individual relationships, the better off we’ll be.”
Love is, indeed, a many splendored thing.
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