KEY POINTS
- Creating a marriage of equals is difficult because we persist in thinking men and women substantially differ.
- Both religion and evolutionary psychology support different marital functions based on masculine and feminine traits.
- The construct of masculine and feminine traits as a way to differentiate men from women is overvalued.
Even though gender is becoming less significant in defining how we interact with one another in most areas of our public lives, it remains a central motif in marriage. It seems as if marriage is still a “gender factory,” i.e., it still dictates how we interact around everyday household activities, childcare, and displays of affection for one another.1 Sociologists tell us that these traditions persist because masculinity and femininity get linked to the way we interact in marriage. In other words, being husband and wife is about being masculine and feminine.
If we want things to be different in marriage, we must dive into what keeps us tied to the ideas that promote gender differences as essential to the marriage relationship between a man and a woman.
Let’s take a dive into:
- How we study gender differences—it’s about masculine and feminine traits
- The influence of evolutionary psychology on gender traits
- The Influence of religion on our view of marriage
- The historical idea that men and women live in different worlds or spheres
I will end with a blatant promotion of a marriage of equals—what I have promoted for my entire career as a psychologist.2
The Persistence of the Belief in Gender Differences in Personality Traits
In conventional evolutionary science, “favored genes” cause themselves to be passed on from one generation to the next because they create traits that prove advantageous in a particular environment.3 Men are aggressive because they must compete with other men to impregnate women, thereby, causing their genes to propagate.
We Have to Talk About the Construct of “Traits”
What do we mean when we characterize people as having various traits? The construct4 of trait is used by psychologists to explain why we tend to act similarly in different situations and at different times in the same situation–our perceived consistency. For example, if I am assertive at home (which I am), I will tend to be assertive at work and in social situations. Because I have the genetically determined trait of assertiveness, I will be equally assertive tomorrow, next week, and next year in various situations. By the way, the combination of various “traits” that I have make up my “personality.” Spoiler alert: I do defer to my husband and I am restrained in many social situations.
The Importance of the Construct of Trait to Evolutionary Psychologists5
The “meat and potatoes” for evolutionary psychologists are the genetically programmed traits that differentiate men and women. This idea reached its zenith with the pop-culture notion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.
Hold On a Minute… Scientists Are Taking a Second Look
Fortunately, scientists are raising questions about the idea of “traits” as the best way to describe human behavior.6 These researchers argue that: (a) the idea of people having traits is used to label behaviors but does not actually explain the causes of their behavior, (b) the idea of traits underplays the way people behave differently in different situations and across time, and (c) traits do not explain human uniqueness.
There is another practical problem with the idea that men’s and women’s traits are significantly different. The research does not consistently support big differences. Researchers Carothers and Reis argue that while people think of male and female as two distinct categories, sex is not nearly as confining as popular belief (and even academicians) tells us.7
Using their own trait data of men and women, these researchers attempted to separate the men from the women in the study by traits. They could not. A given person—a man, for example, may score in a stereotypical way on aggression and score low on math ability—another typically male trait. You just cannot separate men and women into separate categories based on stereotypical psychological traits.
Other research suggests that everyone’s personality blends characteristics-more frequently-seen-as-male with characteristics-more-frequently-seen-as-female.8
The takeaways:
- Traits may not be the best way to describe how we act. We are not as consistent in our actions as we tend to think.
- Our actions vary in different situations and at different times, which is appropriate.
- The existence of significant differences in traits between men and women is overvalued—maintaining gender stereotypes.
The Influence of Religion on How We View Marriage
A group of writers and editors with a passion for giving people access to what is enduringly Christian tell us that the first differentiation of gender roles occurred when God said of Adam, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”9 (Genesis 2:18) In matters relating directly to marriage, a key passage (Ephesians 5:21-33) states, “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
These and other biblical references have supported the patriarchal position in Christian religions until the 1970s and 1980s when church women began to question the devaluing of women implicit in these passages. In response, evangelical churches and the Baptist Convention adopted a newer theory of the relationship between husbands and wives called The Complementarian Theory.
The leaders of these groups tell us that men and women are equal in “personhood” although they are created for different roles in family and public life. They try to convince us, metaphorically. that just like complementary colors which together create beauty, men and women complementing each other with different roles in life create a “more beautiful whole.”10
How We Got the Idea That the Women’s Sphere Is the Home
The Industrial Revolution drove farmers’ sons and daughters into cities resulting in increasing disease, poverty, and crime. This great revolution also brought into existence businesses and industry. People wanted a safe haven from the great changes that were occurring. The home became this place. [11]
Husbands had to be in the public sphere to work and create wealth, but wives were free to inhabit the private sphere—the woman’s sphere. A true man was aggressive, competitive, rational, and channeled his time and energy into work. In contrast, a true woman was characterized by being pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. Above all, she was virtuous and was the great civilizer of men. This virtuous civilizer of men created order in the home in return for her husband’s protection, financial security, and social status.
While we no longer live in the Victorian society where the idea that men and women are created to complement each other, evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women are designed by their genes to inhabit different spheres of living, spheres that complement each other.
Creating and Maintaining an Equal Marriage Is Tough
I have discussed the two major, powerful social institutions—religion and evolutionary psychology that support marriages in which men and women are best fitted to occupy two different spheres of living. Men are best suited for the public sphere, women for the private sphere. This view has been so influential as to generate the idea that men and women are from different planets—talk about different spheres!
First and foremost, a marriage of equals is about individuals, not categories of people. It is individual people that fall in love, court each other, decide to marry, and value each other as individuals before valuing each other as husband and wife. In a marriage of equals, differences and disagreements are opportunities to negotiate collaboratively the things that are important to each of the partners. In a marriage of equals, you commit to negotiating collaboratively individual and marital goals, a satisfying sex life, where you stand on fidelity, how to think about having and caring for kids, and how to have committed careers and a satisfying family life.
Be cautious!
Here are a few tips on gender traps that will bog you down in a traditional gender-driven marriage:
- Having children will pull you toward a traditional marriage. It’s best to sort this issue out before you get married.
- Pop culture ideas about “trait” differences between men and women are overblown.
- Changing the traditional gender-based view of marriage can threaten your sense of masculinity and femininity (e.g., taking care of a baby does not make you less masculine).
- Wives will request change in traditional marriages because they are less satisfied. Husbands may resist changing through such tactics as stonewalling, defensiveness, criticism, and contempt. [12]
An Equal Marriage Goes the Whole Way
A marriage of equals allows contemporary couples to challenge old gender trappings that can undermine a committed marriage relationship. An equal or egalitarian marriage goes the whole way… equal in worth and equal in the ability to occupy different roles in a marriage and in life.
References
1. Berk, Sarah F. The Gender Factor: The Apportionment of Work in American Households. New York: Plenum, 1985.
2. Aponte Catherine E. A Marriage of Equals: How to Achieve Balance in a Committed Relationship. Berkeley: She Writes Press, 2019.
3. Dunsworth, Holly and Anne Buchanan. “Sex Makes Babies.” Aeon, August 9, 2017.
4. It is important to understand that the term “construct” is an idea invented for a particular theory or research problem. Construct is contrasted with the word “concept”, which refers to a generally accepted collection of meanings or characteristics that are concrete. Trait as used by psychologist is such an invented term, i.e. a theoretical construct.
5. For a readable and helpful discussion about evolutionary psychology, see “How Valid is Evolutionary Psychology.”
6. Sheldon, Kennon M., Melanie S. Sheldon, Charles P. Nichols. “Traits and trade-off are insufficient for evolutionary personality psychology.” American Psychologist. December 2007; 62(9)1073-1074.
7. Carothers, Bobbi and Harry Reis. “Men and Women are from Earth: Examining the Latent Structure of Gender.” Journal of Personalit and Social Psychology 104, no.2 (2013).
8. Greenburg, Spencer and Holly Muit. “Most of Us Combine Personality Traits from Different Genders. ClearThinking.org, January 31, 2022.
9. Roat, Ayssa (Ed.). “What are Complementarianism and Egalitarianism? What’s the Difference?” Christianity.com. July 5, 2019.
10. Roat, 2019
11. _________ “The Emergence of “Women’s Sphere” ushistory.org. April 17, 2020.
12. Gottman, John and Nan Silver. The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work. New York: Crown Publishers, 1999.
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This post was previously published on PSYCHOLOGYTODAY.COM and is republished to Medium.
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Wonderful article! Very helpful. It backs up what I’ve learned in 40+ years of counseling males and females, single and in all kinds of relationships. thank you for putting it all so clearly.