Breaking News: Shitty Relationships are Shitty for Everyone (or Today in What About The Menz)

by Shaker ExMo

So here's the deal, ladies. You've been taught from childhood that love and romance were your ticket out of unhappiness. Sure, you may have had a feminist aunt (or mother, or father), but your Seventeen, and later your Cosmopolitan, impressed upon you the importance of a (heterosexual, monogamous, racially homogenous) relationship. Part and parcel of this socialization is the belief that you are a delicate flower and that men, well, men could take you or leave you. They don't need to have a relationship to be happy. So you must be coy, play hard to get, and generally invest vast amounts of emotional energy, time, and money into getting, and then keeping, a man. Men are merely an audience for your pathetic display, and really, they are too simple and sex-obsessed to recognize how you are tricking them. Furthermore, they could give a shit about the quality of your relationship, so once you have done the right thing and wrestled you a good one, you must take it upon yourself to nag them into romancing you with consumer products.

Prepare to have your knickers knocked clean off.

Ready?

Men care about the quality of their relationships.

According to the New York Times (and to the study they are reporting on), previous hypotheses about the relationship between men and women's mental health and relationship status may not apply. The conventional wisdom, both among what the NYT calls "scientists of love" and in our popular culture, holds that being in a good relationship has more of an effect on women's mental health than men's. This wisdom, like most wisdom labeled "conventional," is based on about 50% actual data/science and about 50% total fucking bullshit.

It has been found, for example, that both men and women who are married (hetero/officially, more on that in a minute) can expect better outcomes on a variety of metrics. Married men live longer and are more physically healthy. Married women are less depressed. Both married men and married women are economically better off. These findings have been documented in a wide variety of studies in the social sciences.

What has also been documented, however, is a difference in the way that women and men express psychological distress. What it boils down to is that men are more likely to turn that distress outward, and engage in risky (like substance abuse) or violent behaviors, while women are more likely to turn that distress inward, which tends to manifest as depression or unhappiness. So, while women who are single, or otherwise not able to check off the "married" box on a survey, may also have higher levels of depression or other types of emotional distress, their male counterparts will not manifest that distress in the same way.

So what happens is we have the popular media (like the NYT) reporting on studies and saying women are more depressed than men about their relationships. And as we know, this shit does not occur in a vacuum. Only in a culture where women's experiences are devalued to the point that their emotions are used against them to further denigrate their experiences, can news stories about depression and relationship status gain traction.

But this new study suggests that men (specifically, young unmarried men around the age of 20 in the city of Miami) benefit more than women from a good relationship and are hurt more than women by a bad relationship. How can that be so? Men are unfeeling bastards who could give a shit about how good our relationship is, right? They are just in it for the sex and the conquest, right? Now my little lady brain is confused.

The biggest problem with this article (and, I should say, a problem that is not evident in the original study) is that it conflates the findings of this study, that apply to young men engaged in non-marital relationships with earlier research that applied to married men in a different age cohort. Could it be that men of my father's generation were socialized differently than the men in my husband's generation? No, not in America, where individualism rules.

Furthermore, the NYT manages to, hold your breath, blame women for men's sudden rushes of unpleasant emotion. To wit, "And pity the men, their anguish so long overlooked. One hypothesis of the authors suggests that while women have outlets for emotional engagement in the form of intimate friendships, men are adrift without the ongoing care of a female soul mate." Because our responsibility as women, obviously, is to coddle men and "take care of them" and be their mothers. Because that is how healthy relationships are built and maintained. Excuse me while I vomit.

There are other problematic elements of this story, and admittedly with this line of research. Most research being published now is based on survey instruments that were written 20 years ago, and that come with other various limitations. There is not much focus among "love scientists" on gay/lesbian relationships, or non-marital monogamous relationships, or non-monogamous relationships. Until the point that relationships that are deemed "unconventional" are studied by social scientists with the same vim and vigor that the heterosexual marriage is fetishized in popular culture, shit like this is bound to get published.

Side note: I first heard of this story when a colleague posted the link to the NYT story on their Facebook page. The thumbnail was of Mel Gibson, a man who is demonstrably not dealing well with a failed relationship. Coincidence?

Full disclosure: I personally know both authors of the JHSB article, and have worked with them both. They are not aware that I am writing this and are not connected to it in any way.