But there's a catch. Nock believes that since he
conducted his research in the 1990s, women's expectations have
expanded to include greater intimacy.
While conducting his research, he says, "I was focused
more on ordinary expectations." He believes that emotional
expectations may now be the most central part of
marriage.
"Even a generation ago, if a man was a good breadwinner
and he had no profoundly negative attributes, if every night he
came home, had a martini and watched TV all night, then went to
bed, he was fine," says marriage and family therapist Terry
Real, author of How Do I Get Through to You? Closing the
Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women. Now the job description has
been expanded to include listening and that least measurable of
skills, empathizing. Today, simply not cheating on your wife or
beating your kids doesn't make you a good husband and
father.
Real says he counsels a lot of men who would prefer the
bullet-point version of how-to-achieve-intimacy-now. "I say to
them, 'She wants you to be more relationship-skilled than you
were raised to be. You're a smart guy -- this isn't rocket
science.'" But for a lot of husbands trying to rise to the
demands of their 21st-century wives, the lessons of intimacy
are worse than rocket science. They're poetry.
When husbands realize what their wives are asking for,
the reaction isn't "'I didn't know that you wanted that, too,'"
says Margulies. "It's more like 'I don't understand what the
hell you're talking about.'" It's not a question of
miscommunication, of Mars and Venus. It's a matter of new
specifications, of women wanting something more than a
traditional husband who, by definition, was removed and even
remote. "In a nutshell, women want their husbands to act like
girlfriends," Margulies says.
"I wish it were that simple," says Nock. "I don't think
we can say, 'Okay, men, here's what you need to do to become
better husbands.'" A lot of men would prefer such clear
coordinates -- even if it meant acting like a
girlfriend.
While the conflicted desires of women have created some
of this tension, society sends its own mixed signals. Time and
feminism have chipped away at the granite facade of traditional
masculinity, but old monuments don't fall easily. The last
presidential election, after all, was in part a referendum on
what kind of father or husband we want for our country. And did
not the simple, stubborn, somewhat unintelligible fellow with
the apparently traditional marriage best the more nuanced,
flexible, loquacious gent with the strong, independent wife?
John Kerry was chastised for windsurfing on Nantucket while
George Bush was off whacking weeds in the hot Texas sun.
"What's so ludicrous about windsurfing?" asks Real. "It's
effete -- which is another way of saying it's feminine." Yet
guys are forced to contend with such inane stereotypes. (Have
you ever tried windsurfing? It's about as easy as riding a
shark.)
Worst of all, women are often complicit in the
stereotyping. If a single woman goes to a party, says Farrell,
her friends don't push her toward the sensitive schoolteacher
-- they urge her to chat up the banker. "People don't say,
'Look at that man, he's really listening to a woman, asking her
questions and drawing her out,'" says Farrell. "You don't get
introductions like that, even though you would be introducing
the woman to the type of man who would be a wonderful husband
and father. Instead the host will say, 'That fellow is an
intern at Mt. Sinai Hospital.'"
So we end up with men wary of the shifting rules of
marriage, wondering what's in it for them. The weary
white-collar salaryman, having worked his 60-hour week while
making time for his daughter's piano recital, may well wonder
about the poetry lessons his wife is threatening him with.
Suddenly an evening of video games or ESPN doesn't sound so
bad, even if it means eating a TV dinner. Hungry-Man meals have
gotten a lot better over the years -- and they're still nicely
compartmentalized, with clear bullet-point instructions on the
back of the box.
For the most part, our parents and grandparents did not
worry much about the emotional content of marriage. My parents
lived through the Great Depression and the second World War.
When their marriage ended in divorce in the 1960s, I doubt
either of them thought, "If only we had achieved greater
intimacy!" It's not that they were stronger or better than we
are today, or that our demands and complaints aren't
legitimate. The lack of emotional connection certainly killed
many marriages, and the right to personal fulfillment was part
of what drove the women's movement -- which in turn changed
marriage for the better.
But on the communication score, most men are still
playing catch-up with women. To care about someone else's
feelings you have to be in touch with your own, and getting in
touch with your feelings is not something we've been raised to
think of as essential, or even admirable. Collectively, we
don't have a lot of positive examples of an open, questioning,
emotional hero. Hamlet, who was certainly introspective, was
neither husband nor father; he died, quite conveniently, before
facing either of those hurdles.
Tags:
ambitions,
american man,
bullet points,
chest size,
closeness,
cold one,
declarative sentences,
divorce mediator,
divorces,
gender roles,
greensboro north carolina,
julia child,
marriage,
marriage experts,
men,
murk,
nock,
relationships,
sociologists,
welcome men,
work
