The dictionary defines courtship as "paying respectful and flattering attention to in order to get the love of," and that's what men and women do in the early infatuation phase of a relationship.
It's a time when men are the most verbal, open, caring, understanding, tender and communicative. They send love notes, give gifts, buy flowers, make thoughtful gestures, take long romantic walks on beaches, communicate their hopes, fears and dreams for hours at a time, and even enthusiastically share the cooking and the dishes afterward.It's also a time when women are more likely to become involved with a man's sport activities and hobbies, prepare special meals, plan romantic occasions, write love notes, pay particular attention to how they look, give lots of luxurious time and attention to the exclusion of friends, family and work activities, and pull back from career demands.
And what happens when the courtship is over and the relationship settles in? Both sexes are likely to suffer from post-courtship shock, says Morton H. Shaevitz, author of "Sexual Static." Consider first the woman's view.
Many women view a vigorous courtship by their men as the major predictor of their future "happily ever after" life together. The way he is now will be the way he'll be forever, she thinks.
However, now instead of the verbal, open, caring man, the woman finds a work-involved, distracted and sometimes disinterested man. Not only is the woman puzzled by this new silent figure in her life, she often feels tricked, manipulated and angry. The romantic man she knew has tuned to another frequency, remote and hard to reach.
What a woman doesn't realize, says Shaevitz, "is that during courtship, unlike during any other time in his life, a man's primary need is to connect emotionally with a future partner and to win her affection and lasting commitment. Often, everything else shifts to second place - work, career, even fatigue.
"When the intensity of the courtship diminishes, however, when her love and loyalty have been won, most men allow work issues to reappear as their primary concern, and their behavior slowly changes to reflect that. Career, success and achievement re-establish themselves as top priorities. Much to the astonishment of their partners, men's attentive, dashing courtship selves begin to recede into the proverbial past tense."
Men, too, eventually begin to wonder who shut off the faucet. As does a woman, he also expects to remain primary in the life of his partner . . . just like his mother was to his dad. And he didn't think to talk to her about this during courtship because things were going fine, but, suddenly, as a today's woman, she's got other priorities. She's busy balancing relationships, career, household, children and all the rest.
So, just as she is horrified when she realizes she's no longer No. 1, he's horrified when he realizes he is not exactly the center of her universe either.
Both suffer from tacit cultural expectations of which they are not aware. Nobody told her that he didn't come culturally programmed with the same intensely focused caretaking behaviors she so easily manifests. Or that courtship would be a temporary aberration in his life when the love relationship would take superiority over all else. Nobody told him that she wasn't going to follow his mother's traditional cultural modeling in giving him full devotion or that she wouldn't be there when he comes home.
One problem men have is that they are much more dependent on women than women realize. If the major issue for today's women is overload, the crisis for men today is loss - the loss of women. Says Shaevitz: "Women today aren't available in the same ways as before, so men, in their hearts of hearts, are feeling let down, deserted and keenly vulnerable to women's absence, whatever form that may take. Women remain mostly in the dark on this, because men aren't talking."
The man's sense of loneliness, incidentally, impacts on the household arena. "Many men feel they get the post-housework leftovers of their partner's time and energy," Shaevitz stresses. "He's upset when she's not willing to relax with him until every last dish is put away. . . . He misses the supportive care he thought he'd be getting."
Women are prone to experience disillusionment because they expect men to be like them. Although men are biologically and culturally very different from women, in trying to penetrate that male inscrutability, women will mistakenly assume that men feel and respond as they do about many things.
This extends to the caretaking area. A woman often assumes that a man notices her needs but simply doesn't care enough to respond to them. In her mind, certain behaviors of the man become linked with proofs of caring, and the woman watches to see if he'll come through. In essence, she gives "tests" (If he cares enough, he'll . . . ), and the man flunks because he only finds out about the tests after he's failed.
All of this, and much more, is going on underneath the surface of relationships as men and women reel from dashed expectations that emanate from not understanding each other and recognizing that there are quantitative differences between the two sexes.
The challenge for couples, of course, is to get beyond any tacit cultural programming governing the relationship to the issue of filling the emotional needs of both partners.
In today's stressed world, both people need to work to keep the relationship in focus and the emotional "faucet" turned on.