- An analysis of 50 studies suggests men care more about being in a romantic partnership.
- Hollywood and media get it wrong, often portraying women as loving love more.
- Women have more emotional support networks outside of a romantic relationship.
Magazine articles and Hallmark movies leave the impression that women are much more obsessed with romance than men are. But a recent study that looked at dozens of other studies suggests those portrayals of who needs romance more have it wrong.
Romantic relationships matter more to men than to women, according to a study by that very name published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
The reason may be both simple and nuanced, according to the international team of researchers, who came from Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Minnesota and Vrije University in Amsterdam. Women are used to sharing their emotions and providing emotional support to and receiving it from family members, friends and others. Men are less so.
Often, a romantic partnership is where men find emotional support and where they feel safe to express what they’re feeling, so having that kind of relationship matters a lot to them.
The researchers looked at more than 50 scientific studies on gender differences in heterosexual relationships, mostly in Western cultures, finding that men are more intent on having a steady romantic partnership. And, in fact, they get more health benefits and emotional support from a romantic attachment, compared to women.
“Men apparently tend to be more focused on entering into steady relationships,” said Iris Wahring, research associate at the Institute of Psychology at Humboldt University of Berlin, and the study’s lead author. “Moreover, the well-being and health of men benefit more from such relationships than women. Even the life expectancy of men is more strongly associated with being in a steady relationship than that of women.”
It’s also a fact that women are more likely to initiate a breakup than men. And men are more likely to be lonely after a breakup and less apt to see it as a positive, the researchers wrote.
In a news release, the researchers said they created a model that “takes gender differences in different phases of a relationship into account,” which is a unique model, though the connection between relationships and health has already been well studied.
The social and emotional connection
Women tend to get and give more emotional support from their family and circle of friends and colleagues or others, a fact that’s also been well documented. That bolstered the researchers' belief that emotional support is a key factor underpinning the findings of the studies they examined.
“Therefore, heterosexual men are more dependent on their partners to fulfill their emotional needs than heterosexual women. In short, steady relationships are psychologically more important for men than women,” Wahring said in the release.
Study co-author Paul van Lange from Amsterdam noted that social norms expect women to share their emotions and support others more strongly, compared to norms for men. “Even young children experience these norms, according to which it is much more common and appropriate for girls than for boys to share emotions and vulnerabilities,” he said.
Men who don’t have a partner may be less likely to have people to whom they can open up or who will provide emotional support they may need or crave. That was a finding in a 2021 Survey Center on American Life study called “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges and Loss.” Men in the survey were less apt to be pals with whom they could unburden their feelings outside of a romantic relationship. That may be one reason the survey found that young men rely on their parents for emotional support more often than do young women.
Charlie Huntington, a postdoctoral researcher with the Washington University School of Medicine and a couples and men’s issues therapist in Colorado, wrote a column for Psychology Today that has some advice for men. He wants them to build better connections so emotional support and deep personal connection are spread out a bit.
“The more you lean on others, the easier it will be to handle disappointments and frustrations in your relationship. If your relationship recently ended, take the opportunity to deepen connections with others; build a network that will help cushion your fall next time. If you are single, having a strong network of friends and family can protect you from jumping into a relationship with someone you’re not that compatible with merely because you want all the benefits of being in a relationship again.”
How do you define romance?
The Washington Post reported that “research has not suggested that men may be more romantic than women across the board. But in a 1989 study that developed the romantic beliefs scale, which is widely used in research to measure how strongly someone agrees or disagrees with romantic ideas such as love at first sight, researchers noted that generally, men were more likely than women to endorse the ideology of romanticism and hold romantic beliefs."
Gwendolyn Seidman, a visiting scholar at Michigan State University, told the Post that in relationship research, “romanticism” refers to beliefs about love, not how you act in a romantic relationship. “Believing in love at first sight or that we all have only one true love doesn’t relate to how much effort you put into your actual relationship day in and day out.”
The Post article also said the experts interviewed claim that “while some research suggests that there is a greater tendency for men to hold certain romantic beliefs like love at first sight, romanticism is significantly influenced by cultural, societal, generational and individual relationship dynamics.”