Bridge Gender Gap By Using Your Head
So there you are, watching the Seahawks lose - again - when the muttering starts.
It’s your (choose one: wife, girlfriend, significant other, love muffin), washing Saturday’s left-over dinner dishes and complaining about how you never pitch in and help around the house.
Quickly, you recall that in the past 48 hours you have: run two loads of laundry, cooked one dinner and two breakfasts, taken the car in for its oil change, gone grocery-shopping twice, taken out the week’s recycling and the garbage, let the cat out at 5:22 a.m. and adjusted the plunger arm on a running toilet for what must be the millionth time.
And yet, here you are, being called a slug just because you’re indulging in a few hours of sports-fan masochism.
Or is that what’s really going on?
According to an article in the December Reader’s Digest, the conflict may be due to what a University of Washington psychologist calls an “emotional gender gap.”
John Gottman has studied the fortunes of some 2,000 relationships over the past 20 years. His take: “Harsh criticism is an early signal that a marriage is in danger.”
Before you mutter “Du-uh,” consider this: Fights between couples follow gender-based patterns. For example, Gottman claims, the intensity of a woman’s reaction may have more to do with a specific matter than an overall dissatisfaction with the man in her life.
In their turn, men tend to take such intensity personally. They shut off their emotions in the face of a perceived attack, which curtails any real chance that the conflict can be settled. Or even discussed.
So, Gottman offers a few suggestions:
Men need to listen while women talk about their feelings instead of attempting to fix things right off.
Women need to be more specific about their complaints instead of simply indulging in across-the-board character assassination.
Both partners need to try to see the situation from the other’s point of view. And both need to try to state their feelings with as much love as they can muster.
Will such guidelines work? It depends on how much effort each person is willing to expend.
What, you have to ask yourself, do you have to lose?
Far more, clearly, than a 15-yard penalty and loss of down. , DataTimes MEMO: Common Ground is written on alternating weeks by Dan Webster and Rebecca Nappi. Write to them in care of The Spokesman-Review, Features Department, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210-1615. Or fax, (509) 459-5098.