Being There When It's Good--II

In their article, "Supportive Responses to Positive Event Disclosures," (see my previous post), the authors break their data down a bit according to gender.  The context, you may recall, is that they were testing for the impact of active-constructive responses to positive events on relationship health.  "Our date...showed that feeling understood, validated and cared for during the positive event discussion," they conclude, "was strongly and consistently associated with relationship well being (satisfaction, commitment, and love" (page 914).

The gender differences were, from my perspective, notable.  First, the value of the positive responses depended, for women, on the importance of the event itself.  Events that the women perceived as of smaller import were not impacted by the positive responses from their partners.  Important events that generated positive responses had noticeable impacts on relationship health.

We men are not as discriminating.  The importance of the event was not a significant variable.  No matter what the positive event--large or small--we benefit from active-constructive responses from our partners.  We men hate to admit this sort of thing.  But we need and benefit from affirmation from our partners for even the smallest accomplishments.  As my spouse often says, we men are simple creatures indeed (at least in comparison with the women in our lives).

The second gender difference was even more telling for my purposes.  The authors reported that "for men only responsiveness to positive event discussion was associated with current relationship well-being, but for women responsiveness in both the positive and negative discussion was associated with well-being" (page 915).  Women benefited from "social support" in terms of relationship health.  Support in response to negative experiences strengthened the relationship from the perspective of the women test subjects.

That was not true for the men.  There is a difference between male shame and female shame.  Male shame is rooted in performance failure.  I observe that women are much freer in confessing shortcomings and failure than are we men.  Intimations of failure on our part produce feelings of shame that impact badly on our relationships.  This study, as a fringe benefit, reminds us of that reality in relationships.

It was incredibly difficult for me to feel much of anything but shame after Anne's death.  I had failed so utterly to save her life.  I had disappointed, I believed, everyone who knew and loved her.  When others tried to persuade me that I had done my best, that it was all right, that I was not guilty of neglect/stupidity/selfishness, all I could hear was more confirmation that I had failed.

It was when I could move on and be somewhat functional that I could feel modestly better.  All of this is personal speculation based on a digression in one study and my own amateur assessments, but for me there is something significant there.  This ties in with Brene Brown's work on shame that opened so many doors for me in the first six months post-loss.  She acknowledged that male shame is profoundly failure-based.  I hope she has had a chance to pursue that further in terms of male shame in general and perhaps in terms of male shame in bereavement.