The Myth of the Clueless Husband

What's the secret to women's superior emotional perception? According to a new study, it's all in the timing.

When it comes to dealing with life's everyday hassles, women say they are more responsive to their husbands' stress than vice versa. Men say the same thing about themselves. "There's a cultural stereotype that women are more supportive than men," says Lisa Neff, a psychologist at the University of Toledo. Many researchers chalk this sex difference up to women's natural tendency to nurture.

But for psychologists, something didn't add up: When researchers watched married couples interact in the lab, men expressed supportive emotions as skillfully as did women. If, for example, a woman told her husband that she was struggling to lose weight, he generally responded with as much care, encouragement and consideration as a woman would to her husband.

What changes when married couples are away from the prying eyes of the lab? For one, in the real world, women react more quickly to their partner's stress than men do. Husbands don't always spring into immediate action, according to Neff's study, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "It's not that men can't be supportive," she says. "It's that they are doing it at the wrong time." Perhaps some men wait until they are certain their wives are really upset. Or maybe some newly married men are just inexperienced. Neff says her study, using diaries of marital interaction and reported stress levels, doesn't pinpoint how men are lacking during tough times, just that women say they are.

Part of the imbalance, says Neff, is that wives may not communicate their needs directly to their husbands. Previous research suggests that spouses, especially women, have roundabout ways of telling their partners that they need extra care and encouragement. Studies also show that women are more empathetic and better at reading nonverbal emotions than are men, which may account for speedier female reactions.

But the data indicate another dynamic. During times of higher stress, women report that men have a tendency to compound their distress by becoming hostile and negative, says Neff. And that undermines whatever support men might otherwise give.

"What women take from the interaction is the negative," says Neff, echoing the famous conclusion by marriage guru John Gottman that within unhappy relationships, negative behavior outweighs the positive. By Gottman's calculations, a marriage will succeed only if a couple's positive interactions outnumber the negative by a factor of five.

Perhaps the reason for America's high divorce rate lies within this contemporary paradigm: a modern woman's stressful existence and a man's inadequate response. Neff isn't willing to go that far. It's possible, she says, that men get better at supporting their partners with practice.

"The big message is that men can do it," Neff says of marital support. "They aren't oblivious. And that's something that's underappreciated."