>From a friend:
On the Time magazine website, there is right now a whole slew of
articles on Research and Studies on sex, relationships, flirting and
more. This is one of them, about research and studies on gay
relationships, written by a gay man. A good read, (other than the
fact that i needed the online dictionary for a few words here and
there)
A lot of it is actually good things, and even what is bad about gay
relationships is not really bad, because its all about personal
choices, rather than built-in failure.
Of course its all about American society, but a lot is universal.
The most surprising find? Apparently gay men actually need drama in
a relationship for it to survive (while straight ones settle into a
peacefulness/dullness over the years) I'm not entirely sure if this
is true, but i haven't been there to know.
And I like the conclusion.
------------------
Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008
Are Gay Relationships Different?
By John Cloud
Michael and I had been together 7 1⁄2 years when I moved out in late
2006. We met at a bar just after Christmas 1998; I had seen
Shakespeare in Love with a couple of friends, and I was feeling
amorous, looking for Joseph Fiennes. Michael hit on one of my
friends first, but the two didn't click, so Michael settled for me.
That was one of our most reliable stories to tell friends over
dinner. It never ceased to get the table laughing, Michael and me
most of all, because it was preposterous to think we wouldn't have
ended up together. We were so happy, our love unshakable.
I went home with Michael the night we met, and figuratively
speaking, I didn't leave again for those 7 1⁄2 years. The breakup
sucked, the more so because it was no one's fault. Our relationship
had begun to suffer the inanition of many marriages at seven years.
(The seven-year itch isn't a myth; the U.S. Census Bureau says the
median duration of first marriages that end in divorce is 7.9
years.) Michael and I loved each other, but slowly--almost
imperceptibly at first--we began to realize we were no longer in
love. We were intimate but no longer passionate; we had cats but no
kids.
Things drifted for a while. There was some icky couples counseling
("Try a blindfold") and therapeutic spending on vacations, clothes,
furniture. We were lost. The night Michael wouldn't stay up to watch
The Office finale with me, I knew I had to move out. Yes, he was
tired, but if he couldn't give me the length of a sitcom--Jim and
Pam are going to kiss!--then we were really done.
What followed for me, in no meaningful order, was intense exercise
and weight loss; fugue states punctuated by light psychotherapy,
heavy drinking and moderate drug use; really good sex; Italian
classes (where I learned to pronounce il mio divorzio perfectly);
and marathons of cooking. I had always enjoyed the kitchen, but now
I would make pumpkin ravioli from scratch on Thursday and cook a
black bass in parchment on Friday and bake an olive-oil cake on
Saturday. The fridge was stuffed; my friends were ecstatic and full.
But in the mornings, alone before dawn, a jolt of terror: What had I
done?
Finally I started reading the academic research on relationships,
which is abundant and, surprisingly, often rigorous. I wondered
whether Michael and I could have done more to save our union. What
impact had our homosexuality had on the longevity, arc and
dissolution of our relationship? Had we given up on each other
because we were men or because we were gay? Or neither? Friends
offered clichés: Some people just aren't meant for each other. But
our straight friends usually stayed married. Why not us?
When I was 13, I secretly read my parents' old copy of Dr. David
Reuben's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, first
published in 1969. Standing nervously at the bookshelf, I was poised
to replace the volume quickly if I heard footsteps. The chapter on
homosexuality explained, "The homosexual must constantly search for
the one man, the one penis, the one experience, that will satisfy
him. He is the sexual Diogenes, always looking for the penis that
pleases. That is the reason he must change partners endlessly. [In
gay marriages] the principals never stop cruising. They may set up
housekeeping together, but the parade of penises usually continue
[sic] unabated ... Mercifully for both of them, the life expectancy
of their relationship together is brief." My face went hot with
embarrassment.
I know now that the book was blithe and stupid, but I think many
people, gay and straight, assume gay men are worse at maintaining
relationships than straight people are. I needed experts, answers. I
was also curious if I should be so upset about my breakup. As a
society, we treat single people over 30 with condescension or pity,
but maybe the problem was that I had hurtled into a serious
relationship too young. I know that in my 20s I had wanted to
impress my family and my heterosexual friends with my stability.
Maybe I should have waited.
Research on gay relationships is young. The first study to observe
how gays and lesbians interact with their partners during
conversations (monitoring facial expressions, vocal tones, emotional
displays and physical reactions like changes in heart rate) wasn't
published until 2003, even though such studies have long been a
staple of hetero-couple research. John Gottman, a renowned couples
therapist who was then at the University of Washington, and Robert
Levenson, a psychology professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, led a team that evaluated 40 same-sex couples and 40
straight married couples. The psychologists concluded that gays and
lesbians are nicer than straight people during arguments with
partners: they are significantly less belligerent, less domineering
and less fearful. Gays and lesbians also use humor more often when
arguing (and lesbians use even more humor than gays, which I hereby
dub "the Ellen DeGeneres effect"). The authors concluded
that "heterosexual relationships may have a great deal to learn from
homosexual relationships."
But Gottman and Levenson also found that when gay men initiate
difficult discussions with their partners, the partners are worse
than straight or lesbian couples at "repairing"--essentially, making
up. Gottman and Levenson suggest that couples therapists should thus
focus on helping gay men learn to repair.
The therapist Michael and I hired did not encourage us to repair.
She didn't have to. Our relationship had become so etiolated and
dull that we didn't even have proper fights. We carried an aura of
passivity, and the therapist wanted to see passion. She was smart to
ask for it. Gottman, Levenson and their colleagues found that gays
and lesbians who exhibit more tension during disagreements are more
satisfied with their relationships than those who remain unruffled.
For straight people, higher heart rates during squabbles were
associated with lower relationship satisfaction. For gays and
lesbians, it was just the opposite. Gays conduct their relationships
as though they are acting out some cheesy pop song: You have to make
my heart beat faster for me to love you. For gays, it is apathy that
murders relationships, not tension. Straight people more often
prefer a lento placidity.
Why would gays show more beneficence in arguments, do a worse job of
repairing after bad fights and find palpitation satisfying?
Researchers have long noted that because gender roles are less
relevant in gay and lesbian relationships--it's a canard that in
most gay couples, one partner plays wife--those relationships are
often more equal than heterosexual marriages. Both guys do the
dishes; both women grill the steaks. Straight couples often argue
along gender lines: the men are at turns angry and distant, the
women more prone to lugubrious bursts. Gays and lesbians may be less
tetchy during quarrels because they aren't forced into a particular
role.
"In heterosexual couples," Levenson says, "men become very sensitive
to their wives' sadness and anger. It's toxic to most straight men
and disappointing. They want their wives to idolize them, and they
are very, very good anger detectors. And they don't see any of it as
funny. In gay couples, there's a sense of 'We're angry, but isn't
this funny?'"
No one is sure why gay men are worse at making up after fights, but
I have a theory: it's less important for their sex lives. Probably
because they don't have women to restrain their evolutionarily male
sexual appetites, gay men are more likely than straight and lesbian
couples to agree to nonmonogamy, which decreases the stakes for not
repairing. And according to a big study from Norway published in The
Journal of Sex Research in 2006, gay men also consume more porn than
everyone else, making them more "partner-independent."
Finally, I think gay and lesbian couples may prefer more heart-
racing during conflict because of what happens to gays and lesbians
as kids. Although the world is changing--more than 3,700 schools now
have student clubs that welcome gays--many gay kids still grow up
believing that what they want is disgusting. They repress for years,
and when they finally do have relationships, they need them to carry
sufficient drama into those emotional spaces that were empty for so
long. Gays need their relationships to scorch.
That's one reason gays and lesbians end relationships sooner than
heterosexuals. In a 2004 paper, psychology professor Lawrence Kurdek
of Wright State University in Ohio reported that over a 12-year
period, 21% of gay and lesbian couples broke up; only 14% of married
straight couples did. Too many gay relationships are pulled by the
crosscurrents of childhood pain, adult expectation and gay-community
pathologies like meth addiction. Kurdek has also found that members
of gay and lesbian couples are significantly more self-conscious
than straight married people, "perhaps due to their stigmatized
status," he writes.
Legalizing same-sex marriage would probably help prolong gay
relationships, if only because of the financial and legal benefits
married couples enjoy. Federal benefits are unavailable to lesbian
and gay couples even in Massachusetts, the only state that allows
those couples to obtain marriage licenses. Kurdek says in a 1998
Journal of Marriage and the Family paper that even though gay and
lesbian relationships end more often than straight marriages, they
don't degrade any faster. In other words, it takes squabbling gay
and straight couples the same amount of time to enter what is known
as "the cascade toward divorce." But straight couples more often
find a way to stop the cascade. For gays, breaking up usually means
simply moving out, not hiring divorce attorneys.
Today Michael and I are friends. On Christmas Eve, we gathered a
group, and I made an enthusiastic attempt at the traditional Italian
seven-fishes feast. I'm in better shape now than I was in high
school, which fits with psychologist Bella DePaulo's finding (in her
fascinating 2006 book on single life, Singled Out) that the period
around divorce is associated with improvements in health. Divorced
men are also, not surprisingly, happier than men stuck in bad
marriages.
And yet if ours had been a straight marriage, I have little doubt we
would still be together. We had financial security and supportive
families. We almost certainly would have had children. This isn't
regret--fighting my homosexuality would be like shouting against the
rain. But while the researchers are certainly right that straight
couples have something to learn from gay couples, I think the
inverse is true as well.
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1704660,00.html
