Gay relationships benefit for being the very thing straight relationships are not: a union of two people of the same sex.
Ask any husband and wife and they’ll admit that marriage is hard-but social science is beginning to discover that part of the challenge of marriage stems from the fact that most couples choose to marry a member of the opposite gender. Mixing a man and a woman in a marriage, it turns out, makes a union harder.
As trite and overdone as the cliché “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” may be, it does contain a grain of truth: Men and women are fundamentally different in certain ways, and those differences can pose major challenges in straight marriages.
Same-sex couples, by definition, don’t face these obstacles, which is why recent research suggests that same-sex marriages aren’t just equal to straight marriages: in important regards they are superior.
Now that the Supreme Court has decided that gay marriages deserve the same rights as straight ones, it’s worth keeping in mind the findings of psychologists John and Julie Gottman, arguably the world’s leading experts on what makes relationships work. They are finding that gay and heterosexual marriages share a lot in common in terms of why they thrive or fail, but on one of the biggest determinants of marital success-how couples fight-gay couples have an edge.
“They are,” John Gottman told me, “a lot nicer to each other during fights.”
Some couples fight frequently and other couples avoid conflict altogether. The key distinction between couples who ultimately stay together and those who get divorced is not how often they fight, but how they handle themselves during conflict. And gay couples have a healthier fighting style than straight couples.
For one peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington brought straight and gay couples into Gottman’s lab and interviewed each couple separately about an issue they fought about. Gottman has performed some version of this study many times and has found that couples often bring up topics like uneven division of chores, money problems and sex-usually one person wants to have more and the other person doesn’t.
In this study, the gay and straight couples brought up the same sort of problems, but gay couples were, by a statistically significant margin, less defensive during fights and more likely to use shared humor to soften the tension of the conversation.
“The gay and lesbian couples,” Gottman told me, “were much more open and much more direct, particularly when talking about sex.”
Gottman gave me an example of two gay men who were debating who initiates sex more. The first said to his partner, “Who do you think initiated sex this morning?” His partner responded saying, “You don’t have the kind of body on a man that I find most sexually attractive.” To that, his partner said, “I know that. But my question is: Who do you think initiated sex together this morning?”
“Can you imagine,” Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist, chimed in, “A man saying to his pregnant wife: ‘You don’t have the kind of body right now I find most attractive in a woman?’”
The directness and lack of defensiveness have an added benefit: It lets the couples actually resolve their conflicts.
John Gottman told me about a lesbian couple he saw in his lab who were having a disagreement about whether one of them was being too flirty with men. The woman accused of being too flirty worked in a bar and made a lot of money in tips by being flirtatious and dressing provocatively. Her partner thought her behavior was threatening and obnoxious. The flirty partner swore that she was only making herself attractive to men for the money. Her partner upped the ante, though, saying, “That’s bullshit, I think you get off on this, on dressing provocative and on all of these double entendres. I’ve watched you flirt and I think you love the attention.”
“At first,” Gottman told me, “the partner was defensive. But then she said, ‘I think you are right. I really do like it. I don’t want to sleep with the men, but I really do love the attention.’ Her partner said, ‘I knew that, and it hurts me. Even though I know you won’t have sex, I find it threatening.’ The other said, ‘OK. I’m going to change. I’m going to work on that.”
The Gottmans run the Gottman Institute, which is devoted to using scientific findings to help couples build happy and healthy lives together. Over the years, they have seen hundreds of same-sex couples come through their workshops and John, who is a research psychologist, has studied them empirically.
To carry out his research, Gottman brought couples into what he calls his “love lab,” an office building that formerly existed on the campus of the University of Washington, and hooked them up to machines that measured their heart rates and blood pressure. He then carefully watched how couples-both homosexual and heterosexual-interacted with each other when discussing points of conflict, telling the story of how they met and reflecting on positive and negative memories of their relationship. His experiments have included videotaping couples spending a weekend together at a bed-and-breakfast-style lab, which also used to be on the University of Washington campus, to record how they interacted during day-to-day moments. Several years later, he followed up with the couples to see how their relationships were faring.
By interviewing these couples about their relationships, measuring their physiological responses and seeing how they treat each other in an ordinary setting, Gottman has been able to predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will divorce five to six years later.
For the “ disasters,” as Gottman calls them-those who are destined to divorce-there are two telltale signs of trouble. During the initial interview with the couple, Gottman has found that the disasters show a heightened physiological response when they are talking about a point of conflict, like money or in-laws. In other words, one or both members of the couple go into “fight or flight mode,” where their blood pressure and heart rate spikes, a sign they think they are being and feeling attacked. The “masters,” the term Gottman uses for couples likely to stay together, remain physiologically calm, even when discussing conflict, because they feel safe and loved.
When monitoring couples as they have a conversation about relationship conflicts, Gottman has found that straight couples feel more and more negative moods and emotions, like stress and anger, as a conversation went on, whereas gay couples did not.
“When we plot the amount of negative affect over a 15-minute conflict discussion, in heterosexual couples, it goes up over time,” says John Gottman. “The last 5 minutes have more negative affect, even in good relationships, than the first five. That doesn’t seem to be true in same sex couples.”
That isn’t gay couples’ only advantage.
The second sign of trouble is how each person in the relationship speaks to the other. The disasters often they trot out what the Gottmans call “the four horsemen” during conflict, which are contempt, criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling. These four horsemen are devastating because they make people feel worthless and unsafe in their own relationships. Gottman has found that gay couples are far less likely to rely on one of the horseman-defensiveness-during a fight.
The couples who have elevated physiological responses and employ the four horsemen are far more likely to be divorced or unhappy in their marriages a few years down the line. That’s true, he has found, for straight and gay couples alike. It’s just that gays, in general, are better at dealing with conflict, and this appears to buffer them against trouble.
Beyond being better at fighting, gay relationships benefit in unexpected ways for being the very thing that straight relationships are not: a union of two people of the same sex.
As Liza Mundy pointed out in her Atlantic article, “The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss,” gay couples tend to be more egalitarian than straight couples-which makes sense. Because there is no gender difference between them, they don’t find themselves falling into stereotypical gender roles. Mundy cites studies showing that same-sex couples are much better, for example, in dividing up house chores in an equitable way, compared to heterosexual couples, where women still perform most house duties, even if they are working full-time.
This is an important point because one of the topics that straight couples fight about the most is housework and whether it’s being divided fairly. This is a source of conflict that, it seems, affects gay couples less.
Gay couples, by virtue of being the same sex, also have empathy on their side-they understand each other better.
“It’s easier for a man to understand the experiences of another man,” Julie Gottman said, “and a woman to understand the experiences of another woman, than for a man to understand the experiences of another woman, and a woman to understand the experiences of another man.”
The Gottmans give an example from a workshop they held with gay and lesbian couples. They gave couples some exercises to complete and the men went through the exercises much more quickly than the women. While the lesbians felt that there was not enough time to complete the exercise properly-they wanted more time sharing answers among one another and with the group-the men wanted the exact opposite. They wanted to keep their answers to themselves and move on to the next exercise.
Put two women together who want to talk it out, and you get an emotionally deep discussion and a meeting of the minds. Put two men together who want to move on to the next exercise, and you get mutual understanding about privacy needs. But put one woman who wants to talk it out together with a man who prefers to keep quiet, and you have a potential fight on your hands.
Seeing eye-to-eye especially helps when it comes to sex. The sex drive of a man, according to the psychological literature, is much stronger than the sex drive of a woman. This explains why sex is such a hot-button issue that couples fight about in heterosexual marriages. Usually, as marriage counselors have found, a man wants more sex and the woman either thinks they are having enough or wants less of it. They don’t usually see this mismatch among same-sex couples, who are more in sync with each other’s libidos.
What they do see, though, is that gay men are far more polyamorous than lesbian women or men in heterosexual relationships. About 60 percent of gay men, one study found, have had sex outside of their marriage and 44 percent of them said that they had done so with the blessing of their partner. By comparison, about 14 percent of straight men and women reported having sex outside of marriage, and only eight percent of lesbians did.
Dan Savage, the gay sex columnist, famously coined the term “monogamish” to describe the gay approach to extra-marital sex. Savage and his husband Terry Miller were monogamous in the first part of their relationship, but then decided to relax that policy after they had their first child. “The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told the New York Times, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men.” To Savage, given how strong the male sex drive is, it’s unrealistic to expect men to remain monogamous for life. Having occasional trysts outside of marriage helps gay men keep the marriage together.
This, though, is a potential conflict point for gay relationships. Jealousy is only human, after all, and even seemingly meaningless one-night-stands can grow into something more. “They want to be physically attached,” Gottman says of gay men who have side-trysts, “but not emotionally attached.” The problem, as he points out, is that when individuals have an orgasm, they release a hormone called oxytocin, which makes people emotionally attached and bonded to another person. “So there is attachment taking place through sex,” he said.
Lesbians suffer from the opposite problem. Rather than having too much sex, they seem to be having too little. The term “lesbian bed death,” coined by the sociologist Pepper Schwartz, is a now-famous descriptor for how little sex lesbian women report having. When I asked the Gottmans if lesbians are missing out on the intimacy that sex, with the help of oxytocin, kindles, Julie Gottman said no. “Having less sex doesn’t make them less affectionate, and oxytocin is also released when people are affectionate with one another.”
During oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, the historic Supreme Court case that guarantees marriage rights in for gay couples in all 50 states, both liberal and conservative justices pointed out that gay marriage is a radically new institution. The justices are right: gay marriage is very new and it seems to be, at least based on the social science research, different in certain ways from straight marriage. And that may not be such a bad thing.
As trite and overdone as the cliché “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” may be, it does contain a grain of truth: Men and women are fundamentally different in certain ways, and those differences can pose major challenges in straight marriages.
Same-sex couples, by definition, don’t face these obstacles, which is why recent research suggests that same-sex marriages aren’t just equal to straight marriages: in important regards they are superior.
Now that the Supreme Court has decided that gay marriages deserve the same rights as straight ones, it’s worth keeping in mind the findings of psychologists John and Julie Gottman, arguably the world’s leading experts on what makes relationships work. They are finding that gay and heterosexual marriages share a lot in common in terms of why they thrive or fail, but on one of the biggest determinants of marital success-how couples fight-gay couples have an edge.
“They are,” John Gottman told me, “a lot nicer to each other during fights.”
Some couples fight frequently and other couples avoid conflict altogether. The key distinction between couples who ultimately stay together and those who get divorced is not how often they fight, but how they handle themselves during conflict. And gay couples have a healthier fighting style than straight couples.
For one peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson at the University of Washington brought straight and gay couples into Gottman’s lab and interviewed each couple separately about an issue they fought about. Gottman has performed some version of this study many times and has found that couples often bring up topics like uneven division of chores, money problems and sex-usually one person wants to have more and the other person doesn’t.
In this study, the gay and straight couples brought up the same sort of problems, but gay couples were, by a statistically significant margin, less defensive during fights and more likely to use shared humor to soften the tension of the conversation.
“The gay and lesbian couples,” Gottman told me, “were much more open and much more direct, particularly when talking about sex.”
Gottman gave me an example of two gay men who were debating who initiates sex more. The first said to his partner, “Who do you think initiated sex this morning?” His partner responded saying, “You don’t have the kind of body on a man that I find most sexually attractive.” To that, his partner said, “I know that. But my question is: Who do you think initiated sex together this morning?”
“Can you imagine,” Julie Gottman, a clinical psychologist, chimed in, “A man saying to his pregnant wife: ‘You don’t have the kind of body right now I find most attractive in a woman?’”
The directness and lack of defensiveness have an added benefit: It lets the couples actually resolve their conflicts.
John Gottman told me about a lesbian couple he saw in his lab who were having a disagreement about whether one of them was being too flirty with men. The woman accused of being too flirty worked in a bar and made a lot of money in tips by being flirtatious and dressing provocatively. Her partner thought her behavior was threatening and obnoxious. The flirty partner swore that she was only making herself attractive to men for the money. Her partner upped the ante, though, saying, “That’s bullshit, I think you get off on this, on dressing provocative and on all of these double entendres. I’ve watched you flirt and I think you love the attention.”
“At first,” Gottman told me, “the partner was defensive. But then she said, ‘I think you are right. I really do like it. I don’t want to sleep with the men, but I really do love the attention.’ Her partner said, ‘I knew that, and it hurts me. Even though I know you won’t have sex, I find it threatening.’ The other said, ‘OK. I’m going to change. I’m going to work on that.”
The Gottmans run the Gottman Institute, which is devoted to using scientific findings to help couples build happy and healthy lives together. Over the years, they have seen hundreds of same-sex couples come through their workshops and John, who is a research psychologist, has studied them empirically.
To carry out his research, Gottman brought couples into what he calls his “love lab,” an office building that formerly existed on the campus of the University of Washington, and hooked them up to machines that measured their heart rates and blood pressure. He then carefully watched how couples-both homosexual and heterosexual-interacted with each other when discussing points of conflict, telling the story of how they met and reflecting on positive and negative memories of their relationship. His experiments have included videotaping couples spending a weekend together at a bed-and-breakfast-style lab, which also used to be on the University of Washington campus, to record how they interacted during day-to-day moments. Several years later, he followed up with the couples to see how their relationships were faring.
By interviewing these couples about their relationships, measuring their physiological responses and seeing how they treat each other in an ordinary setting, Gottman has been able to predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a couple will divorce five to six years later.
For the “ disasters,” as Gottman calls them-those who are destined to divorce-there are two telltale signs of trouble. During the initial interview with the couple, Gottman has found that the disasters show a heightened physiological response when they are talking about a point of conflict, like money or in-laws. In other words, one or both members of the couple go into “fight or flight mode,” where their blood pressure and heart rate spikes, a sign they think they are being and feeling attacked. The “masters,” the term Gottman uses for couples likely to stay together, remain physiologically calm, even when discussing conflict, because they feel safe and loved.
When monitoring couples as they have a conversation about relationship conflicts, Gottman has found that straight couples feel more and more negative moods and emotions, like stress and anger, as a conversation went on, whereas gay couples did not.
“When we plot the amount of negative affect over a 15-minute conflict discussion, in heterosexual couples, it goes up over time,” says John Gottman. “The last 5 minutes have more negative affect, even in good relationships, than the first five. That doesn’t seem to be true in same sex couples.”
That isn’t gay couples’ only advantage.
The second sign of trouble is how each person in the relationship speaks to the other. The disasters often they trot out what the Gottmans call “the four horsemen” during conflict, which are contempt, criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling. These four horsemen are devastating because they make people feel worthless and unsafe in their own relationships. Gottman has found that gay couples are far less likely to rely on one of the horseman-defensiveness-during a fight.
The couples who have elevated physiological responses and employ the four horsemen are far more likely to be divorced or unhappy in their marriages a few years down the line. That’s true, he has found, for straight and gay couples alike. It’s just that gays, in general, are better at dealing with conflict, and this appears to buffer them against trouble.
Beyond being better at fighting, gay relationships benefit in unexpected ways for being the very thing that straight relationships are not: a union of two people of the same sex.
As Liza Mundy pointed out in her Atlantic article, “The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss,” gay couples tend to be more egalitarian than straight couples-which makes sense. Because there is no gender difference between them, they don’t find themselves falling into stereotypical gender roles. Mundy cites studies showing that same-sex couples are much better, for example, in dividing up house chores in an equitable way, compared to heterosexual couples, where women still perform most house duties, even if they are working full-time.
This is an important point because one of the topics that straight couples fight about the most is housework and whether it’s being divided fairly. This is a source of conflict that, it seems, affects gay couples less.
Gay couples, by virtue of being the same sex, also have empathy on their side-they understand each other better.
“It’s easier for a man to understand the experiences of another man,” Julie Gottman said, “and a woman to understand the experiences of another woman, than for a man to understand the experiences of another woman, and a woman to understand the experiences of another man.”
The Gottmans give an example from a workshop they held with gay and lesbian couples. They gave couples some exercises to complete and the men went through the exercises much more quickly than the women. While the lesbians felt that there was not enough time to complete the exercise properly-they wanted more time sharing answers among one another and with the group-the men wanted the exact opposite. They wanted to keep their answers to themselves and move on to the next exercise.
Put two women together who want to talk it out, and you get an emotionally deep discussion and a meeting of the minds. Put two men together who want to move on to the next exercise, and you get mutual understanding about privacy needs. But put one woman who wants to talk it out together with a man who prefers to keep quiet, and you have a potential fight on your hands.
Seeing eye-to-eye especially helps when it comes to sex. The sex drive of a man, according to the psychological literature, is much stronger than the sex drive of a woman. This explains why sex is such a hot-button issue that couples fight about in heterosexual marriages. Usually, as marriage counselors have found, a man wants more sex and the woman either thinks they are having enough or wants less of it. They don’t usually see this mismatch among same-sex couples, who are more in sync with each other’s libidos.
What they do see, though, is that gay men are far more polyamorous than lesbian women or men in heterosexual relationships. About 60 percent of gay men, one study found, have had sex outside of their marriage and 44 percent of them said that they had done so with the blessing of their partner. By comparison, about 14 percent of straight men and women reported having sex outside of marriage, and only eight percent of lesbians did.
Dan Savage, the gay sex columnist, famously coined the term “monogamish” to describe the gay approach to extra-marital sex. Savage and his husband Terry Miller were monogamous in the first part of their relationship, but then decided to relax that policy after they had their first child. “The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told the New York Times, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men.” To Savage, given how strong the male sex drive is, it’s unrealistic to expect men to remain monogamous for life. Having occasional trysts outside of marriage helps gay men keep the marriage together.
This, though, is a potential conflict point for gay relationships. Jealousy is only human, after all, and even seemingly meaningless one-night-stands can grow into something more. “They want to be physically attached,” Gottman says of gay men who have side-trysts, “but not emotionally attached.” The problem, as he points out, is that when individuals have an orgasm, they release a hormone called oxytocin, which makes people emotionally attached and bonded to another person. “So there is attachment taking place through sex,” he said.
Lesbians suffer from the opposite problem. Rather than having too much sex, they seem to be having too little. The term “lesbian bed death,” coined by the sociologist Pepper Schwartz, is a now-famous descriptor for how little sex lesbian women report having. When I asked the Gottmans if lesbians are missing out on the intimacy that sex, with the help of oxytocin, kindles, Julie Gottman said no. “Having less sex doesn’t make them less affectionate, and oxytocin is also released when people are affectionate with one another.”
During oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, the historic Supreme Court case that guarantees marriage rights in for gay couples in all 50 states, both liberal and conservative justices pointed out that gay marriage is a radically new institution. The justices are right: gay marriage is very new and it seems to be, at least based on the social science research, different in certain ways from straight marriage. And that may not be such a bad thing.
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