What Should We Be Worried About?

MYTHS ABOUT MEN

HELEN FISHER

Biological anthropologist, Rutgers University; author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love

Scientists and laymen have spent the last fifty years dispelling myths about women. I worry that journalists, academics, and laymen will continue to perpetuate an equal number of myths about men. Annually, in 2010, 2011, and 2012, I have conducted a national survey of singles in collaboration with a U.S. dating service. Together we designed a questionnaire with some 150 queries (many with up to 10 sub-questions) and polled over 5,000 single men and women. We did not sample the members of the dating site; instead, we collected data on a national representative sample based on the U.S. census. All were divorced, separated, widowed, or had never married; none were engaged, living with a partner, or in a serious relationship. Included were the appropriate number of blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos; gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and heterosexuals; rural, suburban, and urban folks from every region of the United States, ranging in age from twenty-one to seventy-plus. The data paint a different portrait of men than do America’s chattering class.

Foremost, men are just about as eager to marry as women. In the 2011 sample of people in their twenties, 68 percent of the men wanted to wed, along with 71 percent of the women, and 43 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women hoped to have children. Journalists have suggested that men want children because they don’t have to change diapers. But men spend a great deal of metabolic energy at child care. To support their young, men take the dangerous jobs—90 percent of people who die at work are men. Moreover, men universally confront an intruding thief and generally drive the family car through the raging blizzard.

Men aren’t “players,” either. When asked about their approach to dating, only 3 percent replied, “I would just like to date a lot of people.” Men are as eager to find a partner as women are; indeed, men find loneliness as stressful as women do. And men are far less picky in their search. In the 2011 sample, only 21 percent of them reported that they “must have,” or find it “very important” to have, a mate of their ethnic background, vs. 31 percent of women. Only 18 percent of men (as opposed to 28 percent of women) reported that they “must have,” or find it “very important” to have, a partner of the same religion. The men were less interested than were the women in a partner of the same educational background and political affiliation. And 43 percent of the men in their thirties and forties would make a commitment to a woman who was ten or more years older. Women are the picky sex.

Men fall in love faster, too—perhaps because they are more visual. Men experience love at first sight more regularly than women, and men fall in love just as often. Indeed, men are just as physiologically passionate as women. When my colleagues and I have scanned men’s brains using fMRI, we have found that they show as much activity as do women in neural regions linked with feelings of intense romantic love. Interestingly, in the 2011 sample we also found that when men fall in love they are faster to introduce their new partner to friends and parents, more eager to kiss in public, and want to “live together” sooner. Then, when they’re settled in, men have more intimate conversations with their wives than women do with their husbands—because women have many of their intimate conversations with their girlfriends. Last, men are just as likely as women to believe that you can stay married to the same person forever (76 percent of both sexes). And data from other studies show that after a break-up men are 2.5 times more likely to kill themselves.

In fact it is women who seek more independence in a committed relationship. Women want more personal space (77 percent of women vs. 56 percent of men). More women are reluctant to share their bank account (35 percent of women vs. 25 percent of men). Women are more eager to have girls’ night out (66 percent) than men are to go out with the boys (47 percent); and women are more likely to want to vacation with their female buddies (12 percent) than men with their male buddies (8 percent).

Two questions in these annual surveys were particularly revealing: “Would you make a long-term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but with whom you were not in love?” And “Would you make a long-term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but to whom you did not feel sexually attracted?” Thirty-one percent of men were willing to form a partnership with a woman they were not in love with, as opposed to 23 percent of women. Men were also slightly more likely to enter a partnership with someone they were not sexually attracted to (21 percent of men vs. 18 percent of women). Men in their twenties were the most likely to forgo romantic and sexual attraction to a mate; the least likely were women over sixty!

Why would a young man forfeit romance and better sex to make a long-term partnership? I suspect it’s the call of the wild. When a young man finds a good-looking, healthy, popular, energetic, intelligent, humorous, and charming mate, he might be predisposed to take this opportunity to breed despite the passion he might have for another woman, one he knows he would never want to wed. When the “almost right” woman comes along, the ancestral drive to pass on his DNA toward eternity trumps his sexual and romantic satisfaction with a less appropriate partner.

The sexes have much in common. When asked what they were looking for in a partnership, over 89 percent of men and women said they “must have” or find it “very important” to have a partner they can trust, in whom they can confide, and who treats them with respect. These three requirements top the list for both sexes, in all years. Gone is the traditional need to marry someone from the “right” ethnic and religious background who will fit into the extended family. Marriage has changed more in the last 50 years than in the last 10,000. Men, like women, are turning away from traditional family customs, instead seeking companionship and self-fulfillment.

In the Iliad, Homer called love “magic to make the sanest man go mad.” This brain system lives in both sexes. And I believe we’ll make better partnerships if we embrace the facts: Men love—just as powerfully as women.