Relational psychology is complex and layered and marital conflict cannot be reduced to a single factor. There are usually a number of factors that comprise the rough undercurrent to a troubled relationship, and in this publication I intend to highlight only one - albeit a rather common one. A woman’s relational temperament is often misunderstood, as it has been in the ‘RedPill’ community. Temperamentally, the average man differs in personality from the average woman, and these differences manifest most plainly at the extremes. For example, men are generally more aggressive than women. That is not to say that there are not aggressive women out there who could eat a temperamentally average man alive, however at the extreme, 100% of the 100 most aggressive people alive are men, and 100% of the 100 least aggressive people alive are women. In the relational context of a marriage, two particular personality traits and their respective levels of expression are of most concern: Agreeableness and Neuroticism.
Women generally score in the highest percentiles for trait Agreeableness and for trait Neuroticism, while men do not. Agreeableness is characterised by high levels of compassion and cooperation. It is the primary dimension of care for others and is part of the maternal dimension of a woman’s personality development. Agreeableness is what facilitates infant-mother attachment and attunement. Neuroticism is defined as a sensitivity to negative emotion and stimuli, and on average women are significantly more sensitive to negative emotion than their male counterparts. This is also a feature of the maternal dimension - women care for infants and so a more neurotic temperament is incredibly useful and acts as a threat detection system. Aside from infant-care, women have a number of good reasons to be more sensitive to negative stimuli than men; for example, women are more physically and sexually vulnerable than men. A woman will identify a change in tone, or a change in body language, or a hazard in the environment, or a hesitation in their significant other, and these will make an emotional impression on her. In a marriage, a woman will bring a man her concerns (the threats she has detected and her current understanding of them) and the intention and goal of that interaction is to: 1) regulate and resolve the emotional impression left by the trigger, and 2) to gauge the validity of her concern with her husbands assessment.
It is important to note that like any threat detection system, a woman will produce a number of false positives. She may have picked up on a threat that is not actually a concern, or a threat that will not actualise, or perhaps she has interpreted an unusual but harmless gesture as a threat. Women initiate roughly 75% of divorces in the West [1]. The driving factors for this statistic are debated; some conclude women must simply be troublesome, some conclude women are quicker to give up and jump the boat than men. I can neither confirm nor deny either of those claims, however I think it is much more likely the case that, generally, women pick up what’s wrong in a relationship long before men do. A husband would do well to listen and facilitate exploration of his wife’s concerns.
A man’s immediate reaction to his wife’s emotive concerns are twofold: 1) try to contain and minimise her emotional expression of the concern (e.g. stop the crying) but in doing so dismissing and neglecting to address the threat his wife has detected, or 2) immediately problem solve to either negate the threat as valid or remove it entirely from the situation. If a man is able to listen to his wife’s entire description of the issue, with curiosity, and let the discussion unfold to the degree that he begins to understand her perspective well enough to offer a solution, then his legitimate assessment of his wife’s concerns will be received by her as genuine comfort.
It must be realised that this feminine sensitivity to negativity is incredibly useful in a marriage. Wouldn’t you be curious about what she’s seeing that you’re not? If a man is able to engage with his wife in this explorative manner, problems can be clarified before they even manifest themselves. In successful marriages, both husband and wife understand that their most valuable assets are each other’s perspectives.
https://www.asanet.org/wp-content/uploads/savvy/documents/press/pdfs/AM_2015_Rosenfeld_News_Release_FINAL.pdf
Amazing post!
Oh, and the explanation of the trait distribution at the extremes was just very well done, like a just right golden crispy buttery naan. You must be very good at statistics and research methods haha.