You so “get” me!

Picture it: you have just failed to get a promotion at work because the person who got the job is not only having an affair with the boss but is completing the boss’ monthly reports as well. You come home railing against the system and expressing the feeling that your professional life is over. Your partner looks at you with a smile, gives you a pat on the shoulder, and says, “So, shall we have Thai or Indian tonight?” These are the moments that test relationships, when you feel that your supposed life-partner does not quite appreciate the depth and meaning of your experience. Empathy is relationship glue and without it things tend to fall apart. What new research has shown however, is that what a man thinks is empathy and what a woman thinks is empathy can be a little different.

In the new study more than 150 heterosexual couples were gathered . The average length of relationship was three and a half years and 56 per cent were married.

Every individual involved in the study was asked to describe an incident with their partner from the last three months that was either frustrating, disappointing, or upsetting. The researchers took audio recordings of a one or two sentence statement summarising the incident and then, taking their lives into their own hands, brought the couples together and played each individual’s statements. The couples were asked to come to a better understanding of what had happened during the incident in ten minutes while they were videotaped. The couples then watched the ten minute video using an electronic device to rate their emotions throughout ranging from “very negative” (0) to “neutral” to “very positive” (11).

Using these ratings the researchers selected six 30 second clips from the videotape that had the highest rated positive or negative emotions from each partner. The researchers then showed these clips again to the individuals asking them to report how they felt during each segment and what they thought of their partner’s efforts to understand them. This was then put against measurements of the subject’s overall satisfaction with their relationship and whether they thought their partner was empathetic or not.

Interestingly, women who correctly understood that their partners were upset were much more likely to be happy with the relationship than when they understood that their partners were happy. Additionally, when men understood that their female partner was unhappy, the women were happy but the men were not. This is probably because being empathetic to negative emotions may be threatening for men but not for women.

It could be that for a woman to see a man upset may reflect the man’s depth of engagement in the relationship. This fits with well established research showing how dissatisfied women become in response to their man withdrawing in the face of relationship conflict.

An additional finding was that relationship satisfaction for both partners was directly related to a man’s ability to read their female partner’s positive emotions correctly. The problem is that in the emotional arena, many men are illiterate.