Husbands are as affectionate as wives, study finds

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent of Last Updated: 6:01PM BST 10/08/2012
Wives show their love for their partner by nagging less while husbands' idea of being affectionate is to do the washing-up or offer to have sex, a study has found.

Books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus suggest women are naturally more romantic creatures, but researchers claim husbands and wives simply express their feelings in different ways.

While women show love by suppressing negative thoughts and feelings, men reciprocate in kind by spending more time on shared activities, whether in the kitchen or in the bedroom.

In fact men use a greater range of behaviours to be affectionate than women do, proving that they are just as affectionate – albeit less traditionally romantic – than their spouses, according to the study.

The team, from the University of Texas, questioned 168 couples at four points in their marriage: two months after their wedding, on their first and second anniversaries, and again 13 years later.

To analyse the nature of their relationships the team interviewed each person about how close and attached they felt to their partners, as well as asking a series of questions about each other's behaviour over the past 24 hours.

They found that wives "seem to show love by tending to the emotional climate of their marriages" while husbands' love "appears to create an environment that draws spouses together in activity".

Women who were more in love with their husbands were less likely to nag their husbands, as well as offering them hugs and kisses.

Suppressing negative thoughts and feelings for the good of their relationship suggests that wives are more focused on fostering a healthy emotional relationship, researchers said.

In contrast, husbands' displays of affection were related to spending more time in shared activities with their spouse, for example by helping out with household chores or taking up shared hobbies.

Men who were more in love were also more likely to try to initiate sex with their wives, supporting the idea that sex is "an important channel through which men express loving feelings", the academics suggested.

Loving wives, on the other hand, were less likely to try to have sex, possibly because allowing their husbands to take a leading role was another sign of their accommodating behaviour.

This could be the result of evolution, which programmed women to try to secure an emotional investment from men in their family, and encouraged men to invest time in their partners to prove themselves as good providers, the researchers added.

Writing in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, they said: "Contrary to the notion that women are more inclined than men to show love through affection, husbands were just as likely as wives to express their love by engaging in warm, intimate behaviours.

"Moreover, contrary to the popular notion that wives' ability to love outshines that of men, it appears that husbands may actually use a wider range of behaviours to show their love than wives.

"To shamelessly abuse the metaphor, we did not find men in a Martian cave nor women in a Venusian garden, but rather in separate neighbourhoods of the same town."