Well, It’s Men: Does He Flip for Her?

[I’m sorry that took awhile to get back to this theme. I’ve been over-busy working on a grant.]

In my last post, I left you with a question about whether attitudes about sacrificing for one’s partner are more related to commitment to the future of the relationship for men or women. Well, it’s men. This doesn’t mean that we found that men were more willing to sacrifice. We found no difference between men and women on overall level of willingness to sacrifice. What I’m focusing on here is that sacrifice was more related to being committed to the future for men than women. And I decided not to bring this back to oxytocin until the next post, but that’s coming.

So, what does this mean that sacrificing may be more tied to long term commitment in men than women? Sarah Whitton and I suggested that one of the reasons this could be the case is that women are simply more socialized to “give” of themselves to others, and that this would make women more likely to sacrifice (or have positive attitudes about sacrificing) no matter how clear the future is in a relationship. Men, on the other hand, may be more likely to need to decide that a particular woman is “the one” for the future in order to really give their all to that woman. Ironically, it’s men not women that most strongly fit what we predicted beforehand in this work. After all, it only makes sense that one would be most willing to sacrifice for someone with whom they see a future. It’s just in those two studies from our lab listed in my last posting, it seems that this is most true for men and only weakly true for women (on average).

My next point go somewhat further from the data than the interpretation above. I think the point is valid and practically important, but it really is more theoretical. I’d like to test everything in this line of reason more fully in future studies. Here goes.

I think commitment for the average man is a bit more like a light switch that gets flipped on (or not) at some point with a particular women when it comes to commitment. It’s flipped or switched on once he becomes clear that she’s who he wants to be with in the future. Until it’s flipped, he may be in love and he may be great to be around, but he’s not crossed over to where he’ll give regularly for that partner without resenting it. I think the average women crosses over to giving more fully sooner in how the average relationship develops. So, if we have the average women and the average man in a relationship together, early on, I’m betting she’s going to move more quickly to fully to sacrificing than him.

Think about that. There’s no great problem if this is true except where the guy never catches up. And that’s why books like “He’s Just Not That Into You” are bestsellers, because it too often never does catch up. If commitment is more like a switch being flipped for the average male, women are at greater risk for over-giving in romantic relationships until he flips—for her. Based on this theory, I’ve often suggested to women that they be careful not to give too much until they can find the switch and see if it is working. This advice is just as good for men, by the way, in relationships where they are the ones to give too much until the commitment is becoming clear.

Next time I’ll get back to biology and oxytocin and talk about an expansion of this theory that takes oxytocin into account. I bet you can see where that’s going. And go we will, next time.

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What Drives Sacrificing for A Partner? And Does Oxytocin Play a Role?

There is a growing body of research on the role of sacrifice in romantic relationships and marriage. It’s really interesting stuff, too—at least for a relationship geek. I’m talking (mostly) about healthy giving from one partner to another, not martyrdom or responding to one’s inner doormat. (If you keep getting rug burns from giving in your relationships, you might not be giving in healthy ways. Hey, maybe that’s another not so hot form of sliding.)

When defined in healthy ways, there are a number of studies that show that sacrifice for one’s partner and relationship is associated with all sorts of good things in a relationship—especially in marriage. But I don’t want to focus on marriage in this post. I want to focus on how relationships develop early on.

Many studies show the positive effects of sacrifice. If you want to look some up, here you go. The article by van Lange is particularly wonderful. All the articles noted here also discuss or study the downside of sacrificing (especially Impett et al.). So, for the really geeky, here are some fine citations for you (otherwise, move on):

Impett, E. A., Gable, K. P., & Peplau, L. A. (2005). Giving up and giving in: The costs and benefits of daily sacrifice in intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 327-344.

van Lange, P. A. M., Rusbult, C. E., Drigotas, S. M., Arriaga, X. B., Witcher, B. S. & Cox, C. L. (1997). Willingness to sacrifice in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social psychology, 72, 1373-1395.

Wieselquist, J., Rusbult, C. E., Foster, C. A., & Agnew, C. R. (1999). Commitment, pro-relationship behavior, and trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 942-966.

In our lab, we’ve published two studies on sacrifice in intimate relationships (which flowed out of the steady focus we have on many issues related to commitment in our lab):

Whitton, S.W., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2007). If I help my partner, will it hurt me? Perceptions of sacrifice in romantic relationships. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26, 64-92.

Stanley, S. M., Whitton, S. W., Low, S. M., Clements, M. L., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sacrifice as a predictor of marital outcomes. Family Process, 45, 289-303.

We predicted that long-term commitment to the future would be associated with willingness to sacrifice, since one should be more inclined to sacrifice for their relationship if they see a future for it. Sacrifices can be seen as a type of investment, which is something people tend to do more of when they see a future. If one’s view is all short-term, you won’t see a lot of investment in anything except “me.” We and other scholars think sacrifices perform a really crucial role in addition to the obvious benefit of generating positive behavior. It’s this. Sacrifices demonstrate commitment. They send signals that reaffirm commitment between partners. This simple theory is why you can also see many groups—gangs for example—requiring some type of overt sacrifice by a newbie to become a member. The sacrifice, like knocking over a 7-11 or something a lot worse, demonstrates seriousness about commitment in a way that just saying “I’m with you on this” can’t. Note, if you are in a new relationship that is growing toward something, and your partner desires you to engage in criminal acts to demonstrate your commitment, that’s not too good a sign. Just take note of that.

Back to our studies. We expected that long-term commitment (wanting a future together) would be strongly related to attitudes about sacrifice. We expected this to be true regardless of the sex of the respondent. What we found, though, is a substantial difference between men and women in how things work. For one of those two groups, the association between sacrifice and long-term commitment was far stronger than for the other.

Which do you think it was? Was commitment to the future more crucial for understanding sacrifice for men or for women? What do you think and why? Mull that over and in the next post I’ll tell you what I suspect. And then I’ll come back to some points (a theory) about oxytocin.

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Trust in the Fast Lane with Oxytonated Fuels

No, that’s not a suggestion for the shortest way to get to work. In the last post, I started writing about oxytocin. Let’s recap. Oxytocin is the chemical of trust, bonding, and social connection. There are other chemicals involved, but the big O is shaping up as the chief one. I’m not saying that you only trust someone because you get a jolt of oxytocin; I’m not saying that what you think, do, or decide has no part in who you end up trusting and what you do in your relationships. I’m just sayin that in addition to psychological and spiritual beings, we’re biologicals. You are a carbon-based life form, and for everything that happens that matters in your mind and social life, there is something happening chemically and neurologically in your body and brain. Oxytocin is the go-to chemical coursing in your body when you are getting attached to someone.

As I noted in my last post, lots of things can give you a jolt of oxytocin. Let me recap that list and add to it: touching, hugging, sex, kissing, a warm bath, vibration, massage, sex, tactile stimulation, genital stimulation, giving birth, sex, and/or sex. There are probably all sorts of other things, too, that cause oxytocin to get rolling but let’s focus on one in this post.

Did I mention that oxytocin released or increased during and following sex? I meant to mention that because it might matter to you or someone that you know.

It also seems pretty well understood by researchers that females (on average, research is always on average) have more robust and active oxytocin systems than males. That would make a lot of sense if you consider that it’s purpose beyond all purposes is to rapidly and massively bond a new mother to a helpless baby. Bam—big time attachment. I’m sure a lot of that must begin in the womb, but there is a big ramp up at birth. It’s, of course, really important for men to bond to their children as well, but through history, survival is at stake when it comes to the baby and the mother to bonding.

Is there any downside to this cool system? Theory alert. What I’m about to suggest is somewhat theoretical but it’s also kind of simple and obvious. By the way, that’s the best kind of theory to build—simple ideas that explain common things.

Things move fast in relationships these days. I get to talk with lots of groups of people, and when talking about some topics, I like to ask people how long it is before the average couple who meets and gets attracted has sex. Not all couples have sex. Not all couples have sex before marriage. Shocking, I know, but true. Not all couples have have sex soon after the relationships begins. Of course, if you read the hooking up literature (it’s pretty interesting), there are also lots of people who have sex before there is any type of relationship at all. If the sex is good, maybe there will be a date. But in general, when talking with groups of folks, especially those in their 20s or 30s, I rarely hear an answer longer than a few weeks when asking how long before the average couple has sex.

Back to the big O (I mean Oxytocin, not Oprah’s magazine or anything else). Oh, you thought I might have meant that! Well, I’m coming to that now. Here’s the problem with this very cool chemical. Putting it simply:

Oxytocin accelerates attachment and trust.
Oxytocin gets rolling with sex.
Sexual contact happens pretty rapidly for lots of couples—most, really.

Sooooooo . . . . .

In the absence of protective mechanisms or cultural rituals that promote going slower in developing relationships, trust and attachment are going to form strongly between partners well before those partners can possibly have evaluated whether the relationship is wise, viable, safe, and good. I don’t want to go too far out on a limb (I may do that next time), but if women have more robust oxytocin systems than men, who’s more at risk by not going slower? It does not have to be the woman, by the way, who has the stronger oxytocin reaction. I’m sure plenty of men are gifted with strong, biologically enhanced, trust circuits. No matter if someone is male or female, the cruel irony is that people who are biologically prone to be particularly gracious and giving may also be more at risk by not making careful decisions on the highway of love.

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Waiting to Inhale: Oxytocin and Trust

This will be the first of a few posts on the chemical I spend more time thinking about than any other: Oxytocin. I would love to be able to measure oxytocin in the studies my colleagues and I do on couples but I think that ability is, technologically, some years off—at least in the way I’d want to measure it. But let me tell you why I’d love to measure it. The chemical oxytocin (a neuropeptide, to be exact) is widely assumed to be THE chemical of trust and bonding in humans. It is the chemical that floods women’s bodies at the birth of a child to enhance bonding with the newborn. It is also released in you (yes, you) by hugging, touching—and, importantly, people also get a jolt of it from sex. I’ll focus on some interesting thoughts about sex in a later post. For the moment, we’ll warm up to that by talking about talking.

There are a variety of small experiments that have tested the power of oxytocin. Apparently, you can inhale oxytocin and it will affect you—or most people, anyway. Perhaps inhale is not exactly the right term for what researchers do, but it can be put in your nose, introduced into your body in some way like that, it would likely have some short-term effect on your trust of others.

Enter a recent study that I find totally fascinating. A team of Swedish researchers (Beate Ditzen, Marcel Schaer, Barbara Gabriel, Guy Bodenmann, Ulrike Ehlert, and Markus Heinrichs) attempted to see if this trust-inducing chemical could affect how couples communicate about problem areas. Psychologically trained marital researchers in the U. S. and Europe have been videotaping couples while they communicate about issues for decades. (Perhaps you’ve noticed the small cameras around your home? Just kidding.) Hundreds of studies have come from this type of work. Couples come into a lab such as the one my colleague Howard Markman set up in our research center, and talk while being filmed. Howard, along with people such as John Gottman, Robert Weiss, and Cliff Notarius, are pioneers of this methodology. Videotaping couples while they talk allows researchers to watch the tapes over and over again in order to observe aspects of how couples communicate.

This method of studying communication allows us to study how “objectively” coded communication patterns (versus people’s personal reports of what they do, which are less reliable) relate to many other aspects of couples’ lives. For example, from such studies, we have learned a great deal about types of communication patterns that are associated with marriages running into difficulties in the future. Our books, such as Fighting for Your Marriage, focus a great deal on such things—and what to do about it.

Back to the Swedish researchers. (It just sounds sexy to be a Swedish researcher, doesn’t it?) What they found in their ingenious study fits all that we know about oxytocin. They gave couples either a snort of oxytocin or a placebo prior to talking about an area of conflict. The couples did not know which chemical they got. After studying the tapes, what they found is that those who got the oxytocin communicated more positively and less negatively during their discussions. Amazing. It’s exactly what you’d predict.

Does this mean that you should run out and get some oxytocin spray? (Oxytocin spray is available on the web. I bought some, and I’m not sure I trust that it’s really got oxytocin in it. Of course, maybe I’d trust it more to spay it up my nose before deciding if I trusted it. There’s some problem with that plan. I need a chemist.)

So, should you run out and buy some spray? Not yet, and maybe not ever (though, who knows). But here is an idea that could work for you. Suppose you and your love know you have to talk about something tricky or hard. My idea here assumes you are not already upset. In addition to the types of techniques we teach in our books and materials for couples (PREP), you could give each other a solid hug for a few minutes before talking. Heck, give it a try afterwards, too. Mutual hugs do not, currently, come with any government warning labels. And, studies suggest you’ll get some oxytocin released from a good hug. It also relieves stress. With this plan, it possible that the hug will boost oxytocin and, along with some basic communication ability or skills, you may just have a better talk than you’d otherwise expect. Are you waiting to inhale? Don’t. Try a hug.

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Sleeping Better Part Three

This is the last in a series of three postings I’ve written on sleep and sleeping better together as a couple. Sleep is in the news in big ways, lately, with a large study being released by the CDC here in the U. S., that researcher in England (I wrote about two posts ago) recommending that mates NOT sleep together most of the time in order to get better sleep, and various new studies coming out all the time intensifying the focus on how the sleep styles and issues of one partner affect the other. There is lot’s of good attention on what is really a fundamental health issue. My research colleagues and I (Howard Markman, Elizabeth Allen, Galena Rhoades) have been adding questions about sleep to all of our ongoing studies, because we are convinced that is much more to be learned and that it really does matter.

I wanted to mention two more issues before letting this topic go for the time being. The first topic here is snoring. Read the last two posts if you have not already done so, before I go on. Many people snore. Men snore more than women, and women are affected more negatively in their sleep by their husbands’ snoring. If the snoring is regular and seems pretty intense, it would be wise to get a medical evaluation before doing anything else. Snoring can be a sign of serious medical problems, especially sleep apnea. If you or your mate sounds anything like a freight train at night (or even the Little Engine that Could not-stop-snoring), get it checked out with your doctor. There are treatments for sleep apnea and some are very effective (and some are more effective than others). Many people go a long time, if ever, before getting it checked, and many other things about the quality of life will suffer for years if you let it go.

Now, for some simple advice to couples with snoring issues. Make it okay for the one who does not snore to wake up, poke, prod, roll, WHATEVER, the other in order to get that snoring partner to shift positions and stop snoring. I forget which of the various sleep studies I was reading that made this point, but apparently many women (and some men) lay awake being polite and not waking their snoring partner to get them to move, and thereby routinely suffer from poor sleep. That’s not good. Talk together, and work as a team, to make it okay to use whatever verbal or non-verbal signal you both agree on to allow the one to get the other to move it.

The second topic I want to address in this post is simply this: Sleep researchers believe another problem for many couples is the motion of one partner affecting the other’s ability to remain asleep. There are a couple of ways to think about this. Does one toss and turn and roll around a lot more than the other, and does that movement wake the other up? Or, perhaps one partner has a different type of work (or sleep) schedule that means one is coming to bed after the other is asleep, or waking up while the other is still planning to sleep, and the movement in and out of the bed wakes up the other.

Here are some simple ideas for dealing with this problem. First, work as a team to agree on how to handle some of this, especially the different schedules thing. Talk about it and what each can do not to disturb the sleep of the other. Second, consider getting a type of mattress that isolates motion. Some mattresses do this a lot more effectively than others. As I noted two posts ago, I’ve been working with Tempur-Pedic this year, and it’s been really fun. Note: there’s your official notice that I have this association. Now I can go on to tell you that this is one of their big selling points. They are the ones with the commercials (and funny videos on You-Tube; seriously, a lot of them, and some of them are hilarious) showing one person jumping up and down and it not bothering a glass of wine or the partner. (If you are married to a glass of wine, this could be especially important advice. Of course, you have other issues we could talk about.) Motion can really be dampened down a great deal with certain types of mattresses. By the way, Consumer Reports has great information on mattresses and what people buy and are happiest with, and it’s worth a look if you end up thinking that a new mattress is part of strategies to gain blissful sleep.

Sleep is a serious issue. It’s probably just as important for how marriages will do over time as how couples handle money. We just know more about the money stuff, but that’s only because most researchers in my field have not been paying a lot of attention to sleep. It can really pay off if two people work as a team to get the best night’s sleep possible. Sleep comes up every single day of your life. If you snooze, you lose. No, that’s not right. If you snooze, you win.

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Sleeping Better Together

As I said in my last post, some sleep experts believe that most people would sleep better if they didn’t sleep regularly with their mate. Sleeping alone may produce the best night sleep for many people. Of course, even if true, most people are not going for this. Further, research by Wendy Troxel at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that happily married women sleep best of all women.

What’s a couple to do? I have a few ideas, but first, how many couples don’t regularly sleep together? Turns out, it’s a pretty big number. The National Sleep Foundation did a national survey in 2001 and again in 2005, and found that the number of married folks who reported not regularly sleeping in the same bed as their mate jumped from 12% to 23%. If that finding is totally solid, it’s an amazing change in such a basic pattern in life. It suggests that people truly are having more sleep problems than before, and some are resorting to sleeping alone to deal with it.

Of course, some couples who are not sleeping together are probably doing so because of not getting along well together. That would be nothing new, though, and couldn’t account for the increase. Still, it’s worth pointing out that some couples sleep apart because they just want to be apart. When I was little, growing up in Kettering Ohio, there was a time when this cranky couple lived next to us. I knew that this couple had separate bedrooms. I don’t remember how I know this, because I can’t recall ever being in their home, but I did know this and I remember thinking that it was odd. But I also remember how regularly this woman yelled at one of my brothers, who, I would add, was gifted at getting her riled up. She also sneered a great deal at all of us. She was not a happy person but she was gifted at sneering. I’m not sure what was up with her, but I don’t think she was happy, nor do I think they were happy as a couple. Having separate bedrooms might have been part of the only way that their marriage could work. (One day, they were gone. We were on vacation when they moved out, and all of a sudden, a perfectly lovely and delightful, non-sneering family had moved in. Happy days.)

Back to couples and problems with sleep. What are the problems that couples who are otherwise doing fine have with sleep? There are three I’ve been thinking a lot about: tension, motion, and snoring. The way I’m using the term here, “tension” is the one that’s most related to the research my colleagues (especially Howard Markman) and I have done over the years on how couples communicate and handle conflict. What I’m talking about here is tension between partners. Sleep is something that happens best when you are relaxed and not being stimulated (well, not stimulated in a stimulating way; a great massage might help you sleep and it’s obviously a kind of stimulation). When two partners are upset with each other, they are less likely to fall asleep as quickly and sleep as soundly.

Vicious cycle time: Research shows that when people don’t sleep well on a given night, they are more irritable and negative with their partner the next day. So poor sleep leads to more negatives between partners. The bummer is that those increased negatives also make it harder to sleep the next night.

To summarize: Tension bad. Sleep good. Tension makes sleep bad. Bad sleep means more tension. Bad spiral to get into and hard spiral to get out of.


It’s very clear that sleep is related to everything about personal health and wellbeing. If you are not sleeping well, everything else in life will suffer. Everything else in life includes your marriage. There is a lot at stake with sleep problems.

Here’s some simple advice. It’s like everything else that we (my colleagues and I) recommend in our books. Take control of your conflicts and don’t let them control you. How do you take control of how conflict and tension affects your sleep? You need to decide on a plan that can help both of you to sleep better, and then stick to it. Take charge and don’t let things slide if your sleep is suffering.

Agree not to talk about issues, conflicts, or problems within two hours of the time you should be falling asleep. Just don’t let stuff come up then, and when it does, get it back on the shelf quickly. Get good at not sliding into that mode near bedtime. That also means you need to find other times to have these talks, when you are at your best, and can work together as well as possible. Otherwise, you’re just asking for these issues to come up when you happen to be together, as you near time to sleep. Sometimes sleeping well together isn’t something you can accomplish lying down.

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Sleeping Together

Okay, sorry to mislead you—not! I bet you thought this posting would be about sex, also, like the last one. It’s not. It’s actually about sleeping. You know, like being asleep through the night and all. I’m going to look at the issue of sleeping together, but not in THAT way. This is the first of several entries I make on the subject of sleep. Over the past couple of years, my colleagues and I (especially Howard Markman) have become very interested in the subject of sleep and how it affects individuals and couples. Speaking for myself, that could be because I’ve had a harder time sleeping well in the past few years.

Apparently, problems sleeping are nearly a national epidemic. In fact, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) just released the results of a huge study (based on surveying 400,000 people in the U.S.) on sleep. Overall, they estimate that about 1 in 10 people have a serious sleep problem. One of the headlines from their report is that people on the East coast (especially West Virginia) have the highest number of sleep problems and people on the West Coast have the lowest number. Remember, with research, it’s always on average. Some people in New York City, no doubt, sleep like babies and some people in California have not slept well for years and years (certainly, you’d think people in charge of the state budget there are not sleeping too well).

I have a theory. I think people on the East coast don’t sleep as well because they have to get up so much earlier than everyone else, and especially those of us out West. You know, the sun gets there a whole lot earlier than it gets to us here in Colorado; and it gets later still to the West coast. I’d hate to have the sun coming up so early every day!

Now, back to the idea of sleeping together. (Hold it a second. I hope you figured out a moment ago that there is a flaw in my reasoning about the East coast. Egads. Did some of you think I was that stupid? Or worse, did my logic about the East coast make sense to you? If so, you really ought to work on not trusting everything you read.)

Now, for some really interesting research. A sleep researcher named Dr. Neil Stanley (no relation), in England, recently caused quite a stir by recommending that people would sleep a lot better if they slept alone—as in, not sleeping with their mate. You can read more about what he said, here, courtesy of the BBC. His main point is that all kinds of sleep problems are compounded by sleeping together. Since I’ve been studying sleep issues with couples, I have come to believe that he is correct, and he is backed up by numerous solid studies on sleep. A number of studies show that behaviors of one partner will negatively affect the other’s sleep, especially things like snoring and tossing and turning.

While I believe this other Dr. Stanley is correct in the basics, I’m not buying into the idea that most partners should sleep apart. Most people aren’t going to follow his advice. It is true that sleep problems are compounded between partners, and women are particularly affected by this. A lot of the sleep problems women have are related to snoring or restless husbands (actually, it’s more often the wife who is “restless”). Men snore more and that makes it harder for women to sleep well.

Here’s a really interesting fact. People think they sleep better when sleeping with their partner, but it’s not true based on some pretty strong studies. If you go to the BBC link earlier, note the comment by Dr. Robert Meadows near the end of the article. I’ve looked at the studies that back this point up, and they are impressive.

Where does that leave sleeping together? It’s complicated. People think they sleep better sleeping together, but many don’t. Sleep problems like snoring, or having one partner toss and turn a lot, makes these dynamics much more of a concern. Women, especially, value sleeping with their man in terms of emotional comfort, but studies also show that women pay the greater price in terms of their own sleep quality. (Remember, “on average” okay?)

I’ve been doing something particularly fun this year. I’ve been consulting for the mattress company, Tempur-Pedic, about sleep issues with couples. I’ve enjoyed this immensely. Their interest in having me give them input was perfectly timed with my own growing interest in the topic of sleep and how it affects couples. Given my growing interests, and my consulting role for Tempu-Pedic (paid, by the way), I’ve been thinking a lot about simple things couples can do to improve their quality of sleep. I’ll share some of those things in the next post or two.

Sweet dreams. (I better expand that a tad: May you have wonderful dreams that you are perfectly unaware of. Research (at least as of some years ago) shows that we only remember dreams if we wake up during them. If you regularly have vivid, clearly remembered dreams, it probably means you are waking up a lot, not that you are dreaming more than anyone else.)

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