Secrets of the Male Psyche

Make of this what you will, but our friends at the Daily Mail report this morning that when a man is involved in a relationship with a woman he will be demoralized by her success. If a woman is involved in a relationship with a man she will be thrilled by his success.

Apparently, the difference between the sexes is not so easy to overcome.

Take a normal couple, husband and wife. If the woman succeeds the man thinks less of himself. If the man succeeds the woman thinks more of herself.

Subconsciously, he reads her success as a sign of his inadequacy. She reads his success as a sign of her success.

As it happens, if you ask the men how they feel about their female partners’ success, they will respond positively. But when researchers measured these men’s subconscious reactions, they discovered that the men were, effectively, lying to themselves. Apparently, the workings of the male psyche are occasionally hidden from men themselves.

The Daily Mail reports:

Men feel worse about themselves when their female partners succeed, according to a new report. 

Men’s subconscious self-esteem is related to their female partners' successes and failures, the study showed.

However, the same does not ring true for women - they do thrive in the shadow of a successful husband.

It made some sense that a man would feel despondent if he lost out to a woman when both were working on the same task.  The researchers expected that a man would feel demoralized when his partner beat him in a competition. But, they were surprised to see that men subconsciously think less of themselves when their wives succeed at tasks in which the men have little interest.

I assume that the validity of the studies depends on which tasks we are talking about.

A study of Dutch men and women compared the two situations: a woman succeeding at a task where the man had participated and a woman succeeding at a task where the man had not. They wanted to measure the effect of success or failure on relationships. They reached this conclusion:

In one study, participants were told to think of a time when their partner succeeded or failed at something at which they had succeeded or failed. 

When comparing all the results, the researchers found that it didn’t matter if the achievements or failures were social, intellectual or related to participants’ own successes or failures - men subconsciously still felt worse about themselves when their partner succeeded than when she failed. 

However, men’s implicit self-esteem took a bigger hit when they thought about a time when their partner succeeded at something while they had failed.

Researchers also looked at how relationship satisfaction affected self-esteem. 

Women in these experiments reported feeling better about their relationship when they thought about a time their partner succeeded  than when they thought about a time when their partner failed, but men did not.

We will offer some reservations here. One finds it difficult to imagine, despite the study's conclusion, that a woman’s success as hostess of a dinner party will lower a man’s self-esteem. Or that a man will feel worse about his marriage if his wife is a great mother.

On the other hand if a woman decides to work harder and to gain more career success because she does not want to depend on her husband for support, one accepts that he will feel that she is telling the world that he is inadequate.

At some level and to some extent, the male psyche is hard wired to see his woman’s success as a sign of his own inadequacy. A woman who succeeds, who can provide for herself will be depriving him of a vital male function: protector and provider.

Does this make him feel like less of a man? To some extent, it does.

One wonders whether the results are different between men who are very successful and men who are not. How does Tom Brady feel about Gisele’s success? How does he feel about the fact that she earned more than he did last year?

The results tell us that, for example, girls who outperform boys in school are not putting themselves on a relationship track. It suggests that women who follow Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and “lean in” to career success will be demoralizing their husbands and probably damaging their relationships. How many men would really want to be married to Sheryl Sandberg.

Take the situation in schools, where girls are clearly doing better than boys. Are the underachieving and outperformed boys more likely to feel hostile to their female competition? Are they more likely to act abusively toward these girls?

If the dating culture is dead and if many of the most successful college women are most prone to engage in hookups, are they thereby paying a price for their academic success?

[Addendum: For those who prefer to get their news from New York Magazine, here's a story about the study, published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.]