The Couples Gender-Based Questionnaire (CGQ): 33 Relationship Considerations
By: Daniel Eckstein, Pat Love, Kristen J. Aycock, & Victor Wiesner
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Abstract
Thirty-three research-referenced gender differences are explored by means of a couple’s gender-based questionnaire (CGQ). Couples take the questionnaire individually and then collaboratively choose one answer relative to whether each statement is more characteristics of males, females, or of both genders. A review of gender-related literature follows. Implications and applications to the couple themselves conclude the article.
The Couples Gender-Based Questionnaire (CGQ): 33 Relationship Considerations
Since 1993 the first author has written a quarterly column in the Family Journal called “For Couples.” It features interviews and questionnaires that couples can complete and discuss together for relationship renewal. All columns have been organized according to the following four ways Jay Haley (1980) suggests in systematically accessing couples relationships, those being: personality differences, role perceptions, communication skills, and problem-solving methods.
The present article introduces the Couples Gender-Based Questionnaire (CGQ) which has been developed by the authors. The purpose is for couples to explore role perceptions based on some research involving gender differences. While no individual man or women will fit all the generalizations, an understanding of basic gender differences can help better create an awareness of some different ways of experiencing and of being in the world.
Process
Below is a gender-based questionnaire established on current research (see Figure 1). There are a total of 33 items. Each of you will individually read each stem, then answer the statement with an M if you think it is more characteristic of males, an F if it is more characteristic of females, and a B if you think the statement is equally true of both males and females. In Figure 2, the reference for the research is cited after each statement in parentheses along with the answers later in the article. (No peeking please!)
After you have individually answered the items then compare your responses to those of your partner. See if you can by discussion and by consensus then come up with an agreed upon best answer to each item. Making an item fit one of the other partners is not the goal of the activity, nor is a superiority-inferior implication due to one or the other of you having more right answers. Rather, an understanding of some basic gender differences that may or not be true of either of you personally is helpful in understanding and respecting basic gender-based differences. After you have taken the questionnaire individually and then discussed and agreed (or agreed to disagree on an item), then read the brief theory input. That will be followed by a presentation of the actual answers. You will then score the items; finally you will be invited to discuss the implications for your own relationship.
Review of Literature
It is important to note that in this article gender-based differences are based on normative male-female statistics. Any individual man or woman may not fit a particular gender generalization, but from the classic “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus” metaphor introduced by Gray (1992) to the contemporary research-based work of Love and Stonsy (2007), there are nonetheless some gender-based generalizations that can be made. Before exploring a more formal representative literature review, there is a lighter side to the “battle of the sexes.”
Gender Humor: Why Men and Women Can’t Communicate- The Humor of Wiley Miller.
Here are some observations relating to the classic line spoken by Paul Newman to the warden in the movie Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” In the Non Sequitur (Cartoon Strip) distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, Miller cites such gender-based communication as:
What he heard from wife-
Your right to independent thought and ability to form an opinion has been revoked.
What she said in marriage vows-
I do.
Syndicated on 2-2-04
What he heard from wife-
Honey, why don’t you put your head in a vise and I’ll turn the handle until your skull explodes?
What she said-
Honey, why don’t we turn off the TV and just talk?
Syndicated on 2-1-04
What she heard-
Life as we know it will cease to exist unless you can alter the space-time continuum.
What he said-
Honey…are you almost ready yet?
Syndicated on 1-31-04
What she heard-
Anything less than absolute perfection means an utter failure as a wife and mother.
What he said-
Mom is coming over for dinner.
Syndicated on 1-30-04
What she heard-
You’re way too stupid to be trusted driving alone in bad weather.
What he said-
Drive carefully, dear.
Syndicated on 1-25-04
Gender Differences
Love (2007) identifies important gender differences impacting relationships. Men have an instinct to provide and to protect. Males hone their survival skills by competing, ordering, directing, confronting, doing, bragging, and threatening. When a man cannot provide and protect, he usually feels inadequate and shameful.
Conversely, women have an instinct to tend and to befriend. When in conflict females usually have feelings of stress, upset, and fear. For women, connecting via talking activates pleasure centers in the female brain. Sharing relationship information gives a dopamine and oxytocin rush. Oxytocin is a chemical that facilitates bonding and pleasurable feelings. Females experience an oxytocin rush from gazing, positive emotional interaction, kissing, and having an orgasm (Love, 2007, pg. 1-2). Physiologically when oxytocin and dopamine are high, loving circuits are activated but at the same time caution and aversion circuits are shut off. Such hormone surges make the female brain more sensitive to emotional nuances. When a woman can connect, she feels fear; that in turn makes her want to move closer to her partner or to someone else. Conversely, when a man feels shame, he usually wants to move away.
During stress, oxytocin is released in both men and women. With this in mind, people should connect with each other during stressful situations. As previously noted, this is largely true for women. In men, however, the concurrent release of androgens blocks oxytocin’s effects, resulting in the activation of the fight-or-flight stress response. As mothers have been the primary caretakers for children throughout our evolutionary history, it is adaptive for women to connect with their children when danger presents; this allows mothers to protect their children (Taylor, 2002).
Humans’ biological underpinnings have implications for communication styles. When women encounter relationship stress, they are more likely to seek social support. This social support is often in the form of their partners. Because men do not feel the effects of oxytocin during stress, in relationships they are more likely to withdraw rather than to seek connection with their partners.
Compassion for each other’s vulnerabilities is a major antidote to the temptations of infidelity. Basic cooperation requires respect for differences in gender roles. Actual physical contact alleviates fear and pain. According to Love (2007) the number one cause for divorce and/or separation is disconnection. The number one cause of disconnection is resentment; and the number one cause of resentment is withdrawal of interest. Four primary ways of loving a man include:
1.Accepting that the partner provides the meaning in a man’s life.
2.Understanding his dread of failure as a provider, protector, lover, and parent.
3.Connecting more through routine, fun activities, touch, and sex.
4.Avoiding control.
The most effective ways of connecting with a man include: sex, touch, activity, appreciation, routine—honor his routine. Men need about three times more.
The four best ways for loving a woman include:
1.Appreciating her importance to you.
2.Making an effort to understand her.
3.Avoiding controlling; protecting is fine.
4.Understanding her fears of harm, your anger, and of deprivation
The best ways for connecting with a woman include: routinely making contact with her, opening your heart to her, connecting, and keeping your thoughts and actions positive. (Love, 2007, p. 3-6).
Chemistry is mainly a function of your DNA. It has more to do with your metabolism than your personality or values. The chemical bath your brain enjoys during infatuation is a powerful regulator of fear and shame…This sharp reduction of the influence of fear and shame is why, when infatuated, you feel so confident and proud while doing things that you might otherwise find fear-involving or shameful. One reason that affairs rarely turn into viable relationships where they break up marriages is that the chemical relief from fear and shame is short-lived. (The divorce rate for affair partners who marry is 80 percent!) Once the narcotic effects of infatuation wear off, the woman is likely to feel more insecure and the man more ashamed of himself than ever. (Love, 2007, p. 89)
Here is a list of activities that cause depletion in one’s insulation from infidelity:
child involvement in too many activities (research shows that involving children in more than two activities per a week can put undue stress upon the child as well as upon the family); over-involvement with work; consumer spending; addiction to intensity; ignoring family and friends; ignoring enriching activities; spiritual neglect; and lack of physical exercise, sex, or romance (Love & Stonsy, 2007).
Women are more likely than men to make suggestions in the form of a question (Simkins-Bullok & Wildman, 1991). When conversing, men do not often interrupt other men but men interrupt women more often than women interrupt men (Coates, 1986). Women are more likely to talk about health matters or children and least about politics, religion, or finances whereas men are more likely to talk about work or sports and least likely to talk about their bodies (Walsh & Walsh, 1993).
Gender differences in patient-doctor communication were found in a study of six western European countries researching 1906 GP’s and 2812 patients. Female doctors show more affective behavior, such as empathy, partnership building, emotional support and reassurances. They also were found to encourage patients’ input through the use of concern and partnership statements. Male doctors were likely to give more interpretations and paraphrases.
Information appeared to be given more by female than male doctors, and female general practitioners were better at (therapeutic) listening and counseling. Male doctors were more likely to give more instructions, advisements, and suggestions for patient behavior, and they were more verbally dominant and imposing during the visit.
The non-verbal behavior also differed between doctors’ genders; female doctors were likely to give more in the direction of the patient, to use more back-channel (or listeners’) responses, and to smile and nod more often. Female doctors offered more options and had more time to negotiate treatment possibilities, both with male and female patients (Brink-Muinen, Dulmen, Messerli-Rohrbach, & Bensing, 2002).
Burleson (2003) found gender differences relative to relationship support and conflict management. He found that “females rated ego support skill, conflict management skill, and comforting skill as significantly more important than did males, whereas males rated narrative and persuasion skills as significantly more important than did females” (p. 6).
Weisfeld and Stack (2002) researched gender differences in forty happily-married US couples. While these couples showed no significant sex differences in marital satisfaction or in verbal statements regarding commitment, sex differences in the following nonverbal behaviors became apparent: smiling, laughing, and average length of look at spouse. The wives looked significantly longer, as if listening attentively and husbands used shorter glances at wives, suggesting a monitoring function.
Gottman (1994) concluded that distressed married couples often engage in ‘negative cascades’- patterns of reciprocal criticism and punishment that escalate until one partner is forced to withdraw. It is usually the husband who withdraws. It is the husband who experiences a stronger physiological stress pattern when the couple fights (even though the husband’s face might not show a matching emotional expression of distress, and Gottman speculates that husbands might withdraw in order to reduce the physiological burden of stress. Maccoby (1998) proposes that most men are inhibited from launching a full-scale aggressive attack against a female. Whatever the cause or causes, men show higher heart rate, respiration rate, and autonomic arousal in general than their wives do when couples are arguing, and these physiological measures of arousal are lowered when husbands turn away or leave the scene of an argument. It is the ratio of positive to negative effect expressed that is the key predictor of satisfaction in marriage (Pasupathi, Carstensen, Levenson &Gottman ,1999). Pasupathi, et al. argue that gender differences in communication styles may be both normal and expected, and that efforts to produce an androgynous matched set of communicators may not help couples in the long run.
Michaud and Warner (1997) and Basow and Rubenfeld (2003) present studies of gender differences in “troubles talk” that allegedly provide support for the different cultures thesis, that being that men and women communicate in such different ways that they should be regarded as members of different communication cultures or speech communities. However, MacGeorge confronts that suggestion by presenting both their own and three other studies suggesting that men and women provide and respond to supportive messages (“trouble talks”) in ways that are much more similar than different. They suggest that the different cultures thesis is a myth that should be discarded.
LGBT Relationships
Thus far, this article has focused on a heterosexual dyad because the majority of individuals describe themselves as heterosexual and, therefore, represent the bulk of clients presenting for counseling. Nevertheless, lesbians and gay males seek counseling at higher rates than heterosexuals (Jones & Gabriel, 1999). While there are certainly some differences between heterosexual and non-heterosexual relationships, a preponderance of research suggests that more similarities than differences exist (Alderson, 2004; Gottman, Levenson, Gross, Frederickson, McCoy, Rosenthal, Ruef, & Yoshimoto, 2003; Kurdek, 2005; Kurdek & Schmitt, 1986). Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) couples experience many of the same difficulties with communication and understanding as heterosexual couples. One factor unique to LGBT relationships is stress related to heterosexism. A common misconception of heterosexual counselors is that these social stressors lessen the quality of LGBT relationships. In fact, gay and lesbian partners share similar levels of relationship satisfaction as heterosexual partners (Kurdek & Schmitt, 1986). Nevertheless, heterosexism adds a dimension to therapy with LGBT couples.
The couples Gender-Based Gender Questionnaire (CGQ) can prove helpful to LGBT couples because biology and socialization affect all humans regardless of sexual orientation. For those of you in the LGBT, it is important to realize that throughout life, males and females receive societal messages informing them of gender-appropriate roles. For example, females may receive positive reinforcement for caretaking behaviors while males may receive positive reinforcement for aggressive behavior. Despite these messages, some individuals, regardless of sexual orientation, fall in the outer ranges of what society identifies as normal gender-typed behavior. LGBT individuals may fall outside of the average range more often than heterosexuals.
The CGQ can be modified for you LGBT couples during the processing phase to gain a better understanding of societal messages of gender-appropriate roles that correspond to or diverge from each partners’ experiences of their gender definitions. This can be a useful tool for raising awareness of areas in which heterosexist views may affect each partner’s views of himself or herself in a relationship. Additionally, it will highlight areas of resilience where you two have coped positively with discriminatory societal messages. It is important to note that this can also be applied to work with heterosexual couples as not all questions apply to each and every person of the specified gender and it is important to understand how couples approach such differences.
References
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Figure 1: The Couples Gender-Based Questionnaire CGB)
(Daniel Eckstein, Pat Love, Kristen Aycock, and Van Wiesner)
1._____ have an instinct to provide and protect.
2._____ have an instinct to bend and to befriend.
3.The _____ brain has outstanding verbal agility and the ability to connect deeply in friendships.
4.Contact lowers fear in _____.
5.When a _____ feels shame, he/she wants to move away.
6.In _____, conflict creates a feeling of stress, upset, and fear.
7.Listening with both sides of the brain makes _____ better at multi-tasking.
8._____ have a larger area of the brain for navigation skills.
9._____ are better at focusing on a specific task.
10._____ have more sensitive hearing especially in the range where language exists.
11.Effective communication for _____ involves understanding motivation.
12.During marital conflict, _____’s heart rate and blood pressure will rise significantly more than _____’s.
13.Feeling needed motivates and empowers _____.
14.Advice-giving responses to stressful situations often leave _____ feeling unsupported.
15.For _____, sudden changes in the environment lead to an emotional response.
16.Connection reduces fear and shame for _____.
17.On a typical day _____ speaks 6,000-8,000 words.
18.Constructive communication is related to marital satisfaction in _____.
19._____ hone their survival skills by competing, ordering, and directing.
20.The best ways to connect with a _____ includes sex, touch, activity, appreciation, and honoring their routine.
21.Stress hormone cortical blocks oxytocin’s action in the _____ brain.
22.Warm partner contact is related to lower blood pressure in _____.
23.During marital conflict, _____’s heart rate and blood pressure significantly rises.
24.Because more brain area is devoted to spatial relations, _____ are better able to parallel park successfully on the first try.
25.When under stress, the hormone androgen reduces oxytocin’s action in the _____ brain.
26.Gazing, positive emotional interaction, kissing, and orgasms’ create a _____ dopamine and oxytocin rush.
27.Being able to step into your partner’s shoes when they’re in distress increases relationship satisfaction for _____.
28.When oxytocin and dopamine are high, loving circuits are activated and caution and aversion circuits are shut off in _____.
29.When a _____ cannot provide and protect, there is a feeling of inadequate and of shame.
30.To love a _____, connect through routine, fun activities, touch, and sex.
31.The number one cause for divorce and/or separation is disconnection for _____.
32.Feeling needed motivates and empowers _____.
33.The deepest form of intimacy is beyond words for _____.
Figure 2: Questionnaire Answers
In the spirit of equity the 33 items of the CGB include 11 each for males and females.
1.Males (Love & Stonsy, 2007)
2.Females (Love & Stonsy, 2007)
3.Females (Love & Stonsy, 2007)
4.Both (Love & Stonsy, 2007)
5.Males (Love, 2007)
6.Females (Love, 2007)
7.Females (Lytle & Lytle, 2006)
8.Males (Lytle & Lytle, 2006)
9.Males (Lytle & Lytle, 2006)
10.Females (Lytle & Lytle, 2006)
11.Both (Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradley, 2007)
12. Females (Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001)
13. Males (Gray, 1992)
14. Females (Tannen, l990)
15. Both (Gongaoy, Campos, & Bradley, 2007)
16. Both (Grewen, 2007)
17. Female (Lytle & Lytle, 2006)
18. Both (Christensen, Eldridge, & Catta-Preta, 2006)
19. Males (Love, 2007)
20. Males (Love, 2007)
21. Females (Love, 2007)
22. Both (Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradley, 2007)
23. Females (Christensen, Eldridge, & Catta-Preta, 2006)
24. Males (Lytle & Lytle, 2006)
25. Males (Taylor, 2002)
26. Females (Love, 2007)
27. Both (Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradley, 2007)
28. Females (Love, 2007)
29. Males (Love, 2007)
30. Males (Love, 2007)
31. Both (Love, 2007)
32. Males (Gray, 1992)
33. Both (Love, 2007)
©Copyright 2008 by Victor Wiesner. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry.
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