GREENER PASTURES: Men, Women, and Stress

Men and women react differently to stress. So finds a new research study by six psychologists from UCLA. Since the 1930s, psychologists have assumed that both sexes reacted to acute stress with the “fight or flight” response, in which the body prepares either to rebuff or run from a perceived challenge or threat.

According to the observations of this study, however, women typically operate under a different kind of biological mandate, which the psychologists termed “tend and befriend.” As stress intensifies, women are inclined to protect and nurture their children, and to seek supportive connections with other women – hence, to “tend and befriend.”

This appears to be a primal and effective adaptive behavior which increases the likelihood that the children of the woman who tends and befriends will survive that crisis. It looks like there is even a physiological basis for this behavior, in the form of a potent hormone called “oxytocin,” generated deep in the brain and dispensed by the pituitary gland.

While both men and women secret oxytocin, which produces a calming effect, apparently male sexual hormones diminish its effects, whereas female hormones enhance them.

After analyzing 200 studies of stress behavior and physiology conducted since 1985, the UCLA team concluded that, “the desire to affiliate with others” during stress is the “primary gender difference in adult human behavioral responses to stress.”

This study has profound implications for man-woman relationships. While women are quite capable of fighting or fleeing, and men of tending and befriending, it helps to explain difficulties in resolving marital conflicts. Men and women tend to react differently to stress, and differently toward each other during stress.

Why would men tend to react with the “fight or flight” response to stress? Perhaps because that has been as biologically effective for men as the “tend and befriend” has been for women. Men have long served as hunters and warriors. The man’s primary mission has been to live to fight another day, if possible; and to insure the survival of wife and children, of his clan or group, if necessary. Whereas the woman’s primary mission has been to perpetuate the life and well-being of her children, if possible; and to fight only if necessary. In the latter case, women have learned the value of fighting as a team.

What this means for a couple under marital stress, is that the man has to overcome his biological imperative either to fight or to withdraw. Neither alternative will resolve the conflict, neither is adaptive for marriage. Here the woman has the distinct biological advantage of already being prepared to tend to the relationship and to remain connected, or get reconnected to the man. The woman has millennia of relational tending working for her.

I have seen many men withdraw, while their women desperately reached out to reconnect. I have also seen many men react offensively or defensively to their women. I have told them not to turn their pain into anger – which perpetuates the maladaptive fight mentality – but to let their pain remain pain. When a man shares his pain with his woman, it well-nigh invariably draws her to him, to nurture and connect.