palakon pe reh agye

"Anything you say, dear"? That was the sound bite that some members of the media used, erroneously, to sum up my study on accepting influence. It was parodied on Saturday Night Live, pilloried by Rush Limbaugh, and picked on by Bill Ma her, the host of Politically Incorrect. I got the biggest chuckle from one newspaper cartoon that depicted Saddam Hussein's wife asking him to take out the garbage and him refusing until she held a machine gun to his head and he finally said, "Yes, dear." 101 Our study didn't really find that men should give up all of their personal power and let their wives rule their lives. But we did find that the happiest, most stable marriages in the long run were those where the husband treated his wife with respect and did not resist power sharing and decision making with her. When the couple disagreed, these husbands actively searched for common ground rather than insisting on getting their way. To arrive at these findings, we looked intently at what happened when these newlyweds discussed an area of conflict and also when they talked about the history of their romance. When we analyzed the data, we were struck by a significant gender difference. Although the wives would sometimes express anger or other negative emotions toward their husbands, they rarely responded to their husbands by increasing the negativity. Most of them either tried to tone it down or matched it. So if a husband said, "You're not listening to me!" the wife would usually say something like "Sorry, I'm listening now" (a repair that tones down the negativity) or "I'm finding it hard to listen to you!" which matched her husband's anger but didn't go beyond it. But 65 percent of the men did not take either of these approaches. Instead, their response escalated their wives' negativity. They did this in a very specific way: by trotting out one of the four horsemen (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling). If the wife of one of these men said, "You're not listening to me!" the husband would either ignore her (stonewall), be defensive ("Yes, I am!"), be critical ("I don't listen because what you say never makes any sense"), or be contemptuous ("Why waste my time?"). Using one of the four horsemen to escalate a conflict is a telltale sign that a man is resisting his wife's influence. Rather than acknowledging his wife's feelings, this husband is using the four horsemen to drown her out, to obliterate her point of view. This is the opposite of accepting her influence. One way or another, this approach leads to instability in the marriage. Even if the husband doesn't react this way very often, there's an 81 percent chance that his marriage will be damaged. 102 Although it is always important for both husband and wife to try to keep the four horsemen from taking over in times of conflict, it is especially important that men be aware of the danger to their marriage when they use one of them to escalate the negativity. For some reason, when a wife uses the four horsemen in the same manner, the marriage does not become more unstable. At this point, the data do not offer an explanation for this disparity. But we know that as a general rule women do accept influence from their husbands, which may help to explain the gender differences in our findings. So although it certainly makes sense for both partners to avoid escalating conflicts in this way the bottom line is that husbands put their marriage at added risk when they do. Signs of resistance I've met enough angry husbands and sparred with enough angry radio talk show hosts to know that some men are quite up front in their refusal to share power with their wives. Even in these days of gender equity there are still husbands who simply refuse to consider any opinions their wives air, and never take their feelings or ideas into account when making decisions. Some men claim that religious conviction requires them to be in control of their marriages and, by extension, their wives. But there's no religion I know of that says a man should be a bully. I am not advocating a particular spiritual belief system about the roles of men and women. Our research has included couples who believe the man should be the head of the family as well as couples who hold egalitarian viewpoints. In both kinds of marriages, emotionally intelligent husbands have figured out the one big thing: how to convey honor and respect. All spiritual views of life are consistent with loving and honoring your spouse. And that's what accepting influence is all about. After all, do you really want to make decisions that leave your wife feeling disrespected? Is that really consistent with religious beliefs? It is not. This was brought home to me by a colleague, Dana Kehr, who is a Mormon bishop. Traditional Mormon doctrine exalts patriarchy. 103 It holds that the husband should make all decisions for the family. But Kehr and his wife have an emotionally intelligent marriage. Kehr says he sees no conflict between his beliefs and accepting influence from his wife. He told me, "I wouldn't think about making a decision she disagreed with. That would be very disrespectful. We talk and talk about it till we both agree, and then I make the decision." Kehr intuitively realizes that a marriage can't work unless both partners honor and respect each other. That's true whatever your belief system. In many cases, I suspect, men who resist letting their wives influence them are not even aware of this tendency. There are men who consider themselves feminists who interact with their wives in ways that belie this label. Case in point: a hardworking software engineer named Chad. If you asked him in the abstract his view on gender roles, he'd come out squarely on the side of a fifty-fifty marriage. But that's not what was playing out in the new home into which he and his wife Martha just moved. One night he announced that he would have to work late that Thursday Martha reminded him that her mother was coming to visit on Friday and that she was counting on him to help her clean the house and get the guest room ready. "I'm really upset with you," Martha said bluntly. "Don't you remember that my mother is coming? Why can't you shift your schedule around?" "Why didn't you remember I have this big project due? There's no way I can change my schedule. I have to work--maybe even the entire weekend," said Chad. His response upped the ante. First he was defensive--instead of responding to Martha's complaint, he volleyed back a complaint of his own: Why didn't she remember his schedule? Then he threatened her by suggesting that he would have to work even more than he had initially said. This was really a kind of belligerence. He goaded her in "here's mud in your eye" style. Martha became furious. She called him a lot of unfortunate names and stormed out of the room. Chad felt like he had just been victimized. After all, he had to work. As usual, her fury seemed to 104 have come out of nowhere. His heart started racing, and his head was pounding. He had become flooded, which made it difficult to think about the problem clearly or come up with a solution. All he wanted was to escape from his wife's unfair, irrational attitude. He certainly wasn't in the mood to find a compromise.