The Gender Factor

                                                                                  
     Love-shyness can be found among people of all ages and of both
sexes.  However, research evidence indicates that the problem impacts
far more severely upon males than it does upon females.  Women who
remain love-shy throughout lengthy periods of their lives usually adapt
very well and often quite happily to their situations. Spinsters, for exam-
ple, often become highly successful career women. The never-married
woman typically goes through life with fewer mental and physical health
problems than her married sister of the same age. In stark contrast, the
never-married, heterosexually inactive man has long been known to be
vulnerable to all manner of quite serious and often bizarre pathologies.
     Data recently obtained by Stanford University researcher Paul Pil-
konis strongly suggests that shy women are no more likely to be neurotic
than non-shy women. This same study, on the other hand, found shy
men to be far more likely than non-shy men to be suffering from very
severe neurotic conditions. In American society some degree of shyness
is considered tolerable and even quite socially acceptable in females. In
males of all ages from kindergarten through all the years of adulthood,
in contrast, shyness is widely viewed as very deviant and highly unde-
sirable. Moreover, shyness in males inspires bullying, hazing, dispar-
aging labeling, discrimination, etc. In females shyness is often looked
upon as being "pleasantly feminine" and "nice".
     The biggest and most consequential difference in the way shyness
impacts upon the two genders has to do with the strong social require-
ment prescribing that males must assume the assertive role in all manner of
social situations. This same norm proscribes males from assuming the
passive role. Today most women have the option of being either assertive
or passive. And whereas the normally assertive woman has been found
by researchers to stand a better chance at happiness and adjustment
than the chronically passive one, the occasional display of passivity
rarely causes a woman to suffer highly disparaging or punitive reactions
from others.
      Hence, shyness in women is very rarely found to be coterminus
with love-shyness. In other words, extremely few shy women are also
love-shy. The best available evidence clearly indicates that shy women
are just/as likely as non-shy women to date, to get married, and to have
children.
      In short, shyness does not force women to remain against their
wills in the "single, never married" category, as it often does with men.
In essence, because love-shyness (not shyness itself) is very rare among
women, this book and the research it incorporates will focus exclusively
upon men.
      In order to avoid misunderstanding I want to stress the fact that
both sexes do suffer from general shyness about equally. Moreover, there
are many different kinds of situations in which shyness is a real problem
for some women. However, a young woman's shyness vis-a-vis the
opposite sex is permitted by our cultural norms to dissipate and fade
away. Because women are not required to initiate informal conversations
with men, or even with members of their own sex, their future prospects
and chances in terms of dating, courtship and marriage are in no way
hampered by any psychoemotional inability (shyness) on their part to
initiate informal conversations with men. Further, the fact that a wom-
an's success with her all-female peer group is far less dependent upon
competitive effectiveness than is a young man's success with his all-male
peer group, assures most women (including very passive ones) of mean-
ingful friendships and of some opportunities for meeting eligible men
through female friends.
      Many studies have convincingly documented the point that men
are far more susceptible than women to severe and intractable love-
shyness. For example, in a 1983 study which incorporated a large sample
of university students, sociologists David Knox and Kenneth Wilson
obtained strong support for the view that love-shyness is primarily a
male problem. Fully 20 percent of the male students surveyed com-
plained of painful feelings of shyness vis-a-vis the opposite sex in infor-
mal social situations. Less than 5 percent of the women students had a
similar complaint. And very few of this small minority of women stu-
dents suffered emotionally from their shyness vis-a-vis the opposite sex
to the debilitating extent to which the male love-shys suffered from their
shyness.
       A seldom mentioned factor which I believe serves to increase the
 shyness (and diminish the self-confidence) of young men as compared
 to that of young women is the fact that women do the lion's share of the
 rejecting in male/female relationships. Within marriage, 90 percent of
 all divorces are sought by wives and not by husbands. And among
 courting couples at least two-thirds of all of the break*ups which occur
 are precipitated by the female partner, not by the male partner. In a well-
 known 1976 study by sociologists Charles Hill, Letitia Peplau, and Zick
 Rubin, most of the terminated "steady dating" relationships had been
 terminated by the girl, not by the boy.
       Even normally self-confident men have been found to suffer far
 more than women when courtship relationships are terminated. Yet
 most young men are forced to suffer far more such relationship break-
 ups than women. Such broken relationships very often take a severe
 emotional toll upon many of the men who suffer them. It is often for-
 gotten that males are human beings with feelings too, every bit as much
 as females. Yet the relationship terminations which men are forced to
 endure often create large-scale and often dangerous emotional upheav-
 als; and some victims of such persistent rejection eventually become so
 emotionally scarred and calloused that they become incapable of express-
 ing their feelings, even to themselves. Women often complain that men
 cannot express their feelings in a meaningful way; yet the steady stream
of rejections which some men suffer at the hands of women often creates
a trained incapacity for the expression of inner feelings.
      It is also important to note that even normally adjusted young men
experience significantly fewer serious man/woman relationships before
marriage than (even very average) young women do. And I think this
too bespeaks some of the serious shortcomings in contemporary court-
ship norms. Human beings do not like to be rejected. It can be extremely
painful when a person is rejected by an opposite-sexed stranger upon
asking for a date. And it can be profoundly devastating to the emotions
when a man is rejected by a woman with whom he has maintained a
relationship over several months or longer. Why does the American
culture persist in requiring the male (not the female) to withstand the
lion's share of such emotional devastation?! I would suggest that the
severe emotional scars endemic in severe and intractable love-shyness
very often reflect a history of such rejection. In essence, the risk-taking
involved in starting new relationships must be shared equally by women
and men alike.