Psychology, Evolution & Gender

4.2 August 2002 pp. 149172

Women in love and men at work

The evolving heterosexual couple?

Angie Burns
Staffordshire University

Abstract
Heterosexual love is often assumed to be intimacy between two very
differently gendered beings. This paper focuses on how gender difference
is constructed in relation to love and emotionality in intimate
relationships by juxtaposing evolutionary psychological approaches with a
narrative, social constructionist and feminist approach. Evolutionary
theory, in its most common form, supports notions of natural
differences, with love for children and partner seen as part of maximizing
the reproduction of genes. In contrast, social constructionists call into
question the naturalness of any such notions by highlighting how they
are continually reproduced through currently available linguistic resources
and narratives. From this perspective, the experience of, and emotional
approach to, heterosexual love is constrained by the stories able to speak
or write of them. After outlining these different perspectives, this paper
contributes to the debate on gender and emotion by analysing twenty-two
in-depth, one-to-one interviews with women and men about their most
important intimate relationships and love. It argues that, in talking of
intimate heterosexual relationships, pervasive assumptions of gender
differences endure in the stereotypic form of emotional female care-giver
and rational male worker. This paper raises questions the implications of
such a gender status quo for heterosexual coupledom and thus offers a
critique of research and theory which reify such differences.

Keywords: emotion, gender, discourse, love, intimate heterosexual

relationships
Psychology, Evolution & Gender
ISSN 1461-6661 print/ISSN 1470-1073 online 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/1461666031000063629

150 Angie Burns

Introduction

We hear about love from many sources, within and without the discipline
of Psychology. It is often assumed to be intimacy and attachment between
two very differently gendered beings. Fictional and factual accounts of
intimate heterosexual relationships ubiquitously depict women who want
love and men who want sex and have problems committing and giving
love (e.g., Duncombe and Marsden 1995; Jackson 1993; Wetherell 1995).
This paper discusses love, emotion and gender by juxtaposing evolutionary
psychological approaches with a narrative, social constructionist and feminist approach. Both an evolutionary and social constructionist perspective
offer theories at a social/societal level to explain constraints on individual
behaviour. But evolutionary psychology is often characterized as seeking
truth rather than engaging in politics (Campbell 2002) while most social
constructionists aim to be political in the sense of challenging truth claims
which support inequality by encouraging our complicity (e.g., Smith 1990).
The paper then contributes to theory and research in this area, by drawing
on the authors own investigation of the social construction of love and
emotion in heterosexual relationships. In doing so, it raises questions about,
and sheds some light on, the form of heterosexual coupledom which is built
on the notions of the emotional woman and the unemotional man.
Evolutionary approaches to love and intimate relationships

Common knowledge of falling in love tends to assume there are essential

gender differences underlying (hetero)sexual attraction and sexual reproduction (e.g., Buss and Schmitt 1993). When love is grounded in sexual
and reproductive imperatives, it becomes explainable in biological and
sociobiological or evolutionary terms as part of mate selection and parental
investment. Evolutionary theorists empirically test models of universal
human behaviour which are based on the understanding that current social
arrangements, such as mating and parenting, are the result of successful
evolutionary strategies (e.g., Archer 2001; Buss and Schmitt 1993). If our
behaviour mimics the hypothesized behaviour of our hominid ancestors on
the Stone Age plain, then it is seen to be adaptive. For instance, on the basis
of survey statistics, when men claim to be more unfaithful than women, this
has been taken to be a consequence of both natural selection and natural
male and female behaviours based on differential reproductive strategies
available to women and men (e.g., Buss, Larsen, Westen and Semmelroth
1992; Fisher 1992).
From an evolutionary perspective, love cements pair bonding and
promotes the survival of offspring. The underlying mechanisms of human
mating are seen to be women seeking resource providers, and men seeking

Women in love and men at work 151

attractive, caring and healthy females to bear and raise babies carrying his
genes (e.g., Buss and Schmitt 1993). Fathering and mothering are thus
often taken to follow from different emotional responses to provide and
to care respectively (Campbell 2002). Recently, gendered motivational
responses to stress have been theorized and investigated, leading to claims
of a tend and befriend instinct more common in females (both rats and
people) to complement the better known fight or flight instinct, more
associated with males (Taylor 2002). This gender difference is taken
as adaptive, for a man can impregnate many women to spread his genes
and not stick around, where a woman is more limited in the number of
children she can bear because of the length of the gestation period. The
tend and befriend instinct gels with the notion of a maternal drive to stay
with children, while male parental investment is seen as much less certain,
often no more than ensuring his partners sexual fidelity and thus her childs
paternity. In practice, evolutionary theory has thus often functioned
to explain what is taken to be normal gendered behaviour, which, in turn,
has tended to justify mens choices (rather than womens) to be, or not to
be, involved parents or committed partners.
Some evolutionary psychologists, however, have been attempting to
avoid these phallocentric leanings. Evolutionary psychology can and has
explained that it is women who choose their partners, and that women are
very likely to be unfaithful to maximize the quality of the sperm to fertilize
their eggs (Wright 1995). It seems to tell us more about our current social
arrangements that such hypotheses and empirical findings do not appear
to have been taken up as widely as those which support a gender status
quo on men want sex and women want love lines. Highlighting a tend and
befriend instinct is intended to help us recognize that focusing on fight
or flight has been somewhat androcentric, but this may still feed into the
reification of emotional gender differences built on factual biological
mechanisms.
Though Evolutionary Psychology attempts to explicate how these sorts
of unconscious instincts underpin gendered human desire and behaviour,
it cannot claim that genetic inheritance explains all behaviour. Far from it,
because it is adaptation to changing environments which is the crucial
mechanism of evolution. However, the long time scale involved in evolutionary adaptation, means that evolutionary strategies seem so focused
on the hunter (man)/gatherer (woman) model, that cultural variability is
underplayed (Angier 1999). When cultural variability is considered, rather
different stories of adaptation can be told, such as that of high male parental
investment (Campbell 2002; Wright 1995). Nevertheless, this does not
seem to stem the continual reiteration of gender difference, and it is the
concern of social constructionists that these reiterations and reifications
underpin constraints on behaviour. For an evolutionary psychologist (e.g.,

152 Angie Burns

Campbell 2002) gender stereotypes proceed from gender difference. For

social constructionists and many feminist researchers, stereotypes drive
gender difference. This is not to assert that there are no differences, only that
we cannot straightforwardly assess them, because they are socially mediated
through language and social interaction. This means that psychological
research which assumes biological or genetic causes of gender difference
reproduces a gender status quo with women usually assumed as deficient
in relation to men (Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1994; Hyde 1994). Traditionally, in the West, this has allowed men more privileged access to paid
work and leisure while women were kept busy at home.
In relation to love and intimacy, an evolutionary framework has led to
experiments to quantify emotional gender differences, especially in relation
to infidelity. Participants are commonly asked to choose one of two options
pre-selected by researchers, or their physiological responses to different
scenarios are measured and compared. For instance, when asked to decide
which would be most upsetting, a scenario representing sexual infidelity or
one representing emotional infidelity (Wiederman and Kendall 1999),
women were more likely to find emotional infidelity more upsetting and
men sexual infidelity. In operationalizing the variables in this way, these
sorts of studies reproduce the gender stereotypes of women as emotional and
men as sexual. Though evolutionary psychologists are more concerned with
the propagation of genes than the individual satisfaction of lovers, their
assumptions impact on the latter.
In an example concerned with love and gender differences, Hendrick
and Hendrick (1995) predicted, from an evolutionary perspective, that
women would link love with aspects of relationships such as investment
and satisfaction, while men would link love to sex. In comparison with
their male participants, the women reported that love was more important
to them, that they were more deeply in love and that they were more likely
to be in love. However, though men reported having had more sexual
partners than women, they also said they had been in love more times,
with more romantic partners, than women. These were not the clearcut gender differences in orientations to love and sex which Hendrick
and Hendrick had predicted, so, in an additional exploration, they asked
psychology students to write accounts of a romantic relationship. They
found that sex was rated as most appropriate as part of the development
of a relationship by both men and women. Since again this did not fit with
the Hendrickss hypotheses, they were attributed to the instructions given
to participants.
This particular work exemplifies a reluctance to question theoretical
models when researchers fail to find the emotional gender differences they
expected. Though the researchers conceded that men and women were more
similar than different, their research remained framed by a search for gender

Women in love and men at work 153

difference. Mainstream psychologists seem rarely interested in those who do

not match up to their hypothesized model. But parading their own
assumptions of normative gendered human behaviour, couched in a
language of scientific rationality, is bad science.
A very different way of approaching love, emotion and gender is to
conceptualize them as gaining their meanings from the narratives within
which they are invoked. When gender is taken not as an attribute but as a
system of meanings, we can deconstruct those meanings in order to understand how differences are created, and question the potential consequences
of accepting these differences as factual. An evolutionary approach
reproduces its own meta-narrative of love and emotional gender differences,
and though the meta-narrative outlined here may seem like a simplification
of some of the work being done within evolutionary psychology, the
underlying assumptions of gender difference, driven by unconscious
instincts to reproduce, remain. More challenging and sophisticated work
may be being undertaken in its name, but evolutionary psychology still
tends to reify gender differences. In the next section I will outline the
narrative of romantic love, and its inscriptions of gender difference, more
familiar in fictional and media representations of love.
Narratives of love

Some psychologists take storytelling to be the most important way in

which human beings make sense of their own lives and the lives of other
people (McAdams 1995). From a postmodern perspective, identities
and personal experience are understood and reproduced in relation to
the cultural narratives we have available, so romance reading, or more
general knowledge of romantic stories, may be a powerful force in shaping
heterosexual relationships, sex, love and gendered desire. Averill (1985)
demonstrated very effectively how a story describing a traditional whirlwind
romance acted as a cultural exemplar. Many of his participants claimed it
was very like their own love story, even when their stories seemed to share
little detail in common with Averills example.
Western romantic narratives, from their beginnings in twelfth-century
French literary work (Belsey 1994), have tended to reproduce the notion
of an all-consuming and idealistic love built around the stereotypic passive
woman and active man. Though love may be his quest, it is her emotions
which tend to drive the story. Even in more modern fictional romances,
her life story is still dominated by the possibility of their union and her
future happy-ever-after, where his life is not so constrained (e.g., Wetherell
1995).
The power of the traditional love story has generated criticism from
feminists who explain that the desire for romantic union has masked the

154 Angie Burns

likelihood of a far from rosy future for married women. Where Cinderella
was released from domestic slavery by her prince, real womens investment
in love and romance have been seen to lead to domestic servitude rather than
happy-ever-afterness (e.g., Greer 1970; Firestone 1971). Men and women
are constructed as essentially different in romantic fiction, yet romance can
bring them together. Though girls do not simply, nor passively, take up
romantic subject positions (Walkerdine 1990), the difficulty for them is to
resist romance when it feels both natural and personal. They learn that
men want sex, but romance makes it seem nicer, less unpleasant (McRobbie
1991). This approach may seem to be replacing biological determinism
with cultural determinism, denying the existence of an a priori disposition
to romantic desire prior to contact with romance narratives. Social
constructionists do not deny human desires; they just question the forms
they are able to take when constrained by the narratives available to engage
them.
In a romance, the male romantic hero is expected to be finally transformed by love, in the sense that he, at least temporarily, offers his undying
love hoping for the heroines love in return, before they settle down to some
assumed happy domesticity, maybe on bread-winner and home-maker
lines. Real womens complaints have often been that their men fail to be
romantic and do not profess their love satisfactorily (e.g., Crawford 1998;
Duncombe and Marsden 1993, 1995; Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe
and Thomson 1998; Jackson 1993). Heterosexual relationships have been
constructed by women participants as fraught, disappointing, failing to live
up to the romantic ideal (e.g., Burns 1999; Dryden 1999; Duncombe and
Marsden 1995; Hite 1991; Langford 1999). Radways (1987) participants
used romance reading for emotional gratification unavailable from their
husbands. However, viewing current relationships as falling well short of
womens expectations is not universal. Drawing on a more therapeutic
discourse, the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1992) has put forward a
very different conceptualization of intimate relationships. He claims, with
little evidence, that a contemporary transformation of intimacy has taken
place in Western societies and that modern couples, both gay and straight,
are engaging in pure relationships, that is intimate relationships which
are democratic, rational, full of give and take, and contingent upon both
partners satisfaction. The pure relationship is pragmatic more than
emotional, but the commitment to relationships while they remain good
suggests a shift for both men and women.
Emotion work, love and gender

Womens dissatisfactions with mens behaviour in intimate relationships offer a form of challenge to the stereotypic gender differences in

Women in love and men at work 155

emotionality which so often reproduce power asymmetry in intimate

heterosexual relationships (Crawford 1995; Jackson 1993). The asymmetry
stems from the expectation that women will do emotion work for men
(using Hochschilds (1983) expression) while men remain emotionally
inexpressive (Duncombe and Marsden 1993) or may even work at hiding
their emotions (Duncombe and Marsden 1998). Engaging in emotion work
means helping others to feel special by letting them know you care for them
and admire them in order to help them feel good, and by being careful with
their feelings to avoid their feeling bad. Romantic narratives often seem to
obscure this asymmetry; romances predominantly construct desire in
gendered ways which may encourage women to understand that any
dissatisfactions they have with men, especially in relation to mens perceived
emotional illiteracy and avoidance of reciprocal emotion work, is misplaced
(Radway 1987).
Some feminists view womens supposed emotional expertise as womens
strength and superiority (e.g., Hite 1991), where others take it, along
with the expectation that women will do emotion work for men, as a symbol
of womens disempowerment within a heteropatriarchal society (e.g.,
Jackson 1993). Commonly accepted is a feminization of love brought
about by the separate spheres available to men and women in postEnlightenment and capitalistic cultures (Cancian 1987; Seidler 1989). This
analysis shifts the hypothetical man as worker, woman as homemaker to
a more recent historical site than the Stone Age plain but reproduces similar
stereotypes. Masculinity is constructed as a concern with personal growth
and achievement, and femininity as a concern with relationships and
intimacy.
Illouz (1997) analysed love relations and suggested, rather like Giddens,
that self and relationships are currently likely to be viewed as projects to be
worked at. Despite a focus on class rather than gender, she speculated this
could be to womens disadvantage if they are the partners expected to put
in the major share of the work. She found partial confirmation in interviews
in that women are more likely to use metaphors of work when describing
their relationships than men, who tend to view relationships in terms of
play and relaxation (Illouz 1997: 206). She wrote also of the dangers
of undermining emotional bonds by more rational concerns:
Furthermore, the rationalized vocabulary of rights and obligations
and needs [when applied to intimate relationships] may actually
undermine the emotional bond it is meant to strengthen. This
discourse is separated only by a fine line from a utilitarian ethos that
makes of others only a means to reach ones own satisfaction or selfrealization.
(Illouz 1997: 207)

156 Angie Burns

In this quote, Illouz fashions emotion and rationality in the dichotomous

form in which they have been so long associated, though her overall analysis
is much more postmodern. Sophisticated conceptualizations of emotion
and gender as social constructions (e.g., Lupton 1998; Lutz 1997) or
performance (e.g., Butler 1990) have opened up academic study in this
area. Lutz, in particular, has identified how women draw on a rhetoric
of emotional control which has the effect of suggesting that women have
more emotion than men to control. Discourse analysis has highlighted
how dominant discourses offer gendered subject positions which mean
that women are much more likely to be positioned as doing the emotion/
romance in an intimate heterosexual relationship, where men are positioned
as doing the sex (e.g., Hollway 1984, 1989; Stenner 1993; Wetherell 1995).
In contrast, many self-help books and pop psychological texts seem
increasingly engaged in reproducing, rather than challenging, notions of
natural emotion and gendered emotional differences, claiming these as
real and physiological differences (e.g., Gray 1992; Gottman 1997). In
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (Gray 1992), biological difference
even becomes a species difference!
Reproductions of the complementary heterosexual couple are so pervasive
they may seem to reflect real experiences based on universal (and genetic)
predispositions. A social constructionist and discursive approach means
focusing on how language constructs versions of the world, rather than
accepting that our experience can be straightforwardly represented. Similar
circumstances may be constructed differently in order to produce different
versions of truth. A narrative or discourse which, for instance, constructs
male emotional illiteracy as normal and natural for (all) men, functions
to construct men as fundamentally unable to do emotion work for others
and allows any man to misunderstand pressures on him to do so. The
predominance of this version of masculinity has implicated it in hegemonic
masculinity (Connell 1995; Edley and Wetherell 1995), a form of macho,
heterosexual, emotionally inexpressive masculinity associated with the
power to silence and resist alternative forms such as the supposedly
emotionally articulate new men or gay men. When women, in contrast to
men, are expected to be able to naturally do emotion work for others, an
emotionality/rationality binary is mapped onto a female/male binary,
reinforcing both divides, making any real differences unknowable.
I have set the scene in terms of disagreements about how the relationship between gender and emotion should be understood and agreements
about the ways in which gender and emotion are usually played out. I want
to contribute to this debate by drawing on my own research data. In doing
so I will focus on how some women and men constructed their own and
their partners emotion and emotionality in talk. The study is thus social
constructionist and discursive. The data were collected in research to

Women in love and men at work 157

investigate heterosexual coupledom and love. In the course of individual

interviews, participants also talked about gender, emotionality and rationality, and it is this talk that is analysed and discussed here.
Given the wider social climate in which gender and gender differences
are pervasively constructed, I was interested to attend to ways in which
gender was brought into play, in the interviews. However, I was not seeking
to tell any particular story about gender and/or emotion, nor, of necessity,
a story of gender difference at all. In accordance with discourse analytic
principles, I offer a reading of my interview material, one driven by the
interview texts, but also informed by my own understanding of the world
(as a woman, a feminist and a psychologist). It is thus not the only possible
reading, but is partial and incomplete as are all readings. My reading engages
with the debate outlined in this introduction because it is driven by the
ways in which participants have made emotional differences between men
and women both tangible and salient. In discussing these ways, I question
how they may function to reproduce and reinforce common and recognizable constraints on heterosexual coupledom.
The study
Design

The research findings which follow are based on discourse analysis of

qualitative interviews with women and men who responded to questions
about their intimate heterosexual relationships and experiences of love.
The particular analysis here focuses on how feelings and emotionality
were constructed in the interviews. The discursive approach taken is broadly
that of Margaret Wetherell (1998). This approach reconciles top-down
and bottom-up approaches to discourse analysis. The top-down approach
identifies and interrogates the available and historically given set of
discourses which participants drew on, along with the subject positions
within discourses taken up by participants. At the same time, the bottomup approach locates these in the specific contexts participants offered. In
other words, everyday talk is not taken to exist in isolation from the wider
contexts or worlds we inhabit. Talk is both constrained by the wider context
and is constraining to that wider context. Common truths are constituted
and evidenced by their repetition in local talk, over and over, time after
time, in different local contexts. These sorts of taken-for-granted or
common sense truths were sought in analysing the interviews (Smith
1988; Wetherell 1998). [A]ny story bears the ineluctable traces of the social
organizations and relations that are integral to the sequence of action it
entails (Smith 1990: 217). The main focus was on what stories could be
told, and in what ways (mainly top-down).

158 Angie Burns

Therefore, in using discourse analysis to analyse interviews, there is

no assumption that there are knowable foundational truths about emotion
and emotionality, which can be laid bare. What can be questioned are
the specific ways in which some constructions are presented as true
and unchallengeable (bottom-up approach) and to question the possible
consequences of their being experienced as overarching and general truths
(top-down approach). At the same time the discourse analysis was employed
to do feminist research. Here the specific concern was to analyse how,
in discoursing love, gender inequalities or privileges were constructed or
resisted in relation to gender and emotion.
Participants and qualitative interviews

Eleven women and eleven men aged between 17 and late 50s took part.
All were white and British and many were educated to degree level. From
a discourse-analytic perspective, participants are taken to be competent
members of cultural communities (Edley and Wetherell 1997: 204)
who will use social knowledge to create and recreate their identities and
their relationships. I expected my participants to be questioning and
reflexive, but they would still need to draw on common narratives in order
to be intelligible (Wetherell 1998). As a well-educated and politically aware
group, they should be well placed to offer accounts which could challenge
stereotypic assumptions of love and gender.
Because of the personal nature of the research topic, participants either
knew the researcher or were introduced to her by someone she knew. The
explicit intention, in the one-to-one interviews, was to ask participants
about their experiences of love and heterosexual relationships, positioning
them as experts on their lives. They were asked for details of their most
important intimate relationship how and when they met, when it became
serious, whether they were in love, whether it was important to be in love,
whether they told each other I love you, whether they had arguments.
They were also encouraged to talk about other peoples relationships and to
add whatever they wanted about other intimate relationships they had
experienced and their more general ideas about love.
The womens interviews were conducted and analysed before the
interviews with men took place. The same semi-structured interview format
was used with both women and men, and the same analytic procedure
followed.
Analytic procedure

By reading and rereading the interviews, paying close attention to content

and form of words, recurrent topic themes were identified. The interviews

Women in love and men at work 159

were then coded and subdivided into these themes. If extracts referred to
more than one theme, they were filed under all relevant themes. The
interview material relating to each theme was read and reread. In this way
it was possible to focus on the similarities, variability and contradictions
within and across the interviews. Dominant pervasive discourses and subject
positions were identified in a search for discursive themes which were
coherent and were used by participants to make sense of their different
experiences. These were contextualized within broad historical and cultural
concerns as well as in contexts offered by the participants. The interview
texts were attended to in detail, continually questioning how emerging
concepts could be understood differently were they not taken for granted
as permanent or fixed, or if different positionings were attempted. Reading
for gist was thus avoided so that articulated assumptions were opened up
to analysis. The analysis here focuses, in particular, on the common ways
in which participants constructed emotion and emotionality in their
intimate relationships, with excerpts chosen to illustrate and detail how
some broad organizing principles seemed to be at play in the interviews.
In describing and detailing these broad organizing patterns, I consider how
their being offered as truths might impact on expectations of intimate
relationships themselves.
Analysis

The interview data were very rich, and the particular analysis here focuses
on how the interviewees positioned themselves in relation to love and
emotionality in intimate relationships. I was not seeking gender differences
and had hoped to find stereotypic gender categories challenged in the
interviews, but this was not what was found. The analysis therefore illuminates how women and men tended to construct love and emotion in ways
which made gender salient and palpable. While discussing a wide range of
different relationships, broad patterns of understanding emotion, their own
and others, emerged, and the extracts exemplify particular ways in which
these patterns were deployed discursively. I will start with an analysis of the
womens interviews, to show how women participants positioned themselves
as understanding themselves in love, through discourses of emotion, while
positioning men as more uncomfortable with emotions.

160 Angie Burns

The womens interviews

Women in love and men at sea: love as peculiar and powerful
feelings
Women as emotional

In talking about their most important intimate relationships, each women

participant talked of themselves as in love or falling in love, explaining this
was about experiencing powerful and strange feelings. Yet, though the
womens experiences of love were often described as weird and odd, they
were offered intelligibility by comparison with a common shared peculiar
experience of falling in love (see Averill 1985). As Barbara says about the
relationship she refers to as my ill-fated love affair:
. . . it seems to me such an extraordinary (laughs) experience that it
sort of intrigues me even now cos it it sort of fitted the criteria of
falling in love. Ss, I mean I didnt believe it until it happened to me,
the songs and the poems and all that, I mean it was just like that and
um [BARBARA].
The proffered extraordinariness of this experience ensured that it was
recognized as the romantic love articulated in love stories, songs and poems.
The women participants talked about love in ways which emphasized
they understood the experience of being in love as something deeply felt,
overwhelming and hard to resist. Their being subject to such powerful
emotions, however, was also constructed as problematic, but in ways which
heightened the drama. Gina, for instance, in talking about her possibly
unrequited passion, said:
Its sort of taking up my life a bit really. I think about it a lot. I mean
I dream about it a lot and at work the other day I nearly threw
(something in the wrong place) and took someone a black coffee
instead of a white coffee. You know what I mean, just little things
I wouldnt normally do. Im so like when Im at work, Im so sort of in
control and I just dont feel that at the moment. Its quite horrible
really. I want it to go away but, you know, you cant help how you feel.
And I just dont know what to do. I dont know what to do [GINA].
The consequences of not adding milk to a coffee seem not too dire. The
actual details do not have to be particularly serious to tell a dramatic and
recognizable love story (see Averill 1985). The womens stories of romance
were also heightened by talking of their attempting to, but failing to, control

Women in love and men at work 161

their emotions (see Lutz 1997). For example, Zoe said, in talking about her
long-term relationship with her boyfriend:
I just keep thinking I dont know what Im gonna do if we split up cos
I couldnt imagine being without him. Not, nothing specific but Ive
just got this great fear of him dying, you know. And he says he has a
bit with me but it doesnt seem to bother him that much like as me.
I feel stupid saying it cos its a bit irrational heh (laughs) [ZOE].
Positioning herself as irrational and her partner as not, or much less so,
Zoe draws on a rational/emotional dichotomy, mapping it onto a male/
female polarity (see Lupton 1998; Lutz 1997). In romantic narratives, the
heroine tends to be unable to direct the relationship, having to wait for
the hero to act so she can respond. But, the emotions of the heroine drive
the story, indicating her goals and desires. By being irrational and emotional,
she can show how much she cares, to herself and anyone she tells. Zoe was
also reflexive and talked of feeling stupid saying this. Her boyfriend is
constructed as failing to reciprocate these feelings.
Men as unemotional, or less emotional than women

Ive been off all morning cos hes going to stay at his friends for two
weeks and I really wanted him to be devastated about it. And hes just
like Oh Ill come back every day and that but I dont know what is
wrong with me, Im just unreasonable, I know I am. But I really wanted
him to be upset [ZOE].
When being upset and being emotional is constructed as a gauge of
love, his being reasonable, when Zoe isnt, is not romantic. Like Zoe, other
women participants tended to suggest their male partners were understandably (though problematically) emotionally inexpressive or closed
off . Barbara said this of a man with whom she had been in a five-year
relationship.
. . . I mean emotionally he was very closed off and I think he began to
get very alarmed about what he was getting into and he felt incredibly
guilty I think about having an affair with a married woman with
children so he would every time we seemed to get very close it would
be followed by immediate withdrawal where he would go very distant
and was unreachable. . . . He had a, he had a horror of sort of scenes
or people displaying excesses of feeling so that made him even more
inclined to pull out [BARBARA].

162 Angie Burns

Barbara analysed this ex-relationship and suggested that had he been more
emotionally open, then her emotion might have dissipated.
. . . I really didnt know what was going on in his head. I really didnt
know and I think that fuelled his attractiveness to me and kept
that sort of feeling going. Whereas I think that if he had kind of
revealed himself and been very open that wouldnt have been there
[BARBARA].
Barbaras construction of her ex-partner as emotionally closed off allows his
feelings to be partly assumed, by her. His lack of expressiveness, like womens
articulated (over)emotionality, has the effect of making womens love stories
more dramatic and more emotional. The way in which mens feelings were
made palpable in the womens stories seems to obviate any need to express
them. In the following extract Gina showed she understood her current
boyfriends feelings and why he had behaved as he did.
When I was first going out with him, you see, he hed er had this
ex-girlfriend. Hed only been out with her about three months but he
was very keen on her and, to cut a long story short, she ran off with
his best friend which sort of like cut him up a lot. And er that was
his first sort of serious relationship and so he was pretty screwed up
and he thought I was going to do the same thing, you know. So he
sort of um after about um, after about a month of going out with
him, he started to be a bit unreliable and a bit, you know, argumentative and whatever, you know. Several occasions we could have split
up but I suppose I proved to him Im not going to do that, you know
[GINA].
We can read here how Gina has positioned herself as the one who has done
the emotion work to get them through problems associated with his
unarticulated emotions. Mens emotional inarticulateness was constructed
by women participants as something they understood, expected and could
cope with. This seems to be one of the ways in which the romantic narrative
employed here allocates men power by excusing them from openly engaging
with emotion or taking their partners emotions into account, and this is
commensurate with the notion of hegemonic masculinity, of macho,
emotionally inarticulate, heterosexual masculinity. By telling stories of
how they understood (rather than challenged) mens lack of emotional
reciprocity, women seem to give their male partners permission to behave
in this way as this is taken to be men behaving normally, like Men from
Mars! (Gray 1992).
Using humour and irony, the women participants tended to be very

Women in love and men at work 163

critical of their own powerful emotions while they also protected and
excused men from having to engage mutually, and thus they might be seen
to be partly engaging in disempowering themselves. At the same time,
though, they could tell highly romantic stories, using mens difficulties with
emotions and unsatisfactory lack of emotional reciprocation as a way of
enhancing the romance, of doing the romance for him as well as for
themselves (see also Burns 1999).
The discourse of romantic love, which underlay the womens interviews,
wedded an emotional woman to an emotionally inexpressive man. The
mens interviews tended to do something subtly different.
The mens interviews
Men at work: love as work

The male participants presented themselves as rational and sensible beings,

rather than emotional or emotionally repressed creatures, closed off from
their own emotions or needing to escape from their partners.
Men as rational and as workers

One participant, Paul, asserted that Men dont have these funny feelings.
When pressed about these funny feelings, Paul conceded he was pulling
my leg! However, other men problematized emotional intensity, constructing it as transient, unsustainable and ultimately destructive to a
relationship. A less emotional, workaday approach was promoted as an
alternative to romantic passion. Michael described his most important
relationship as passionate, but articulated problems with this.
One of the other things about her and our relationship was a sense that
something like that is, by definition, something transient. And that
once you see you have this intensity of feeling for someone and the
feeling that maybe the day-to-day level of existence is just not going,
is going to mean losing it, okay. And so it might be better sometimes
to have a relationship where that isnt there, with someone youre not
in love with because then youre not so disappointed that its so
(laughing) its so um daily, you know, stuff [MICHAEL].
Jon found it difficult to decide which was his most important relationship
because, as he explained, hed wanted an in love relationship, but couldnt
seem to manage to have a good relationship without problems if there were
feelings of being in love.

164 Angie Burns

I mean Ive had a relationship since and it only lasted about two
months. And I felt that I was in love and I felt that I had this
connection, er but there was all kinds of other problems (laughing
tone) associated with this. So. Erm erm so. I think it is important to
be in love. I dont seem to be able erm have the two together, you know,
a nice relationship and be in love [JON].
In the mens interviews, a pervasive construction was that the head could,
and should, overrule the heart. What was very important was to find a
partner who fitted your life. Here Robin is talking about a long-term
ongoing relationship:
. . . I am reasonably sure that certain relationships would have worked
in my life, if I had reached the same circumstances that Im now in.
Um I I dont see love as a theres only one. Its a hit and miss affair.
When youre ready, you happen to meet someone else who has a similar
outlook and I think thats vital. Its its almost, because youre constantly
evolving, changing opinions, politically, culturally. You need to find
someone at that moment in time that is moving in the same direction
so that when you lock in you both move in a similar direction. Um
and I I do believe that there is choice, yea yea. Because at the end of
the day, the mind can overrule the heart [ROBIN].
Choice of partner was also associated with constructing a male identity.
Simon said of meeting his now long-term partner:
. . . I met Jan at a particular time in my life when I was actually trying
to construct a new identity that fitted who you need to be as an adult.
You know that fitted needing to have paid employment. That fitted
um trying to produce an identity that would carry me forward, like in
the years after leaving university [SIMON].
The male participants, in these different ways, tended to construct their
own experiences of love and intimacy in line with rational decision-making,
their decisions, their choices, their lives. In this way they could talk about
intimate relationships built on work and doing, rather than on feelings.
I identified this as drawing on the work discourse of relationships, a
discourse which constructed relationships as contexts within which one
could do work, especially personal growth work, and suggested a male
transformation, not into a romantic hero but into a man who could at least
talk of recognizing that relationships were important. However, this was
not achieved without some contradictions emerging in participants
accounts. For instance:

Women in love and men at work 165

What, what had hit me between the eyes was the possibility of, of
someone, of having a relationship with a woman, as a man, that
was the centre of the life. So it wasnt work that was the centre of your
life. Work could be very important, but or or whatever. But a relationship could be something that was sustaining, um that was was
enriching. Was all those kind of things. And really Id, these hadnt,
these hadnt occurred to me before . . . it was an opportunity [being
in a relationship] for you to grow as a person, for me to grow as a
person [SIMON].
The contradiction here is that Simons personal revelation that relationships
could be as important as paid work suggests a previous position from which
relationships were not central to his life.
The male participants also talked explicitly of working at relationships,
which seemed surprising when the women did not. This seems different
from what Illouz (1997) suggested. Though women participants constructed themselves as doing emotion work for men through the powerful
feelings they talked of having for them, they did not label this as working
at relationships. The discourse of romantic love, as drawn on by the women,
constructed passionate feeling and caring as how you do intimacy and love,
as an understandable response to being in love and loving ones partner.
In contrast, the work discourse of relationships allowed the men to explicitly
construct intimacy as work, with ongoing relationships and love as in need
of constant work and vigilance. Tim talked about his long-term relationship
and his ideas about love:
I think love is part and parcel of a, of a, of a relationship and its
something that you have to keep working at. And you cant just assume
that its going to be there all the time. And you cant take, you cant take
the relationship, and you cant take people for granted. Because if you
do I think the love might actually go away from that relationship
[TIM].
Daniel, for instance, used the analogy of DIY:
Things have to move forward otherwise theres no point having them
[relationships]. . . . If you stand still, you know, things go wrong. Like
a house. You have to keep renovating it and doing it up, otherwise
(laughs) it just falls apart [DANIEL].
However, except for saying I love you and making time to see each other,
it was never very clear what this work was.

166 Angie Burns

The male participants tended to construct themselves as knowledgeable

about relationships and able to do love but in an unemotional way. In the
following extracts, when talking about their general ideas of intimate
relationships, Nick and Ian drew on their personal or professional expertise
to do this.
Well my job is relationships. . . . And I suppose in my job I have a
choice to either put into practice some of the theory that I know, erm
or not. And I see around me, within my own colleagues, those that do
and those that dont. . . . I mean there are some very very stable couples
who obviously do well. And thats because theyre able to put their
theory into practice very well [NICK].
Ive done a lots of, I suppose youd call it psychotherapeutic/spiritual
work on relationships. And a lot of my adult life has been spent,
working or being reflective about the way I approach women and
intimate relationships [IAN].
Drawing on the work discourse of relationships allowed men to position
themselves and their personal growth and achievement as central to
successful intimate heterosexual relationships, which sidestepped their
having to be in love, romantic or emotionally out-of-control. Within this
discourse, they could resist emotional subject positions and, as can be read
in the extracts, they tended to talk quite abstractly, mostly about themselves
and much less about their partners. Ive already shown earlier how female
partners were sometimes constructed as suitable if they fitted in with the
mens life and identity. In some ways, too, women were constructed as more
likely than men to create emotional intensity. Pauls joke only makes sense
if we recognize that women may have funny feelings.
Women engendering emotional intensity

Women were sometimes implicated in producing the extremes of emotion

in mens relationships. Here Michael and Ian are talking about ex-partners.
She was very attractive, very quite confrontational person, but quite
vivacious, so she did spark very strong responses in other people.
People would fall in love with her very easily and get very intensely
involved with her [MICHAEL].
. . . I mean shes normally a very compassionate person, but . . . she
would get extremely upset and er her her pain which we both agreed
linked in with her early childhood would be all be projected onto me

Women in love and men at work 167

and Id find this extremely uncomfortable. And er I obviously wanted

her to basically stop doing it basically. I mean I was quite willing to be
understanding and help her work through it. It wasnt like I wanted
her to pretend it wasnt there.But I did want her to take responsibility
for it being her stuff . . . [IAN].
Where we can read Michaels extract as quite positive about his ex-partner,
Ian constructed his ex as extremely emotional and needing to work
through it. This is commensurate with research into the social construction of emotionality which has suggested that womens feelings are often
construed as engulfing men, constructing emotionality as a lack of selfcontainment, and thus stigmatizing women (Lupton 1998). Such
engulfment is seen to threaten mens independence upon which their
masculinity is assumed to be built. Though the male participants tended
to ascribe emotional intensity externally and to their partners, this was not
always done in ways which criticized women, but it did tend to subtly
construct women as more emotional than men.
Conclusions: evolving heterosexual coupledom?

Identifying two broad discourses or narratives, the romantic and the

workaday has made sense of a wide range of disparate interview material,
though it has inevitably glossed over some complexity and variability. The
analysis is not claiming that women and men are different, but that they
tend to draw differently on two broad narratives to talk about their emotions
and intimate relationships, and that these broad narratives organize gender
and emotion differently. The women tended to tell a romantic love
story built around a version of male emotional inexpressivity and difficulty
with feelings in contrast with their own emotional intensity and expressivity.
In contrast, the men were able to resist being in love, constructing as
preferable a version of themselves as able to work at relationships, reproducing themselves as rational in ways they suggested were most appropriate
to doing heterosexual intimacy and love. In this way, the work discourse
of relationships resists the discourse of romantic love and instead constructs
heterosexual relationships in line with a Protestant work ethic. The right
emotions are produced rather than being irrational or out of control
(unproductive) feelings. Thus women and men seemed to construct two
different sorts of emotion work, one around having feelings for partners
and the other around working at intimacy.
Some evolutionary psychologists might well take these articulations of
gender and gender difference in the interviews as evidence of essential
different natures of women and men. But this would fail to grapple with
the very complex ways in which gender, love and intimate relationships

168 Angie Burns

were produced in the interviews. The model of the complementary

emotional woman and unemotional man was given different meanings in
the womens and mens interviews. From a discursive perspective, the ways
in which women and men are constructed as different, by themselves and
by each other, derives from the available discourses being differentially
available to women and men. Rather than people being predisposed
to behave along gender lines, this highlights the social context in
which gender difference is pervasively reproduced by being inscribed in
dominant discourses, such as the evolutionary discourse of evolved gender
differences.
Of particular interest here is how the mens constructions of emotion
in intimate relationships seemed to involve fewer explicit assumptions
of gender dissimilarity and less asymmetry than the womens stories. From
an evolutionary perspective, this seems at odds with notions of gender
difference. From a discursive perspective, the mens interviews mirrored
Giddenss (1992) version of the pure relationship and offered a democratic
account. From a feminist perspective, this may be seen as more problematic,
for those who have power, by virtue of their position in both the social and
symbolic order, undermine their position if they acknowledge their
privileged position (e.g., Sampson 1993). Women participants constructed
men as special by articulating their powerful emotions for their male
partners. For the men, by talking of taking relationships seriously, they
could be seen to be avoiding being positioned as male chauvinists or men
who cant commit. However, though they subtly drew on a discourse which
allowed them to sound equitable, they also positioned themselves as masters
of their relational universe. Though women and men have constructed
rather different versions of the world, the versions of intimacy, they have
drawn on, function to point up the specialness of men and their centrality
to heterosexual coupledom (see Holland et al. 1998).
Whether we take a narrative or evolutionary approach, whether gender
is a performance or natural predisposition, the stories of love offered
here have tended to reproduce the emotional woman and emotionally
inexpressive or unemotional man. But the analysis here has gone beyond
truth values to question how these reproductions were used to characterize
mens and womens relative importance. From the interviews Ive identified the stories of the supposed post-feminist, postmodern man taking
relationships seriously in order to enhance his personal growth with a not
too emotional woman or the repressed, emotionally inexpressive male and
an (over)emotional woman. In such a hierarchy, differences between women
and men become reified and carry on a line of stereotypic evocations of
heterosexual coupledom the cave man dragging the cave woman by her
hair, the medieval knight tourneying for his ladys favours, the postindustrial male worker receiving a family wage as head of the family and

Women in love and men at work 169

keeping his wife. Both the discourse of romantic love and the work discourse of relationships pose problems for attempts to articulate heterosexual
relationships which are equitable and fulfilling for both women and men.
It is not the role of evolutionary psychology to be concerned with equity and
personal fulfilment, as its role is to explain current circumstances. But a
critical discursive perspective is concerned to understand and challenge
discourses which allocate power unequally by failing to acknowledge the
assumptions involved in its articulation.
The assumptions addressed here were gender difference and what is
considered appropriate emotionality. I have offered a particular reading
of my data which engages with participants constructions of gender
and emotion, and have suggested some implications. My reading, as any
other, is partial and always-already incomplete (Stenner 1993: 130). The
broad patterns, which Ive identified as the work discourse of relationships
and the discourse of romantic love, have made sense of the complicated
ways in which emotion and gender were done when talking about intimate
heterosexual relationships. The discourses offered different types of relationship narrative yet both tended to reproduce a gender status quo with
woman as emotional carer and man as rational worker. Thus, as attempts
to narrativize the heterosexual couple evolving equitably, they have a long
way to go. From a social constructionist and discursive perspective, these
discourses point to, and reproduce, constraints on relationships themselves,
so the analysis is not an end in itself, but an encouragement to discussing
such constraints on heterosexual coupledom, and trying to effect change.
I have attempted to detail, both in theory and empirical research, how
gender difference is continually taken to be an organizing principle of
intimate heterosexual relationships. Accepting this as evidence of real and
factual gender difference reinforces the power of such organizing principles
to inhabit our ways of talking about relationships, which in turn, through
repetition, reproduce and reinforce this version of gender relations. Thus,
the articulation of gender differences by participants is unsurprising in a
wider social world in which differences are routinely researched and
anticipated. When emotional gender differences are mobilized in different
ways in two broad discourses, this highlights their pervasiveness. However,
the identification of different (and competing) discourses also opens
up more possibilities for resistance. This is crucial, because questioning who
is labelled emotional, how, when and by whom, goes beyond academic
concern, into the experience of intimate heterosexual relationships themselves.

170 Angie Burns

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful
comments on an earlier version of this paper, Christine Griffin and Dorothy
Miell for their invaluable contributions to my Ph.D. research, and David
Sheffield for his interest and insightful suggestions.
Note

All of the names used in the interview extracts are pseudonyms. Bold type
indicates emphasis given by participants.
Address for correspondence

Angie Burns, Department of Psychology, Staffordshire University, College

Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2DE, UK. Tel.: 01782 294674; fax: 01782
294986; e-mail: A.M.Burns@staffs.ac.uk
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