ontrast
arriage and Hers
the essay. What type of cooking is men-
ssed again in the essay? How does this decision by
2. Tone Describe Gianakos's tone. Is it effective in this essay?
ur response to the first paragraph and to the essay as a whole?
3. Language What do phrases such as “subtle, flavorful differences" (para. 1), “Food
lovers" (7), and "richly seasoned” (7) contribute to the essay? If Gianakos had
included more phrases like these, how would the essay be changed?
4. Omissions What comparisons did Gianakos not make that she could have made?
Responding to the Essay
1. Discussion In groups of two or three, discuss other regional cuisines that might
share? What distinguishes them?
make effective topics for a comparison and contrast essay. What traits do they
2. Journal Gianakos compares the cuisines of the American Southwest and Mexico
using the traditions and geographic locations of the people who lived there as the
basis of comparison. In your journal, explore several other possible bases of com-
parison that could be used to compare these cuisines.
3. Essay Write an essay comparing foods of two other regional cuisines.
READING
Daniel Goleman
His Marriage and Hers: Childhood Roots
Daniel Goleman holds a PhD in behavioral and brain sciences and has published a num-
ber of books on psychology, including The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights
(2011
) and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence (2011). Goleman reported on the
brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years and was elected
a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his efforts to
bring psychology to the public. In his book Emotional Intelligence (1995), from which the
following selection was taken, Goleman describes the emotional skills required for daily
living and explains how to develop those skills. Before reading, preview the selection
and make connections by thinking about the ways communication between men and
women differ. While reading, notice how Goleman uses comparison and contrast to
explore differences between the sexes and highlight his key points of comparison.
1
As I was entering a restaurant on a recent evening, a young man stalked out the
door, his face set in an expression both stony and sullen. Close on his heels a
young woman came running, her fists desperately pummeling his back while she
yelled, "Goddamn you! Come back here and be nice to me!"That poignant, impos-
sibly self-contradictory plea aimed at a retreating back epitomizes the pattern
most commonly seen in couples whose relationship is distressed: She seeks to
engage, he withdraws. Marital therapists have long noted that by the time a couple
finds their way to the therapy office, they are in this pattern of engage-withdraw,
88
Chapter 15 Comparison and Contrast
2.
lamenting his indifference to what she is saying.
rate emotional worlds boys and girls inhabit while growing up. There is a vast
4
with his complaint about her "unreasonable" demands and outbursts, and her
This marital endgame reflects the fact that there are, in effect, two emotional
they may be partly biological, also can be traced back to childhood and to the sepa-
realities in a couple, his and hers. The roots of these emotional differences, while
amount of research on these separate worlds, their barriers reinforced not just by
the different games boys and girls prefer but by young children's fear of being
teased for having a “girlfriend” or “boyfriend” (Maccoby and Jacklin). One study of
children's friendships found that three-year-olds say about half their friends are of
the opposite sex; for five-year-olds it's about 20 percent, and by age seven almost
no boys or girls say they have a best friend of the opposite sex (Gottman). These
separate social universes intersect little until teenagers start dating.
Meanwhile, boys and girls are taught very different lessons about handling emotions. 3
Parents, in general, discuss emotions—with the exception of anger-more with their
daughters than their sons (Brody and Hall). Girls are exposed to more information about
emotions than are boys: when parents make up stories to tell their preschool children,
they use more emotion words when talking to daughters than to sons; when mothers
play with their infants, they display a wider range of emotions to daughters than to sons:
when mothers talk to daughters about feelings, they discuss in more detail the emotional
state itself than they do with their sons—though with the sons they go
into more detail
about the causes and consequences of emotions like anger (probably as a cautionary tale).
Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, who have summarized the research on differences
in emotions between the sexes, propose that because girls develop facility with
language more quickly than do boys, this leads them to be more experienced at
articulating their feelings and more skilled than boys at using words to explore and
substitute for emotional reactions such as physical fights; in contrast, they note,
"boys, for whom the verbalization of affects is de-emphasized, may become largely
unconscious of their emotional states, both in themselves and others” (p. 454).
At age ten, roughly the same percent of girls as boys are overtly aggressive, given
to open confrontation when angered. But by age thirteen, a telling difference between
the sexes emerges: Girls become more adept than boys at artful aggressive tactics like
ostracism, vicious gossip, and indirect vendettas. Boys, by and large, simply continue
being confrontational when angered, oblivious to these more covert strategies (Cairns
and Cairns). This is just one of many ways that boys-and later, men-are less
sophisticated than the opposite sex in the byways of emotional life.
When girls play together, they do so in small, intimate groups, with an empha- 6
sis on minimizing hostility and maximizing cooperation, while boys' games are in
larger groups, with an emphasis on competition. One key difference can be seen in
what happens when games boys or girls are playing get disrupted by someone get-
ting hurt. If a boy who has gotten hurt gets upset, he is expected to get out of the
way and stop crying so the game can go on. If the same happens among a group of
girls who are playing, the game stops while everyone gathers around to help the
girl who is crying. This difference between boys and girls at play epitomizes what
Harvard's Carol Gilligan points to as a key disparity between the sexes: boys take
pride in a lone, tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see
5
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Daniel Goleman His Mari
themselves as part of a web of connectedness. Thus boys are threatened by any-
thing that might challenge their independence, while girls are more threatened by
a rupture in their relationships. And, as Deborah Tannen has pointed out in her
book You Just Don't Understand, these differing perspectives mean that men and
women want and expect very different things out of a conversation, with men con-
tent to talk about “things," while women seek emotional connection.
© Sally and Richard Greenhill/Alamy
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Chapter 15 Comparison and Contrast
In short, these contrasts in schooling in the emotions foster very different
skills, with girls becoming "adept at reading both verbal and nonverbal emotional
signals, at expressing and communicating their feelings," and boys becoming
hurt" (Brody and Hall 454). Evidence for these different stances is very strong in the
adept at "minimizing emotions having to do with vulnerability, guilt, fear, and
scientific literature. Hundreds of studies have found, for example, that on average
someone else's unstated feelings from facial expression, tone of voice, and other
nonverbal cues. Likewise, it is generally easier to read feelings from a woman's
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very young boys and girls, as they go through the elementary-school grades boys
become less expressive, girls more so. This may partly reflect another key difference:
women, on average, experience the entire range of emotions with greater intensity
8
the role of emotional manager, while men arrive with much less appreciation of
and more volatility than men—in this sense, women are more “emotional” than
men (Brody and Hall).
All of this means that, in general, women come into a marriage groomed for
the importance of this task for helping a relationship survive. Indeed, the most
important element for women-but not for men-in satisfaction with their
relationship reported in a study of 264 couples was the sense that the couple
has “good communication” (Davis and Oathout). Ted Huston, a psychologist at
the University of Texas who has studied couples in depth, observes, “For the
wives
, intimacy means talking things over, especially talking about the relationship
itself. The men, by and large, don't understand what the wives want from
them. They say, 'I want to do things with her, and all she wants to do is talk.'»
During courtship, Huston found, men were much more willing to spend time
talking in ways that suited the wish for intimacy of their wives-to-be. But once
married, as time went on the men- especially in more traditional couples -
spent less and less time talking in this way with their wives, finding a sense of
closeness simply in doing things like gardening together rather than talking
9
things over.
This growing silence on the part of husbands may be partly due to the fact
that, if anything, men are a bit Pollyannaish about the state of their marriage,
while their wives are attuned to the trouble spots: in one study of marriages, men
had a rosier view than their wives of just about everything in their relationship-
lovemaking, finances, ties with in-laws, how well they listened to each other,
how much their flaws mattered (Sternberg). Wives, in general, are more vocal
about their complaints than are their husbands, particularly among unhappy
couples. Combine men's rosy view of marriage with their aversion to emotional
confrontations, and it is clear why wives so often complain that their husbands
try to wiggle out of discussing the troubling things about their relationship. (of
course this gender difference is a generalization and is not true in every case;
a psychiatrist friend complained that in his marriage his wife is reluctant to
discuss emotional matters between them and he is the one who is left to bring
them up.)
10
so sad.
11
Daniel Goleman His Marriage an
The slowness of men to bring up problems in a relationship is no doubt
expressions of emotions. Women, for example, are more sensitive to a sad
compounded by their relative lack of skill when it comes to reading facial
expression on a man's face than are men in detecting sadness from a woman's
expression. 1 Thus a woman has to be all the sadder for a man to notice her feelings
in the first place, let alone for him to raise the question of what is making her
Consider the implications of this emotional gender gap for how couples
handle the grievances and disagreements that any intimate relationship
inevitably spawns. In fact, specific issues such as how often a couple has sex,
how to discipline the children, or how much debt and savings a couple feels
comfortable with are not what make or break a marriage. Rather, it is how a
couple discusses such sore points that matters more for the fate of their
marriage. Simply having reached an agreement about how to disagree is key
to marital survival; men and women have to overcome the innate gender
differences in approaching rocky emotions. Failing this, couples are vulnerable
to emotional rifts that eventually can tear their relationship apart. ... [T]hese
rifts are far more likely to develop if one or both partners have certain deficits
in emotional intelligence.
Note
1. The research is by Dr. Ruben C. Gur at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine.
Works Cited
Brody, Leslie R., and Judith A. Hall. “Gender and Emotion." Handbook of Emotions, edited by Michael
Lewis and Jeannette Haviland, Guilford Press, 1993.
Cairns, Robert B., and Beverley D. Cairns. Lifelines and Risks. Cambridge UP, 1994.
Davis, Mark H., and H. Alan Oathout. “Maintenance of Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships:
Empathy and Relational Competence." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 53, no. 2
(1987), pp. 397-410.
Gottman, Joàn, “Same- and Cross-Sex Friendship in Young Children.” Conversation of Friends, edited
by J. Gottman and J. Parker, Cambridge UP, 1986.
Maccoby, Eleanor, and C. N. Jacklin. “Gender Segregation in Childhood.” Advances in Child
Development and Behavior, edited by H. Reese, Academic Press, 1987.
Sternberg, Robert J. “Triangulating Love." The Psychology of Love, edited by Robert Sternberg and
Michael Barnes, Yale UP, 1988.
Understanding the Reading
lain the differences that Goleman
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