In Gendered close relationships, Wood explains that since little have changed since old times in regards of the way different genders experience and interpret what closeness is. Wood explains that these differences are socially constructed and reinforced over the time by the society, as men are expected to accomplish some goals that differ greatly from those expected from women. In this sense, men are expected to be “the head of the family” meaning that it is his responsibility to provide monetary resources and be the most powerful figure in the family dynamics while women are expected to take care of the house, children, and even the romantic relationship with their partners. Even in most open-minded relationships, many researches had found that this distribution of roles is almost impossible to avoid despite many attempts from both partners to break this strong family structure.
One of the main ideas exposed in this Wood’s text is that women experience and develop closeness mainly through communication involving very intimate subjects. In this sense, a woman creates significant ties when she shares and receives intimate information like feelings, likes and dislikes, personal views and situations, etc. In contrast, men’s experience of closeness is related to sharing activities and intimate conversations are no more than a nuisance most times. These great differences between genders in the main reason that leads a couple to have misunderstandings that often leads to fights, ruptures, and broken hearts. This very different ways of finding deep and intimate connection to each other is a reflection of the very different meaning that a relationship has for each woman and man: while men tend to seek a relationship to accomplish goals, and solve problems, women tend to seek relationships to create intimacy and share personal feelings and experiences.
The differences in same sex and heterosexual romantic relationships are exposed in the following chapter.
| Heterosexual love relationships | Lesbian romantic relationships | Gay romantic relationships |
| · Difficulties in understanding each other’s interpretation of closeness and intimacy: men by sharing activities, women by communicating feelings · Men avoiding emotions and intimate problems by concentrating in work; women wanting to talk problems through in long conversations right away. · Relationships often lead to a feeling of being misunderstood and lack of accompaniment. · Men usually spend more time in work and women often do much more work at home –regardless of any professional work- ending up feeling exhausted, hurt, and stressed. | · The difficulties of differences are eliminated; both women have the same need of talking though problems and create intimacy by sharing emotions, feelings, thoughts, etc. · Home duties are shared. · There are no conflicts in regards of power. · Lesbian relationships tend to be felt as comfortable, intimate, supportive and happy | · Intimacy is carried out by sharing activities; intimate communication of feeling is not common. · There are high difficulties in managing power as both partners tend to compete for it. (salaries, opinions, decisions, etc.) · Gay romantic relationships are often perceived as unpleasant. · There is much more tolerance to sex relationships outside the couple. |
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