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CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS RESEARCH: A RESOURCE FOR COUPLE AND FAMILY THERAPISTS
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Jan 2004 by Hendrick, Susan S
Lesbian and gay couples and families are important in their own right, and such relationships are increasingly the focus of research (for reviews see Patterson, 2000; Peplau & Spaulding, 2000). They also offer relationship researchers a way to study the intersection of relationship processes and gender. Our own research in that area (Adler, Hendrick, & Hendrick, 1987) assessed gay males and heterosexual males in two locations, New York and West Texas. Homosexual and heterosexual men endorsed love styles very similarly, although there were some interesting geographical differences. Texas participants were more manic than New York participants, and gay men in New York were significantly less agapic than gay men in Texas or heterosexual men in Texas or New York. Overall, as Peplau and Spaulding (2000) concluded, "Efforts to apply basic relationship theories to same-sex couples have been largely successful. There is much commonality among the issues facing all close relationships, regardless of the sexual orientation of the partners" (p. 123).
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Gender
Gender is very important in the context of close relationships, and both gender in referencing close relationships differences and gender similarities inform our understanding of how women and men relate intimately. Gender was of interest in our very earliest research on the love styles (C. Hendrick, Hendrick, Foote, & Slapion-Foote, 1984), when gender differences appeared on more than one-half the then 54 items on the love scale. In this (C. Hendrick et al., 1984) and later research, men were always more game-playing, whereas women were typically more friendship oriented, practical, and manic (e.g., C. Hendrick & Hendrick, 1986). Men and women did not typically differ on passionate or altruistic love. Research using the shortened form of the Love Attitudes Scale, however, has found women continuing to be more oriented to friendship and practicality than men, and men to be more in agreement with (or at least less in disagreement with) game-playing than women (C. Hendrick et al., 1998). But women more than men appear now to endorse passionate love, and men more than women consistently endorse altruistic love, with the findings for possessive love varying across studies (C. Hendrick et al.). It is interesting to note, however, although women and men may differ somewhat in their average scores on the love scales, the correlations between the love scales and other measures, including relationship satisfaction, are very similar (S. Hendrick & Hendrick, 1995). Much more fanfare typically accompanies gender differences than gender similarities, yet women and men do not in fact come from different planets. Rather, they come from something like different apartments in the same apartment building. Although it is frequently partner differences that bring couples into therapy-and it has been tempting to attribute those differences to gender-many such differences are based on "person" rather than "gender." Work with gay and lesbian couples indicates that same-sex couples must deal with issues of communication, conflict, division of labor, and so on, just as other-sex couples do.
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