Relationships envy

We all want to be noble of mind and pure of heart. We want to be the person who graciously leaves the last profiterole for someone else, but all too often we find ourselves with the sticky fingers of guilt. We want to politely let others share their ideas in meetings but just can’t stop blurting out our witty insight before anyone else can. Sometimes we just fall short of our own ideals and now a new study shows that is particularly true of men in relationships.

You would like to think that you want only the best for your partner. You love them, you care for them, and you want them to be happy. So you would think therefore that a man would only be totally at ease with the success of his partner…but you would be wrong.

In a new study couples took part in a test that was labelled as being about “problem solving and intelligence”. The participants were then either told that their partner scored in either the top 12 per cent or the bottom 12 per cent. These were not the actual results for the partners but were manipulated to see how they would affect their partner. The subjects were then asked how they felt about their partners scoring higher or lower than they had. This was a way to measure “explicit self-esteem” or how they say they are feeling about themselves.

Each of the participants then completed a test that measured their “implicit self-esteem” which is a measure of how they subconsciously felt about their partners scoring higher. This is a test involves seeing how rapidly subjects link good or bad words with themselves. For instance a person with good implicit self-esteem would see the word “me” on a screen and link it to the word “excellent” rather than “bad”.

The results showed that men who believed that their partner scored in the top 12 per cent had significantly lower self-esteem than those who believed that their partner who had scored in the bottom 12 per cent. By contrast, women’s implicit self-esteem did not alter.

Further research showed that whenever men were asked to think about times when their partner had succeeded, even if they were not in direct competition, their own implicit self-esteem suffered.

So it seems that there is a tendency in men, of course not all men all the time, to interpret their partner’s success as their own failure. Why this might be so remains to be seen but it is not a judgement on men but more of a word to the wise. When your partner succeeds it might be a time to joy in their accomplishment but also to engage in a little self-nurturing as well. After all, a touch of self-care never goes astray.