There’s an old joke about a guy being interviewed about who has the final word on decisions in his household. He says that he makes the Important Decisions, while his wife makes the Unimportant Decisions. And what are the important decisions versus the unimportant decisions? Well the important decisions would include things that are very significant, like what US trade policy should be, and who should be nominated to the Supreme Court. Unimportant decisions would be things that are of relatively minor significance, like which house they should buy, how to raise the children and the like.
This pretty much represents the dynamics of most married couples that I’ve seen over the years. And for some cites:
From a study by a team at Iowa State University:
From a Pew Research Center poll:
What follows is what I think are two major factors that influence this dynamic: male ego, and centrality of marriage/relationship differential.
Male ego refers to the need that men have to feel powerful and in control. I would hypothesize that in general women don’t have this need to the same extent. And this manifests itself in the context of a marriage in the following example. Take a stereotypical case in which the issue is what to do that evening, and the man wants to stay home and watch football while the woman wants to go out for the evening. Suppose the man comes in and announces “I’ve decided that tonight we will go out for the evening”, the wife will be happy. She will be getting what she wants, and will not be perturbed by the fact that her husband is the one who made the decision. She might even be more happy that it worked out this way. Less confrontation, plus her husband is looking out for her and wants to make her happy. By contrast, suppose the wife announces “I’ve decided that tonight we stay home and watch the game”, the guy will be happy to get what he wants, but at some level will be disquieted by the fact that his wife made the decision about what to do and not him.
This impacts actual control in two ways. 1) is that husbands have a need for two things (personal preferences and power) while women have a need for one (personal preferences). Any time you have two people is such a situation, there’s going to be some tradeoff, in that the guy with greater needs will need to sacrifice some of what the other one wants in order to get more of what they need in another area. And 2) is that there’s a serious consequence for men in losing arguments - loss of face - that women don’t face to the same degree. A guy knows at the outset that if he decides to try to insist on his priorities and doesn’t end up getting his way he will be shown up as a powerless non-boss, whereas if he decides to pretend - even to himself - that he doesn’t really care that much, or wants to do what is right (or any other excuse) he will be insured against this possibility. Meanwhile the women doesn’t dread this type of loss of face to nearly the same extent if at all, and so has nothing to lose in this regard by trying to get what she wants.
As a practical matter, these lead to a situation where the husband and wife are analogous to the monarch and prime minster of England. The monarch officially leads and rules, but practical power is in the hands of the prime minister, and much of the power that the monarch formally exerts is really a charade in which the monarch formally does what the PM wants.
So that, in the example above, a lot of husbands who would really rather watch the game are going to consider their options either consciously or subconsciously and realize that it might be wiser not to try for it. Because if he “decides” to watch the game, the wife might object, and the outcome might be a smackdown if they end up going out. But if he “decides” to go out, then he gets to be the magnanimous ruler, making kind and generous decisions that benefit the couple as a whole etc. That’s a strong incentive for many men to choose Option B.
For this reason, I suspect that even much of what we think about gender roles in prior generations may be misleading in this regard. And while we think that a “traditional marriage” meant the husband having absolute power, this was so in a formal sense, but that as a practical matter wives exerted enormous influence throughout the ages (though not necessarily the same amount in every generation and society).
The second issue is the centrality of the marriage (or relationship). ISTM, from what I’ve seen and read, that these form a much bigger part of the consciousness of women than of men. And that it’s easier for men to just mentally write off an unhappy marriage and focus on areas outside of the relationship than it is for women.
One might think that this favors male power in relationships, since women will be more motivated to make sacrifices to keep the relationship happy. And this might be true to an extent. But I think on the whole its impact is in the other direction. Because both spouses have their expectations of what the relationship should be like, and what they should be getting out of it. If a man feels that his marriage does not reflect his expectations, and he is not getting what he should be getting, he can write it off, and find something else to focus on. A women is less likely to be happy with this situation, and is more likely to try insistently on trying to make the relationship into what she thinks it could and should be.
What this leads to is more women “trying to change men” than the reverse, and more men saying “OK, whatever you want, just let me have some peace” than the reverse.
I think the above are important factors. There are likely others, e.g. greater hands on expertise about family matters, societal protectiveness of women and a backlash against patriarchy, favorable divorce laws (when children are involved) and so on.
A few disclaimers
#1: This is an attempt to describe a tendency, a situation that seems to exist more often than would be predicted by random chance. It is not an attempt to claim that every marriage/relationship works this way, or that all men and women differ in this manner (or any individual SDMB posters). Further, the differences described, in addition to not being universal, are also gradual and not black-and-white. IOW, men tend to be more of X and women more of Y, rather than men being X and women being Y, and so on.
#2: This is based on my observations, as well as what I’ve read, which is mostly in the US, in the 20th and 21st centuries. Relationship roles are influences by cultural attitudes, which differ in other times and places. I imagine that some of these factors are inherent and would be present in every situation, but this may not be true, and even if it is, they might be overshadowed by other factors in a given culture.
#3: I am not suggesting that men and women consciously think out these thoughts most of the time. As noted, these could be subconsciously influencing their actions, much in the way that subconscious thoughts influence so much else of what people do. And particularly once patterns are established, much of what happens in a relationship is driven by habit, with even less conscious thought involved, but ultimately based on underlying factors.