It is a matter of no small wonder that amid all the urgent public and private conversation about the condition of women carried on throughout this nation for nearly two decades now there has been so little said on the subject of men. After all, without men there is no such thing as women—and vice versa. The very same nature that made them separate has entailed them beyond extrication. To be sure, the women’s movement has devoted a considerable amount of thought and energy to analyzing and characterizing the male principle, but only as a principle and almost exclusively in terms of the uses of that principle in subjugating the female. Of the actual condition of the actual living men under its collective nose the movement has, to put it mildly, been singularly unmindful.

Such references as the movement has made to men on earth, as opposed to men-in-the-head, have focused on a range of experience apt to be quite unrecognizable to anyone who has been alive for less than a hundred years. The widely hailed gynosociologist Jesse Bernard, for instance, collected statistics designed to prove that middle-aged married men are in far better shape, psychically and even physically, than middle-aged married women. Dr. Bernard’s statistics had mainly to do with such indicators as the onset of clinical depression, but they have been used widely to suggest that getting married relieves a man of his heaviest burdens and places them instead squarely on his wife. Perhaps even more puzzling to the ordinary observer than the idea of all those stable, happy, and healthy middle-aged men and their depressed and sickly wives are the numerous allusions found in the movement’s literature to the ways in which husbands of the American middle class regularly strike terror to the hearts of their cowering wives and children (though frequently one or another of the movement’s leaders, when asked, will confide that her own husband has been most, to use the current favorite word for it, “supportive”).

It would of course be foolish to expect a group of women engaged in pursuing its special interests precisely by adopting an adversarial sexual posture to be more searching about the real state of affairs among its adversaries. But what of the men themselves? With only three or four notable exceptions (the names of George Gilder, Steven Goldberg, and Michael Levin come immediately to mind), men have chosen to respond to the assorted charges of bullying, selfishness, bigotry, exploitation, harassment, and emotional frigidity—leveled against them from virtually every public platform in the land and often in the privacy of their own homes as well—with bowed heads and bitten tongues. Why should this be?

As might be expected, the glibbest answer has come to be the commonest: because, runs this explanation, the men are guilty. They are guilty in two senses of the word, both guilty as charged and full of guilty feelings. Yet based on society’s rich record of experience with other forms of popularly proclaimed guilt, such as liberal guilt, filial guilt, and parental guilt, no woman who has gone to war against men would be well advised to account herself quite so quickly and so easily the victor. Common sense—admittedly a resource that has since the Garden of Eden been in short supply when it comes to relations between the sexes—would dictate a bit of skepticism. Even the most sensitive of men, of women too, for that matter, could hardly be brought sincerely to acknowledge a lifetime of sin overnight.

So why have men responded to the women’s movement as, in general, they have—that is, with a goodly amount of nervous giggling, a lesser but still not inconsiderable amount of protested sympathy, and a very great deal, perhaps a decisive deal, of complaisance? Politicians, understandably, suspect that there may indeed be such a thing as the women’s vote and fear to flout it. Judges similarly have shown themselves to be particularly susceptible to all the items on a rapidly expanding roster of fashionable social theories, and they in turn have succeeded in convincing many employers of the costly but convenient virtues of compliance with their findings. But husbands, lovers, teachers, colleagues, and classmates?

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The answer to this question promises to tell us something of central importance about ourselves. That is why one takes up the recently published American Couples,¹ the report of a huge sociological study of the current terms and conditions of coupledom undertaken by Drs. Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, with deep—and not unrewarded—curiosity. Like many another tome about the sexes that has appeared among us over the past decade, American Couples is grounded in the belief that, in the words of the authors, “the social change of the past twenty years has given rise to new options in living as couples.” So it is that among the kinds of couples examined with balanced attention are husbands and wives, cohabitors, homosexual men, and lesbians. Nevertheless, it is the first such research effort to give not only equal time but equally dispassionate time to the feelings and attitudes of the heterosexual men involved, the husbands and boyfriends of the women whose new possibilities for self-realization have been trumpeted as a turning point in human existence. Moreover, the areas covered include not only the obligatory secrets of sex but also work and that nowadays quite neglected factor in family relations, money.

The authors begin, as no doubt anyone attempting to think about coupledom under the aspect of “new options” would be impelled to do, with the current divorce rate. “The frustrating fact is that there is no guarantee of permanence. All kinds of couples, married and unmarried, heterosexual and homosexual, are seeking guidance because their relationships are in jeopardy.” The authors wish to understand why this is so, not historically, not from the outside, but, like all obedient contemporary social researchers, in terms of individual feelings and choices. In obeisance to the present-day impermanence of relationship, the discussion here is rounded off with an account of which of the 300 couples studied—72 married, 48 cohabiting, 90 male homosexual, 90 lesbian—have broken up since the onset of the research. In between, there are the results, both anecdotal and statistical, of lengthy questionnaires, hours of taped interviews, and so on, divided under the authors’ three main topics, money, work, and sex.

Like so much of social science based on the proposition that if you want to know what is going on with people you ask them and record their answers, much of what the book actually tells us belies its own thesis. The book claims to be treating an unprecedented situation, but one finds in it more continuities with tradition than discontinuities, more of the old than of the new—particularly in the realm so widely advertised as being subject to a revolution, namely sex.

Women, including lesbians, for example, are still on the whole monogamous, seeking what currently travels under the more spiritual name of “commitment” but is quite recognizable as the old-time, plain-Jane “fidelity.” Nor do they show much greater inclination to be sexual initiators. Indeed, lesbians have considerable trouble with initiating sex and appear to be comparatively sexually inactive. Men, on the other hand, seem, in the absence of any compelling demand on them to be otherwise, inclined toward promiscuity. In all-men, i e., homosexual, relationships, sex almost automatically means promiscuity. Nor are heterosexual men particularly stirred by women who are the sexual aggressors, certainly not over the long run.

Even practical daily matters remain to a surprising degree what they were. Men continue to mind doing housework more than women and continue to perform it, when they do, as a favor. Couples whose male partner has been given fixed and regular household chores tend to quarrel more than others. And women, including professional women, continue to prefer that their men make more money than they, as do the men. (Only lesbians are in general relatively unconcerned about who makes how much money.)

None of this is to say that the transactions of coupledom have not changed. They have. (Here I speak of heterosexual couples only, for homosexuals present to the understanding a completely different set of problems, and to society, a completely different order of consequences.) The “option”—some might say, moral requirement—to dissolve forthwith a marriage or a “living-together arrangement” that is deemed by either partner to be less than satisfactory is itself a change of enormous consequence. Any coupledom entered into under the shadow of the recognition that it need not necessarily be permanent is bound to be affected at its very basis.

It must be said, however, that the weight of this change is distributed rather differently from what is popularly being supposed. Here American Couples is most usefully, if unintentionally, revealing. And here it is at last that we face the question of what the so-called new freedom of women, with its accompanying explosion of disaffection, has come to mean to men.

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Unlike many of the declaratory revolutions of our age, the sexual revolution does at least in one sense deserve its name. Not because, as some like Hugh Hefner would say, it has fundamentally altered the nature of the exchange leading up to and following from the act of sex—actually it hasn’t. Each embracing heterosexual couple still comprises a man seeking sexual release and a woman seeking something far more diffuse call it romance, tenderness, confirmation, affection, or the perennial “commitment.” But the term revolution does apply to the arrangement of things between men and women because that arrangement has involved the creation of an actual new institution, that is, the household without marriage. Although this kind of household has not, at least so far, collected to itself the kind of supports—written laws and unwritten rules—usually associated with the establishment of institutions, it is coming everywhere to be accepted as an institution.²

Couples have different expressed motives for living together without the formality of marriage. In some cases, the partners have been unhappily married before and have no intention, as they say, of making the same mistake twice. In other cases, they are “contemplating” marriage and wish to take out a bit of insurance beforehand. In still others, the burdens, financial as well as administrative, of conducting an intense but possibly temporary love affair from two separate bases of operation make moving in together seem convenient and economical.

Whatever the motive, it is the dynamics of the initial decision to share a household—a process about which, alas, American Couples has little to tell us—that are of particular interest. Let us say a young man meets a young woman who attracts him and, no doubt sooner rather than later, takes her to bed. Chances are, both have been this way before. They like one another, or they “love” one another. They find they have, in the current parlance of coupling, “things in common”—mostly attitudes to self. One (or both) of them—if it is one, it is usually the young man—is not sure that he is ready to commit himself permanently. His therapist, his boss, his friends, his lawyer, his accountant are not sure either. His career is on his mind. He has been burned before. He doubts himself. Still, attractive, appropriate, and available women do not grow on trees, even today. Meanwhile, the woman’s demands on his time and attention grow apace. Furthermore, she has a life out there: a job, a career, or an education to care about, friends, acquaintances, interests. His demands on her time and attention are also growing and, what is more, making him uneasy. She, too, is uneasy. While less afraid of marriage than he, she is being steadily subjected to the idea that she has an obligation to be her own person. Yet she wishes to have a man, one man. In their respective uneasiness, they grow a little tense, perhaps have a jealous quarrel or two. They set out to solve a problem not necessarily named or recognized between them: they will move in together. That way they can have more time together, resolve, they think, certain sexual tensions between them, and at the same time be freer for the other things in their lives. Chances are, then, that their decision has been reached not in joy but in something like anxiety.

In this, they are probably not so very different from couples who decide to get married. Except for one thing. Their household is in its very inception and definition conditional. Neither will be forced, by convention and circumstance, to put up with very much from the other. They have not plighted their trust. They have not thought of having children. They have not stood up before society and taken any vows of fidelity or of mutual cherishing. Marriage vows, to be sure, seem nowadays to be rather more honored in the breach, but they are vows, and to breach them is still to breach them. Cohabitation, made possible in general by the idea that a woman is as free as a man to indulge her sexual inclinations (and in the end made necessary by the fact that those inclinations lean heavily in the direction of monogamy), is not, like marriage, a public declaration of intent but rather a shared secret of convenience.

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But the question remains, and seems from the evidence presented to hover perpetually over the satisfactions of the relationship: whose convenience? The young woman has removed herself, at least for the time being, from the sexual market. This is undoubtedly a great relief to her. She has in addition created for herself an arrangement that according to the analysis of the women’s movement should be ideal. To wit, she has secured the companionship and attentions of a husband without at the same time having to be a wife. She is—happy woman—tied down and at the same time free.

Yet there are serpents, sometimes whole nests of them, in her Eden. For her freedom has also to an unprecedented degree begotten his. She is not his responsibility. Neither her well-being at home, her position in the world, nor, except as it pleases him, her financial security is in any but the most superficial and voluntary sense given over to his keeping. Her decisions about work (except, of course, a decision not to work at all) require no support from him. She has little or nothing to say about how he spends his money. To the extent that she does, there is always that half-open door on the household to threaten or reverse her influence. And as for sex, a subject to which we will return, here, too—or perhaps here above all—there is no ultimate pressure for them to work things out.

As in so many of life’s relations, money is a very good symbol for the nature of the underlying exchange in cohabitation. To the resources invested in their life as a couple, both partners are contributors—usually, equal contributors. And since the woman is apt to make less money than the man, or, to put the matter more precisely, since she is likely to be drawn to a man who makes more money than she, her contribution to the household pool is apt to represent a much greater drain on her income. “Their” money, as opposed to his money or her money, is money jointly decided upon but unequally valenced. We may imagine that couples who live together outside marriage do a good deal of extra bookkeeping, literally and figuratively. In the final accounts, it is a bookkeeping very much to the man’s advantage.

“I don’t ever want to be in the situation again,” says one of Drs. Blumstein’s and Schwartz’s male cohabitors, perhaps a bit more brutally than his better-brought-up fellows would put it, “where some woman expects me to set her up for life.” What then can “some woman” expect him to do? Warm her bed, keep her company when it is not too onerous to do so, hold her hand if and when he has the sympathy to spare, provide a focus, an organizing principle, for her home life, and—it is no small part of her need for him—be her escort in the world of coupledom. By surrendering to the female demand for a parody of domesticity, he has positioned himself to offer no more than a parody of loyalty. After all, “setting some woman up for life,” as he has vowed never again to do, means more than paying her bills.

In short, women’s so-called new freedom to lead their own lives, be their own persons, and make their own money has inevitably, though for advocates of this freedom no doubt unexpectedly, brought about the liberation of men.

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Men who marry would seem to be in a rather different boat. They do make vows, however tentative they and everyone else now understand those vows to be. And they do move into a household with a door that has at least for a while been closed on them and that, while no longer difficult to open, must be opened with the help of society and its legal authorities. But they cannot fail to have been affected by the terms of the new non-marriage. For one thing, in a time when the majority of marriages take place at a later age than they used to, many of these men have already had the experience of cohabitation, at least with their wives and possibly with a couple of other women as well. Such experience is bound to influence their habits of relation.

Indeed, it has often occurred to their elders to wonder how it is and why it is that a man and a woman who are already living together decide to marry at all. It has been quipped—and like many quips this one very likely contains a profound truth—that couples living together often get married in order to be able to get divorced. But there are probably less cynical explanations. No doubt the desire to have children plays some part. Or perhaps the woman, grown restless about what she senses to be the imbalance between them, finds the telling pretext—parents, family, social propriety—in the name of which she successfully presses her demand that he become her husband. (Despite the findings of feminist social science, it is probably safe to assume that most marriages still result from the demands of women.) Nevertheless, the fact that he has already, without having to assume institutional obligations, been provided certain of the comforts of home will color his own demands and expectations.

While marriage does settle the issue of property ownership, and in a large number of cases does also result in the straightforward sharing of money, it no longer seems to settle much else. Particularly under the influence of the culture of “women’s rights,” married couples seem to be forever caught up in the process of making, and remaking, decisions about everything: who does what, whose time is being spent on whose needs and preferences; and in general, who owes what to whom.

One overwhelming impression of American Couples is that the contemporary married couple is a social unit which can expound upon itself at almost endless length. Husbands and wives—particularly but not exclusively those who are members of the educated middle class—can tell any listener sympathetic enough or curious enough to want to hear just how they have ordered things between them from the most intimate to the most humdrum. Some couples quarrel about this, some do not, and some have rather different understandings of the same arrangements. But all of them have been schooled in the knowledge that their marriages are thoroughly describable undertakings. Nowhere in a very long book, for example, is anyone found to be saying in answer to any question, “Gee, I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.” That is because they have thought about it; their ideas about life demand that they do so. Not a dish is washed, or a baby diapered, or a penny allocated in unconsciousness.

Now, the word “decisions” has lately become an honored, if not a downright magical, term among us, conjuring as it does visions of power, autonomy, and mastery Therapists, social workers, and social scientists genuflect before it, as do the feminist activists from whom these others have dutifully taken their cues. It is believed that women who make decisions about everything for themselves, and better yet, also manage to impose these decisions on their men, are doing nothing less than exercising a new-found power to control their own destinies.

In the great play of the diverging interests of men and women, however, the exercise of this power, especially since it is so often done in a spirit of challenge and conflict, has turned marital responsibility into a zero-sum game. What she gains can only be accounted a gain when it can be claimed to be at his expense. Her self-sufficient “decision-making”—about her career, about whether to have an abortion, or about whether or not to cook all the dinners and perform all the tasks of mothering—has become an invitation for her man simply to desert the field. He will accede to her decisions, willingly granting her the opportunity to claim a victory, and then withdraw, emotionally, psychically, and in the end financially. He will withdraw to a place where he too is “autonomous,” if not indeed a complete and solitary atom. Pretending to sensitivity and minding one’s tongue is a small price to pay for relief from having in a more genuine way to be concerned. Call a man a pig often enough and he will soon discover that there is little percentage in not behaving like one.

Here we have one of the new “options” that American Couples, deluded as is so much else in this field by easy notions of social change, totally fails to examine. The men are no less willing than the women to talk freely of things once considered delicate: their sexual performance and preferences, and the effect of having children on both; their feelings about success, their own and that of their wives; the management of money and their attitudes to same. But they say nothing, nor are they asked, about what they feel or even what they think about women, or what they say on the subject to other men. Above all, while there is some discussion about the causes of break-up among the couples who did not stay together—about, say, fighting over money, lack of ambition on the man’s part, lack of sex, infidelity—there is no information about how they broke up: about how they, particularly the men, behaved in breaking up, and most important, about how the fathers of families behaved after the break-up.

A study of these questions is beyond the capability of anyone wielding questionnaires, yet it is the key to any understanding of what is really going on with men and women. The number of young women with young children, for instance, who have liberated themselves straight into total abandonment is a statistic that can only be obtained indirectly. But our eyes and our ears, if nothing else, tell us that number is legion—and growing. In a time when all that is asked of a man is that he appear to accommodate himself to a new kind of relationship with women, breaking up is cost-free and even divorce comes very cheap. He may be loath for many reasons to dissolve his marriage, but once the prospect of dissolution is dangled before him, it would be superhuman of him not to quicken somewhere in his being to the message that it is now every “person” for himself. That this message includes matters financial as well as psychic, any family court in the land can testify.

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Not only has the feminization of coupledom under the new dispensation of women’s sexual freedom led to a terrible degree of self-consciousness, it has led to an even more terrible degree of solemnity. Nowhere in a fat volume devoted to people talking about their lives together is there a single reference to that greatest of all bonding agents, laughter. Nor is there a single good-natured joke, tease, or chaff. True, people cooperating with researchers are almost by definition agreeing to be at their most earnest. Still, the impression is inescapable: coupling has in all its aspects become an unrelievedly pompous business. Even the assumption of sexual positions—surely the ultimate reminder of the sheer comedy of being alive—is discussed, measured, and counted as if who goes on top were a social fact of the most telling importance. No doubt each couple could supply a fully articulated explanation of its practices in this respect, and no doubt these explanations would all be cast in terms of the assertiveness or lack of assertiveness of the woman.

Such solemnity is bound to have a far more dampening effect on men than on women. Sex and the kind of coupledom it sooner or later catches men up in is not a voluntary undertaking for them. Rather, it must be experienced by them as a force over which they try to gain some control. Traditionally, they were promised by women that achieving this control would pay off for them in many other ways. The sexes had a deal: husbanding for wiving. Between them, provided they could be light-hearted and accepting enough, they could arrive at some modus vivendi fairly satisfactory to both. Sometimes, in an amused and sympathetic recognition of their respective different needs, they could achieve marvels of friendship—enough for a lifetime. Now, at least theoretically, there is supposed to be neither husbanding nor wiving, but rather an amalgam of separate, responsibly choosing, neither feminine nor masculine, individuals. In reality, of course, things seldom work out this way. Even Drs. Blumstein and Schwartz, forward-looking though they are, did now and then come across a couple who seemed to be friends in the sense described here. Ideally, however, male-female relationships are supposed to aspire to the homogeneous (a better word would be androgynous). Though ostensibly brought to pass by women, this is a cheat for women, because they not only need but prefer to be wives. But it is, paradoxically, a kind of boon to men. By agreeing to take part in the pretense that they no longer demand wiving, they free themselves from the need to be husbands. And all in the name of seriousness and sensitivity to women.

Few men, for example, would any longer be caught dead insisting that their wives stay home and look after the children. Some men actually insist the other way. The prospect of extra income in a time of high living standards accounts for some of this, but mainly it relieves them of the demand to pay real attention to the daily doings of the household. They profess among other things to find their working wives more interesting people, the preferred cant formulation being that a woman’s job outside the home has helped her to “grow.” The truth is that the husband of a working wife no longer needs to be as interested in her, or, possibly more to the point, as interesting to her; the outside world is taking care of both.

Bluntly put, men have been cut loose. And cut loose, not only by divorce but long before (indeed, long before marriage), they have every reason to display their compliance with the feminist revolution.

We have seen the fruits of the new coupledom for women. If it were truly to their liking, or truly beneficial to them, they would have cause to be more cheerful in their relations with men than they once were. But of course they are not; on the contrary. Not a night goes by on television—to take only the most public forum—when individual women or groups of women cannot be seen expressing their current discomfiture. Some of these women claim that their discomfiture arises from the fact that the revolution has not yet gone far enough. Some claim that their uneasiness arises from the fact that they themselves have not gone far enough, that they have not yet succeeded in erasing from their souls the last dying vestiges of centuries—or is it millennia?—of conditioning: they cannot be aggressive enough, they fear success, they are still saddled with the impulse to be “good,” and so on. Some, and their number seems to be growing, are merely inarticulate and incoherent, saying something in one sentence and taking it back in the next. All, all, are still dissatisfied. The feeling that they have made real progress still escapes them. Through it all are their male interlocutors, smiling and nodding and keeping the secret.

Off camera, where women, especially educated young women, congregate to speak unofficially to one another, they do not say that men are oppressors, manipulators, pigs. They say that men are “wimps.” And they say it with if anything greater—though quieter—hostility than their activist sisters have mustered in excoriating men for their brutality. What these educated young women mean by wimps they themselves do not know and cannot precisely say. They tell stories that, without their being able themselves to pinpoint the difficulty, are stories of sickly vanity, of self-preoccupation, of fears and narcissistic anxieties—in other words, of unmanliness. Without being quite conscious of it, deprived of the language in which to define it, they are complaining to one another of male withdrawal.

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But the great liberation given to men by the terms of the declared liberation of women—is it in the end a benefit even to them? Is “liberation” what people need, men or women? Specifically, is what they need the liberation of the sexes from one another, from the burdens that they represent to one another, from their dependence on one another, from the power—yes, even the coercive power—they exercise over one another? That women have grown glum with whatever successes they have so far achieved in liberating themselves from men cannot be denied. But the men?

When a woman falls carelessly into a man’s bed rather than being either drawn, inveigled, or ultimately pushed there, when her sexual partnership costs him nothing in the way of pursuit, by that much does the force of sex in a man’s life decline. The accomplishment will be all in the performance, and the performance in turn will corrode his energies with the acids of self-consciousness.

When the money he earns remains spending money rather than the means for taking on the manly duty to support others, by that much will his earning of it, and his spending of it, come to seem without consequence. Not for nothing do married men with real dependents tend to earn more and tend to be more nourished by their achievements. Fathers who do not support their children are these days supplied with many helpful rationalizations, such as that it should be society’s responsibility, their own primary “responsibility” being to themselves. But in the long or not so long run, they are beset by the symptoms of a decisive diminution of self-respect. If they are ghetto kids, they spend their lives hanging out on street corners. If they are members of the middle class, they grow truculent and defensive in their own style, often on the couches or in the group circles of psychotherapy.

Finally, when a man withdraws psychically and emotionally from the no doubt often bewildering and often painful effort to negotiate with the psyches and emotions of women, by that much is he thrown upon the debilitating, inadequate, and boring resources of self. Saints and other geniuses of the spirit may find enough to live on in solitary engagement; ordinary people literally make themselves sick.

Marriage, real marriage as distinct from the new “arrangement” called coupledom, is not heaven and not even in the neighborhood of heaven. But those, especially those women, who think they have willed themselves or contracted themselves or argued themselves into a more reasoned and more just alternative to it have done themselves little good. And those men who have jumped at the chance to reap their own special benefits from the situation have done themselves even less.

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¹ Morrow, 643 pp, $19.50

² This acceptance has not yet, however, produced a satisfactory name for the arrangement Drs. Blumstein and Schwartz and their fellow social scientists have settled on the terms “cohabitation” and “cohabitors.” Many of the people who are themselves involved seem to use the rather more jaunty “cohabs.” It is to be doubted that these terms will widely catch on In the classic example used to illustrate the problem, will parents introducing the young man or woman living with their child say, “This is my child's cohab”? Parents of homosexuals seem to have hit on the simple “roommate” or even simpler “friend.” But in an age of complexities, these terms offer complications of their own.