UF Study: college students unprepared for real-life romance

October 25, 2001

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Popular music and television shows that idealize romance mislead college students, who often don’t expect to encounter conflict in their relationships, a new University of Florida study suggests.

“Even if young men and women are not studying the songs or TV shows, they get the message that these relationships should be romanticized and that’s what they expect,” said Alvin Lawrence Jr., who did the research for his doctoral dissertation in psychology.

A high divorce rate also may explain why the younger generation is less tolerant of discord, he said.

“Years ago, when divorce wasn’t as common, it wasn’t unusual to hear about couples being married 50 years who didn’t really love each other,” he said. Today’s couples are less likely to feel they must stick it out if they don’t get what they want in a relationship, he said.

The idea that successful relationships lack conflict is one Lawrence encountered frequently in a study of dating problems college students face. He surveyed 112 undergraduates enrolled in psychology classes at UF during the fall 2000 semester.

“Accepting conflict as the norm can help men and women feel a little bit better about their relationships and not think of differences as a negative thing,” he said.

Some of the most common differences women reported on the 160-item questionnaire were the other person’s immaturity and being rushed into a sexual relationship. Men complained of having to pay for everything and partners being interested only in their money, the study found.

For women, Lawrence said, these gender differences can best be explained by the bio-evolutionary theory for human mating and courtship behavior, which holds that men and women act in certain ways over generations because it maximizes their chances of producing healthy offspring and continuing their ancestral line.

Women prefer men who are successful and wealthy, for example, because they make better providers for the family. On the other hand, men desire youth and beauty because those attributes have become evolutionary predictors of ability to produce healthy offspring, he said.

“What really drives us is the desire to pass our genes on, to have children and to have them survive,” he said. “We’re all here because our ancestors made choices that were effective, and those strategies then get passed on.”

Doing a better job of explaining problems important to men was a popular theory called “social exchange,” which likens relationships to business transactions in that they are based on a series of deals and trades between partners, Lawrence found.

“Often we’re socialized at a young age to think relationships work out great and your life partner is always going to satisfy you,” he said. “In recognizing that conflicts are a part of any relationship, people will expect them and won’t be caught by surprise.”

Conflicts continue no matter what the stage of the relationship or the age of the partners, Lawrence said. In college, men and women are focused on finding and acquiring partners, but once they’re in a relationship they have a different set of problems, he said.

For example, when a wife complains that her husband is a workaholic and never spends time with the children, it may be that the man works overtime because he wants to earn more money for his family, Lawrence said.

His ambition may be a sign of his commitment to his children, just as his wife’s spending time with them is evidence of hers, he said.

“There’s a lot of emotional reaction to some of these theories from people who think humans should be more sophisticated and beyond such evolutionary and biological forces,” he said. ‘The truth is that humans have existed for at least 100,000 years, but our modern egalitarian view of relationships has only been around for an extremely short period of time relative to that.”