Love-shyness

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The term love-shyness was used by psychologist Brian G. Gilmartin to describe a specific type of severe chronic shyness. In 1979 he received a grant from Auburn University to study the problem. According to his definition, published in Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatments, love-shy people find it difficult to be assertive in informal situations involving potential romantic or sexual partners. For example, a love-shy heterosexual male will have trouble initiating conversations with women, since they are suspicious that the other party is reluctant. Dr. Gilmartin researched this phenomenon exclusively in heterosexual males.

Gilmartin's book was published in 1987 by University Books, and in 1989 that publisher's subsidiary Madison Books published an abbreviated version with a new foreword by E. Michael Gutman, then president of the Florida Psychological Society, and Chief Psychiatrist for Mental Health Services, Orange County, Florida. After falling out of print, Gilmartin's book did not attract a lot of attention, though usenet posts from the mid-1990s on indicate it was still being read, and Gilmartin notes that "Over the years" he had "received letters and e-mails from all over." His work was translated into Japanese, and in 1995 Gilmartin visited Japan to promote it.

It began finding many new English language readers as a result of excerpts posted on the newsgroup alt.support.shyness in 2001 and an Angelfire webpage, and by the subsequent creation of a Yahoo! Group for further discussion of the book. Further readers can be attributed to the recommendation of the book by popular TV sex guru Sue Johanson in her book Sex, Sex, and More Sex. Additionally, Dr. Judy Kuriansky notes in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Dating that Nobuku Awaya, a Japanese author, created a program of "practice dating" based it on Gilmartin's description in his book.

Contents

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Gilmartin's definition

Gilmartin said the love-shy men he studied all conformed to each and every one of the following seven characteristics:

  • He is a virgin.
  • He is a person who very rarely goes out socially with women.
  • He is a person without a past history of any emotionally close, meaningful relationships of a romantic and/or sexual nature with any member of the opposite sex.
  • He is a person who has suffered and is continuing to suffer emotionally because of a lack of meaningful female companionship. In short, he is a person who desperately wishes to have a relationship with a woman, but does not have one because of shyness.
  • He is a man who becomes extremely anxiety-ridden over so much as the mere thought of asserting himself vis-a-vis a woman in a casual, friendly way. This is the essence of "love-shyness".
  • He is a man who is strictly heterosexual in his romantic and erotic orientations. In other words, he is a person who is in no way a homosexual.
  • He is male.

He did not rule out the existence of female or homosexual love-shy people, but he doubted they would feel the same negative effects as heterosexual men. Thus the condition would manifest very differently in them.

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Results of Gilmartin's research

According to Gilmartin, people of all ages, all sexual orientations, and both genders can be love-shy. However, in Gilmartin's opinion, the negative effects of love-shyness manifest themselves almost exclusively in heterosexual men. Because of this belief, Gilmartin's study included only heterosexual men. He studied 200 love-shy college students (aged 19-24), 100 older love-shy men (aged 35-50), and a comparison group of 200 'non-shy' college students.

Because of gender roles in Western society, it may be possible for both women and homosexual men to become involved in intimate relationships without needing to take any initiative, simply by waiting for a more assertive man to initiate the relationship. Shy women are just as likely as non-shy women to date, to marry, and to have children.Template:Fact This is not the case for heterosexual men. Love-shy heterosexual men therefore normally have no informal social contact with women. They cannot date, marry, or have children, and many of these men never experience any form of intimate sexual contact with others. Third parties are often inconsiderate of their difficulties, and reluctant to aid them in finding a girlfriend.

Gilmartin notes that love-shy men are frequently assumed to be homosexual, because of their perceived lack of interest in women. Additionally, he notes that many heterosexual love-shy men are not interested in friendships with other men. This, combined with their lack of success in initiating contact with women, causes feelings of loneliness, alienation, and sometimes depression.

Gilmartin estimates that love-shyness afflicts approximately 1.5 percent of American males. According to Gilmartin, love-shyness is, like most human psychological characteristics, the result of some combination of biological (genetic/developmental) and environmental (cultural, familial, religious, etc.) factors (see also: nature versus nurture).

Gilmartin believes that shyness is a condition which needs to be cured. He claims that "SHYNESS IS NEVER HEALTHY" (his capitalisation).

He mentions several possible biological causes of love-shyness, most notably low maternal testosterone during fetal development, nasal polyps and hypoglycemia.

Crucial factors exacerbating negative development during the love-shy male's childhood are:

- School bullying. Love-shy boys are vulnerable to bullying from their peer group, due to their shyness and inhibition. Non-conformism to peer group norms also makes the boy a target through no fault of his own.

- Parental upbringing. Where a child receives primarily negative stimuli from his parents (e.g. corporal punishment, verbal abuse, criticism, 'put-downs', negative comparisons, indifference) this will most likely cause the boy to retreat further and further into his 'shell'.

With so many negative stimuli from crucial relationships in one's childhood, the love shy boy becomes a social isolate. He learns to associate these crucial interactions (i.e. with parents, peer group) with hurt feelings and is likely to avoid social interaction. Social isolation becomes a 'vicious circle' for the love-shy individual as the years go by, and inhibits his chances in interaction with the opposite sex, as well as in other crucial areas of life such as his career.

Gilmartin makes references to subject areas widely regarded as pseudoscience such as astrology, reincarnation, past life regression and Kirlian aura (page 15) to support his research, a fact that reviewer Elizabeth Rice Algeier, Ph.D. stated "waters down the potential impact of his writings."

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Career, Money & Education

Gilmartin noted that the 100 older love-shy men studied were experiencing well above average career instability. Even though almost all of these older love-shys had successfully completed higher education, their salaries were well below the US average. They were typically, if anything, underemployed and were working in jobs such as taxi driving, or in lower level clerical or telemarketing jobs. At the time of Gilmartin's research (1979-1982), 3.6% of college graduates in the USA were unemployed. The unemployment rate for the older love-shy men was 16%.

Being single men, the older love-shy men all lived in apartments, but no doubt due to their financial situation most of them lived in less than attractive neighbourhoods. It is notable that none of the older love-shys Gilmartin studied owned their home. While many of these men were excellent students, the effects of their shyness impacted on their life chances in their careers every bit as much as it inhibited their love lives.

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Music

According to Gilmartin, the love-shy tended to prefer vocal love ballads, Broadway show music, brassy jazz music, easy listening, film soundtracks, and light classical works. A few of them mentioned having a strong liking for country and western. On the other hand, rock music of any kind tended to be strongly disliked by the love-shys.

Simply put, love-shy men prefer anything with rich and beautiful melody; and they dislike anything which is noisy, loud, dissonant, or unmelodic. For most of the love-shys, melody appears to be the most important element in music.

He mentions an anecdotal case of a love-shy person who says "I like to sing the love ballads of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and the like. All they had us sing was religious and patriotic garbage. I hate religious and patriotic music!"

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Love-shyness and mainstream psychology

Love-shyness is not recognized as a mental disorder by the World Health Organisation or American Psychiatric Association. It does share some characteristics with commonly recognized mental disorders, however.

Like people who have a specific social anxiety, love-shy people can be very anxious in informal social situations.

Like people who are afflicted with an avoidant personality disorder, love-shy people feel uncomfortable in many informal social situations, and typically avoid opportunities for social contact.

Like people with attachment anxiety, love-shy people worry intensely that their relationship attachments aren't good enough.

Their impairment of functioning in social interactions bears some similarities to the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome or Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder. For example, like people who have Asperger's syndrome, love-shy men often have a hard time developing peer relationships. In a March 6, 2004 letter by Gilmartin [1], he felt "as many as 40 percent of the cases of severely love-shy men would qualify for a diagnosis of 'Asperger's Syndrome'".


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Top Ten Love-Shy Movies (1945-80)

The movies most repeatedly seen by the American love-shy in Gilmartin's study:

  1. Jeremy (1973)
  2. David and Lisa (1962)
  3. Forbidden Games (1952)
  4. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1965)
  5. The Graduate (1967)
  6. Butterflies Are Free (1972)
  7. Marty (1955)
  8. Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
  9. Romeo and Juliet (1968)
  10. Nobody Waved Goodbye (1965)

According to Gilmartin, the full list of 63 repeatedly seen movies can be classified into two categories:

  1. "heavy", emotionally engrossing love stories, and
  2. escapist musicals with a strong romantic flavor.
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References

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See also

it:Timidezza d'amore

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