Love-shyness

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 because of strong feelings of anxiety. 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 on Gilmartin's description in his book.

Gilmartin's definition

Gilmartin had seven criteria for each "love-shy" man he included in his study:

He is male.
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.

Gilmartin 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, and suspected that the condition would manifest very differently in them.

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. 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. Gilmartin's non-shy men were not intended to represent the average male, and were recruited only if they were highly social.

Temperament and personality

The love-shy men in Gilmartin's sample had significant differences in temperament from the non-shy men. They scored significantly lower on Extraversion, and higher on Neuroticism than the non-shy men on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. In Eysenck's terms, they had a melancholic temperament. Most of the love-shy men (and only few of the non-shy men) reported that their mothers had often said that they had been quiet babies, which Gilmartin suggests is evidence that love-shys are more likely to fit Jerome Kagan's description of behavioral inhibition.

Interactions with peers

Most of the love-shy men, and none of the non-shy men, reported never having any friends. The vast majority of love-shy men reported being bullied by children their own age, while none of the non-shy men did, and love-shy men were less likely to fight back against bullies. Around half of the love-shy men reported being bullied or harassed as late as high school, while none of the non-shy men did.

Adjustment and psychopathology

Gilmartin's love-shy men were poorly-adjusted and high in rates of psychopathology. He found that the love-shy men had considerably more violent fantasies, were much more likely to believe that nobody cared about them, and were much more likely to have difficulties concentrating. He also found a tendency in some of the love-shy men to stare compulsively at women they were infatuated with or even stalk them, but without being able to talk to them, which sometimes got them in trouble with school authorities. Most of the love-shy men reported experiencing frequent feelings of depression. Also, many love shy men have parents who disallow them to go on dates and have trouble circumventing it; they can also be convinced regardless of having permission to do so. Also, many love-shy men have had had their privacy overinvaded.

Career, money and 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.

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.

One love-shy men he interviewed insisted, "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!"

Top Ten Love-Shy Movies (1945-80)

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

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

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

Other notable attributes

According to Gilmartin, love-shy men:

often feel women are more privileged than men
are in below-average physical shape as a group
tend to be less interested in sports
tend to be more interested in movies and music, and prefer watching different types of movies from non-love-shy men
place great, often disproportionate importance on physical beauty (especially facial beauty)
are not as likely to be interested in male friendships
develop interest in females at an earlier age than usual, particulary in the third to fifth grade range
often only want to have female children
often have a hard time expressing their emotions
are sometimes passive aggressive
are melancholic
often have had a physically difficult birth
have low energy levels; show little interest in physical and sporting activities, as well as difficulty getting out of bed in the morning
were usually quiet as infants, while non-love-shy men are rarely so
often have tense, nervous, angry and/or two-faced mothers who disallow dates with people
often have no sisters, and rarely have more than one
often are very serious
often had no adults to turn to for emotional support as children, and continue to be that way as adults
often felt they had little influence on family decisions as children
are easily upset
are plagued with other psychological limitations as well.

Gilmartin's theory

Causes of love-shyness

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, which reviewer Elizabeth Rice Allgeier, Ph.D. stated "waters down the potential impact of his writings."

Love-shyness, sexual orientation, and gender

Gilmartin believes that love-shyness would have the most severe effect on heterosexual males, because of gender roles. He claims that it may be possible for both shy 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. According to Gilmartin, shy women are just as likely as non-shy women to date, to marry, and to have children, while this is not the case for heterosexual men. Love-shy heterosexual men normally have no informal social contact with women (virtually by definition). They cannot date, marry, or have children, and many of these men never experience any form of intimate sexual contact. Gilmartin found that third parties such as parents and friends are often inconsiderate of the difficulties of love-shy men, and reluctant to aid them in finding girlfriends.

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.

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 ^*, he felt "as many as 40 percent of the cases of severely love-shy men would qualify for a diagnosis of 'Asperger's Syndrome'".

References

Brian G. Gilmartin (1987). & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment (excerpts in HTML, full document as .PDF file) (ISBN 0819161020).
Brian G. Gilmartin (1987). "Peer group antecedents of severe love-shyness in males". Journal of Personality 55: 467-89 .
Brian G. Gilmartin (1989). The Shy Man Syndrome: Why Men Become Love-Shy and How They Can Overcome It. (ISBN 0819170097).
Elizabeth Rice Allgeier (1988). Book Review: Shyness & Love: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment. Journal of Sex Research 25 (2): 309-315.
Sue Johanson (2004). Sex, Sex, and More Sex (ISBN 0060566663).
Judy Kuriansky (2004). Complete Idiot's Guide to Dating Third Edition (ISBN 1592571530).

External links

love-shy.com - support hub for the love-shy

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