The role of gender related attributes and attitudes in showing love to married partners

According to sociostructural theories, men and women are predisposed to express love differently because they are socialized into different gender roles. The goal of this study is to examine to what extent gender differences in showing love could be explained with gender per se, and to what extent with gender related attributes (expressiveness and instrumentality) and attitudes toward gender roles in marriage. We gathered data from 302 married couples from Croatia and 456 married couples from Serbia of different ages (20-82 years) and various urban/rural backgrounds. Instruments that were used in this study were the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ ; Spence, Helmreich & Stapp, 1975), the Attitudes toward Gender Roles Scale (Kamenov, Jugović & Jelić, 2009), and the Ways of Showing Love Scale that was constructed for the purpose of this study. As expected, women were more expressive, less instrumental, and held more egalitarian attitudes than men, but gender accounted for only a small amount of variance for these gender-related attributes and attitudes. We performed regression analyses to examine the extent to which individuals’ trait expressiveness, trait instrumentality, and attitudes toward gender roles (versus gender) predicted their tendency to report showing love to one's partner in various ways. Results have shown slightly different patterns for the Croatian and Serbian sample. While expressivity proved to be a significant predictor for all the different ways of showing love in both cultures, instrumentality was a more important predictor in the Serbian sample and gender attitudes in the Croatian sample. Overall results have shown that although men and women differ in two expressive and two instrumental ways of showing love, gender itself accounted for more variance in domestic and public instrumentality, whereas emotional openness and support and physical affection were better explained by gender related attributes and attitudes.