Are you a John or a Neal?

I have two good friends in Saint Louis, John and Neal. There were my “non-psychology” friends in graduate school who fed me and kept me sane. They were also the friends who helped me move from Saint Louis to Chicago, and drove up to help me move again after my divorce. They came to our commitment ceremony and met my parents, and showed up to my 40th birthday party. There are really the only people, aside from family, I’ve consistently stayed connected to over an 18 year period. They have also been together for over 25 years, which makes them the longest-running-committed-gay-couple I know.

Every Saturday after Thanksgiving, they throw a Holiday Brunch. The food is amazing, the company is wonderful, and you always see someone you haven’t seen in years and meet someone new you wouldn’t have met otherwise. This year I talked at length with a fellow named Patrick. He’s in school getting a master’s degree, working with Teach for America, and his dream is to return to Saint Louis to start a new kind of school and learning experience for inner-city kids. We talked about teaching, education, generational differences (he’s about 20 years younger), and the topic of some of his course papers.

You see, he’s straight, but also very interested in gay couples and how we work, live, love, form families… He’s written several course papers on gay couples, reading scholarly literature and interviewing a gay couple to understand an “insider’s perspective” on it. And so, when he met me and my partner, he asked me the question…

“Are you a John or a Neal?”

John and Neal are the only gay couple he’s known, and every non-book-related thing he knows about gay couples he learned from them. At first the question struck me as tiny bit like the typical heterosexist question, “Which one of you is the woman?”, which assumes that gay and lesbian couples follow the “normal” model of couples functioning seen in heterosexual couples. However, I realized he was trying to understand us not from a heterosexual perspective, but from the only gay relationship template he has - John and Neal. John is the logical, calm, practical one. Neal is the creative, excitable, and “artistic” one. That’s not to say one never shows the traits of the other, but rather that they tend to love, work, and play that way. It has nothing to do with making money, house work and repairs, career interests, hobbies, intimacy… It really is about finding a person who is sufficiently different from you to balance out your weaknesses and benefit from your strengths, but not too different so as to be hard to connect and relate to.

What does this have to do with psychology in everyday life? I have two thoughts…

First, Jacobson and Christensen have based their theory of couples therapy (Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy) on sound research which supports this. The idea is that people in happy relationships are different but closer to the sufficiently different end of the continuum. Individuals in unhappy relationships are also different, but unfortunately are closer to the too different end. The things that drew them to each other originally now drive them apart. Therapy is focused on helping them learn to recognize this, and appreciate the complementarity while managing the clashes. Their therapy work is effective, works with couples who find other therapies ineffective, and has results that last after therapy is over.

Several others joined our conversation after a while, including some straight folks, and the question was given to them. They easily could identify with one or the other. Patrick felt he was a “John” as he thought in logical, calm, and practical ways. He thought I was too, and that my partner was a “Neal,” which to him highlighted a good match between us. Carol was a “Neal” and her husband Richard was a “John.”

This brings us to my second thought. John Gottman has been conducting research into what makes for a healthy couple for 25 years, and he’s devoted special attention to gay and lesbian couples. He found happy gay and lesbian couples were more upbeat, used humor to diffuse difficult situations, and stayed calm during arguments. They are also less likely to take their partner’s unhappiness as a sign of some fault or failure on their part. This is easier, I think, when all the things tied to gender roles (money, housework and home repair, child rearing responsibilities…) are not forced on to partners, and when even in the difficult times we realize that our partner is very different from us and that difference is what made them attractive to us.

In the end… I think we had a great conversation, and the “John and Neal Model of Couple’s Functioning,” while perhaps not exactly what was examined in the literature, received good “real world” validation.