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LOVE SHYNESS as ‘DEVIANCY’

Another experimental study with clear implications for our understanding of love-shy males was conducted by Freedman and Doob (1968) at Stanford University. Using a clever experimental manoeuvre, they made some of their subjects feel "different" from those around them, whereas other experimental subjects were made to feel "pretty much like others of their own age and sex." Hence, subjects who were told (after taking

a battery of personality tests) that they were very unlike others of their age and sex tended to elect working alone on a contrived experimental task. This was especially true if none of the other experimental subjects in the room knew that they (the deviant subjects) were actually "deviant". More succinctly, most of the experimental subjects run by Freedman and Doob chose to work in a group with other people. The only subjects who chose not to work in a group with other people were either (1) those who had been made to feel "deviant" as a result of being shown fake personality test results that made them appear to be highly "deviant", and (2) those whose real or actual personality test profiles indicated that they were indeed (in reality) quite different from others of their age and sex.

Love-shy men are, of course, quite demonstrably "deviant". How, indeed, could a totally virginal, heterosexual man in his thirties or forties be anything but "deviant"! Most of the 300 love-shy men studied for this book were even more "deviant" than that, inasmuch as most of them had never even kissed (or been kissed) by a girl or woman! Many of them had never even dated. In this sense, severely love-shy men must be considered quite directly analogous to Freedman and Doob's "unknown deviant" laboratory condition. Thus, you cannot spot a 40-year old male virgin on the street just by looking at him. You cannot spot a severely love-shy 19-year old male who has never been kissed, just by looking over a group of 19-year old individuals.

These "deviant" (involuntarily nonconformist) men tend to be quite embarrassed about their non-behavior, about the fact that their "non-behavior" is at drastic variance with their value systems, and about the way their interpersonal anxiety with women has dominated and ruled over their lives. Thus, we might reasonably guess that most of them don't especially care to be "found out" or "exposed"--as could quite easily happen within the context of any all-male peer group.

And, of course, many love-shy men further feel that the all-male peer group will misperceive them as "homosexuals". After all, how can 19-50 year old men who are totally without any form of heterosexual experience (and who are not priests) be anything but homosexual! That is the way popular lay-reasoning works. Most people are not even aware of the fact that about 40 percent of all homosexual men marry; about 35 percent of them have children. And about 80 percent of them pass through a period of quite rampant heterosexual promiscuity before they finally come to terms with and accept their true homosexual identity. Again, homosexuality is a totally different "animal" from heterosexual love-shyness. Doubtless, there are some homosexual love-shys. But they are most assuredly in the minority, just as heterosexual love-shys represent a small minority (1.5 percent) of all heterosexual men.

In sum, people who feel "different" from others of their age and sex are highly unlikely to want to affiliate with friendship groups composed of same-sexed peers. Their desire to hide their deviancy until it is rectified will make them prefer aloneness to being in the company of others who might become hostile and disapproving. Of course, aloneness is not the same as true loneliness. Again, many of the love-shys studied for this book did not appear to suffer very frequently from true loneliness. Most of them preferred to be alone; and most of them tended to seek out solitude from those of their own gender. Unlike a truly lonely person, being "alone" did not usually make the love-shys feel depressed. When they did feel depressed (or angry) it was because they lacked an intimate female companion, NOT because they did not have any friends.

Moreover, there appears to be some indication that even the depression that is caused by being without an opposite sexed intimate tends to dissipate somewhat with advancing age. The older love-shys appeared to be demonstrably less depressed than the younger love-shys--despite the fact that their loneliness scores were higher than those of the younger love-shys. The older love-shys seemed to react to their plight primarily with feelings of anger, cynicism and fatalism. They appeared to be pretty well resigned to their plight, but nevertheless were very angry about it. The younger men appeared to be less cynical and less angry, but more prone to frequent bouts of painful depression-again, related exclusively to being without a girl friend, never to being without male friends.

Because anxiety does not entail any objectively dangerous stimuli, and because it is not warranted from a purely rational standpoint (society stipulates that men are "supposed to be" more rational than women), love-shy men are basically "cowards" who cannot and will not help themselves by "taking the bull by the horns". They have "allowed" their emotions to overrule their rational intellects. Their anxiety state with respect to informal heterosexual involvement further makes them want to be alone in order to avoid the disapprobation of their own gender.

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