How to Be a More Supportive Partner

Some of the most important moments in romantic relationships occur when your partner shares something difficult about his or her life with you. Even though most people want to understand their partner and be supportive in these situations, sometimes it’s hard to know what to say.

In this illuminating animation of by Brene Brown’s TED talk, one can see the important differences between responding with sympathy ("At least...") versus empathy ("I'm glad you told me") when people share something hard from their life. Sympathy involves feeling pity for someone else, and even though that feeling may be well intended from listeners, no one likes to feel like someone feels sorry for them. Empathy is harder because it involves putting yourself in the other person’s emotional shoes, which takes a tremendous amount of attention to what they are saying, effort to truly understand how they feel about it, and then sincerely conveying this understanding.

In laboratory studies that test men and women’s empathy, men have traditionally performed worse than women, which may come as no surprise to some people. However, new research including brain-imaging studies looking for differences between men and women’s capacity for empathy and studies that incentivize men’s empathic accuracy with monetary rewards, suggest that men have the ability to be just as empathic as women. As one of my professors was fond of saying, “There’s a difference between ability and motivation.”

So, it seems that lack of motivation, rather than lack of ability is the better explanation. Sometimes, this might be due to men not paying enough attention to understand. Alternatively, some men might understand and want to express their empathy, but just don’t know what to say. For the latter type of guy, the advice at the end of this video is about as good as it gets.