Men equally affectionate as wives

A study by the University of Texas found husbands and wives are equally romantic, but they express their feelings in different ways. Researchers at the university interviewed 168 couples at four points in their marriage, Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday. Husbands and wives were questioned separately about how close and attached they felt to their partners, as well as a number of questions about each other's behavior over the past 24 hours. Researchers found wives "seem to show love by tending to the emotional climate of their marriages" while husbands' love "appears to create an environment that draws spouses together in activity." "Contrary to the notion that women are more inclined than men to show love through affection, husbands were just as likely as wives to express their love by engaging in warm, intimate behaviors," the researchers wrote in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. "Moreover, contrary to the popular notion that wives' ability to love outshines that of men, it appears that husbands may actually use a wider range of behaviors to show their love than wives," they said. "To shamelessly abuse the metaphor, we did not find men in a Martian cave nor women in a Venusian garden, but rather in separate neighborhoods of the same town."