Connor Beaton explains why women often resist accountability in relationships: men gain status through direct confrontation, women through maintaining social harmony. He advises men to regulate themselves first, reassure their partner that admitting mistakes won't threaten the relationship, and avoid dominating or demanding.
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All right, team, welcome back. Today we are going to be talking about the long awaited topic about women and accountability. Now, after working with couples for a very long time and working with thousands of men for over a decade, one big question has continued to come up over and over and over again, especially from men, which is why can't women take accountability when they are in the wrong in a relationship? You've probably seen the online memes and the videos and the jokes and this isn't some biased narrative or perspective. This is something that a lot of women openly admit to struggling with. They say, I struggle to take accountability in a relationship. I struggle to take ownership for my part of the relationship. Or they have a couple relationships where the exact same challenge happens over and over again. The relationship ends and they finally come to a place of saying, maybe it wasn't all those guys, maybe I had something to do with that. And they reflect and finally come to the realization that there was some part that they played in it. And so I'm going to do two things in this video. I'm going to break down why women are not incentivized to take accountability in a relationship and why there are certain structures that actually lead to women being disincentivized towards accountability. And I'm going to talk to you guys about how you can actually support accountability in your relationship. Because I think one of the most frustrating things for men, for all of us guys in a relationship, is when our partner, when a woman, our girlfriend or wife can't take accountability. They can be very, very frustrating because it's, it can actually halt and diminish the connection and the intimacy and the growth and the progress of a relationship. And oftentimes men will take over accountability, which can lead to the perception that men are the problem in the relationship. Let's dive in. Why do women avoid accountability? And why do some women, again, not all women, this isn't for every single one. So before ladies, you start to go in the comments and tell me that you are the exception, and before I hear the not me's, assume ladies, that I am not talking about you personally or directly. I'm talking about a generality. This isn't a universal right. Not every single woman on the face of the planet struggles with accountability. This is about the ones that do. So first and foremost, there are different social strategies between men and women when it comes to status. So men gain social clout and men gain social status through accountability, through responsibility. And men who build themselves to take on more accountability, to gain more status, they are required to take accountability. And you can see this in the socialization of young girls and boys, where there is much more stricter punishment on boys. You can see this in jail times. You can see this in the stats and the data between men and women who commit the exact same crime. Men will be punished on average, quite a bit more than women. There's a different expectation that part of being a man and part of being good at being a man is taking accountability, Whereas women gain status through social cohesion. So it's less about accountability and it's more about agreeableness. And often this is at all costs, men will attack issues directly with other men. So when there's a problem between men that are in a social group, they will force another man to take accountability, upholding moral or ethical rule. Right? So if there's a guy in a group that's really stepping out of line or he's betrayed another man, usually that man will be confronted and he will be forced to take accountability. Right? Men are generally the ones upholding rules, laws, ethics, values. It's not to say that women don't do that, but within our system, generally, it is men who are holding other men and women accountable to to ethics and morals and the rule of law. Whereas within women, when somebody steps out of line, the way to socially punish that person or keep that person in line is not always through direct confrontation and holding that woman accountable. It is often things like reputation attacks and slandering and gossiping that are deployed to try and get some type of social coherence or obedience or following the rules, however you want to frame that. The aim is similar between men and women, but the tools that are deployed are different. Men will use direct confrontation, they will use accountability. Women will generally use things, again, like I said, like reputation attacks or gossiping to try and have a woman that is maybe out of line or disconnected from the rest of the social group to try and sort of keep her in line. The first thing is to stop trying to command or overpower her into accountability. What a lot of men will do when a woman isn't taking accountability for her part in a conflict, in an argument, in some type of dysfunction in the relationship, they will immediately move to anger or aggressiveness. And they will try and either demand through logic and rationality, or they will try and dominate and overpower that woman into a kind of a submission, into accountability. And this is very, very harmful for the trust between you and her if she feels like you are trying to dominate her, into submissiveness, into accountability. She will likely always fight back and it will make it much harder for her to see her part because she will feel threatened by you and as maybe as she should. So you have to move out of and see how you might be approaching the the conversation around her taking accountability or her actions from a place of demanding accountability or trying to dominate her into accountability which will never produce the result that you want. So where do you begin? You start by regulating when something has happened. You need to begin by making sure that you are in a grounded and as calm place as possible in order to engage in the conversation of around accountability with the woman that you are with. If you are dysregulated, if you are overly volatile, that conversation's not going to go anywhere because that emotional volatility will be the thing that either she uses or becomes an excuse or becomes the thing that she's afraid of that doesn't allow for the conversation about accountability to actually happen properly. The next thing is reinforcing that there is nothing wrong with her and that her taking accountability or owning what has happened is not going to be a threat to the relationship. So you have to reinforce there's nothing wrong with her. There's not something faulty or defective about her and what you're talking about is not a threat to the relationship. Maybe it might feel like that in the bigger picture, but you want to reinforce, hey, I want to have a conversation with you about something that's not okay, Sam.
