Harvard study showing husbands don't emotionally support wives in marriages. Is actually completely incorrect

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Another meme, doing the roads is about how men don't emotionally support their wives which is the alleged findings from a Harvard study. You may have seen this being circulated on Facebook, reddit and all of the other usual channels.

The thing is the interpretation of the results are at best fanicful. If you read the actual study there some glaring issues with it. You can read the study yourself here.

Something that is taken out of context is the following synopsis: 

"When Tim came home after emotionally draining days in the classroom, both he and Lisa reported that he was a poor listener. He seemed distracted during Lisa’s recollections about her day and showed less affection and concern for her feelings in general. Consequently, the couple rated the time they spent together as a family worse — tense and less enjoyable. We observed this pattern throughout our sample. When husbands had stressful workdays with extensive emotional demands, they provided less support to their wives. On these days, both spouses often rated the time the family spent together poorly.

In contrast, when wives were put in the same situation, their stressful workdays did not affect how much emotional support they provided to their husbands, nor did it affect the quality of the time the family spent together. When Lisa had an emotionally taxing day at work, for example, she was still able to show up for Tim at home, and hence, the time the family spent together was not affected. Moreover, after a rewarding workday, Lisa provided even more emotional support to Tim, and the overall quality of their family time improved — another pattern we found among the women in sample. When men had a rewarding day at work, however, they did not provide more emotional support to their wives, nor did the quality of family time improve."

Now there are some significant caveats that have been used to make this appear as badly as possible. Note how the original poster says "married couples who BOTH work at least 3 days a week". This is deliberately chosen to suggest that both couples are working equally and yet one is not supporting the other emotinally and it's all the support form the woman's side.

WRONG. Lisa is working 3 days and her husabnd Tim is actually working 5 days. Why did the original poster leave out that fact ? Why did they use that language ?

It's because when you realise Lisa is actually only a part time worker and her husband is working full time it completely pulls apart the emotional headline of the study "Wives support husbands which is not recipricated". It doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "Part time working wife provides more emotional support to her full time working husband". Actually it sounds a pretty good deal, 2 days off to support your spouse, emotionally, which you are kind of meant ot be doing anyway. Add into that the 2 day weekend and over half the week is your own free time. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

And you know what ? Lisa must find it's pretty easy to get over a stressful day at work when every day is a Friday.

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