I'd sooner say that men and women _currently_ have different kinds of relationships, for the most part. For men who have been conditioned toward independence but who have greater emotional needs than that model allows, the independence model can feel repressive. Likewise, I've known a number of women who lean more toward independence than intimacy. (This switching of relationship models seems to happen more than a little among the trans-men and trans-women that I know.) It isn't clear to me that the relationship categories are linked to anything other than cultural/societal conditioning.
Listening to feminists talk about relationships is actually helpful, in that by acknowledging the basic equality of women, we as men can allow ourselves to form the kind of relationships that we each want individually, rather than the kind that is trained into us from childhood. Escaping from societal pigeonholes can be good for men as well as women.
Listening to feminists talk about relationships is actually helpful, in that by acknowledging the basic equality of women, we as men can allow ourselves to form the kind of relationships that we each want individually, rather than the kind that is trained into us from childhood. Escaping from societal pigeonholes can be good for men as well as women.