The Age of Toxicity: The Influence of Gender Roles and Toxic Masculinity in Harmful Heterosexual Relationship Behaviours

Although heterosexual relationships have been evolving since the dawn of humanity, there continues to be a considerable amount of inequality, toxicity, and dissatisfaction within heterosexual couplings. This paper explores the ways in which socially prescribed gender roles and toxic masculinity contribute to behaviours which lead to toxicity and unhappiness in heterosexual relationships. The behaviours that this paper will discuss include coercive control as well as physical and sexual violence, all of which are behaviours that according to current literature, are shockingly common in heterosexual relationships. Moreover, the present paper will investigate previous literature in order to explore these concepts in depth through theoretical concepts as well as previous qualitative and quantitative studies done on heterosexual relationship satisfaction. This particular research paper aims to identify and define the concepts of socially prescribed gender roles and toxic masculinity, before applying these concepts to the previously mentioned relationship behaviours in order to determine just how these social concepts contribute to or cause these behaviours in heterosexual couplings.