Have you been fighting against stereotypical sex roles all your life? The one with the housewife who stays at home with the children and the father who, as the breadwinner of the family, goes out to conquer the world? In these stories women are the natural nurturers and caretakers, while men get to go out and have the fun in the world.

For years, No.1 best selling author and founder of Access Consciousness, Gary M. Douglas, has been looking at roles between the sexes both in relationships and marriage and observing that what we commonly assume to be true isn’t always entirely so. A large study conducted by match.com backs up what Douglas has been saying for years.

Those roles of the sexes only ever applied to half of the population in the first place, says Douglas. When it comes to relationships, he observes, the sex roles for “the other half” of the population are exactly the opposite of what we have assumed. Douglas speaks mainly to and of the latter; he says it is 47% of the population, to be precise, that is interested in question, change, and consciousness. His term for this subset of the population is “humanoids.” The word he uses for those more interested in preserving the status quo and not questioning is “human.” For Douglas, the description of the differences between the groups is for the benefit of more clarity for all.

Douglas makes no judgment about one being better than the other. He is merely noticing a difference that people working with clients on their behavior and studying the subject have not noticed before now. “It’s like horses and cows,” he says. “They both live in the same pasture, eat the same grass, poop in the same place. But they are different. If you want a steak, go find a cow. If you want to ride around and have fun, go get a horse.”

Part of the reason this difference has been unnoticed up until now is the tendency of those in favor the status quo: the humans, to assume their point of view is the only correct one. While humanoids tend to question just about everything, the one thing they tend not to question is their own wrongness when they differ from the dominant way of thinking in the culture. Humanoids have assumed that the roles of the sexes that have been presented by the humans were correct, and even blamed themselves for not fitting into this model.

“In reality,” says Douglas, “humanoid women want to go out and conquer the world, whereas humanoid men want to stay home and create a nice comfortable nest.”

Newly released research is showing that in many ways, the majority of the population no longer fits into what we have assumed to be the dominant model, and that Douglas’s observations are more correct than most of us have noticed.

A wide study that was recently released and funded by match.com has just discovered that in some age groups men are actually MORE desirous of marriage than women. They found that in many cases, men desire children more than women, and women are more interested in measures of independence than the men are! The study of 5200 people ages 21-65 was carried out by researchers from Rutgers and Brigham Young Universities and reported in Time magazine on February 14^th 2011.

Men in the age groups 21-24 and 50-54 are actually more interested in marriage than women in their same age group. According to the study, men in all age groups desire kids more than women. In the age group 21-35, more than half the men desired children, while only 46% of the women did. Obviously the ticking of the biological clock plays a role in the desire for marriage; it’s only when parenthood is a possibility that more women prefer marriage than men. Women of all ages are less inclined towards marriage than stereotypes might indicate.

Having worked with thousands of individuals and couples throughout the world, Douglas is occasionally of being against relationships. “Not so!” he says, “I am against BAD relationships!” Unfortunately, in his experience and work, this is the vast majority of relationships. Only 1 in 10,0000 relationships allow both people in it to express themselves without giving themselves up, in whole or in part, for their partner, he says.

For that reason, Douglas is a proponent of total choice, which includes seeing a single life being as valuable as married life. “Acquiring a spouse is not the must-do item it once was on either sex’s checklist,” says Time in its February 14^th 2011 issue.

Households headed by single people now number 100 million in the U.S. and households headed by married couples are the minority.

Time even dares to posit that “single people may like being single.” As one of the researchers said, “We’re still carting around the concept that they’re workaholics or desperate or can’t get on with anyone. The reality is that many of them may be choosing this lifestyle.”

As for Douglas’s assertions that humanoid women just want to go out and conquer the world, the measures of independence studied in the match.com research tend to support them.

Significantly more women than men are invested in having their own interests even after marriage, having their own personal space, having their own bank accounts, regularly having a night out with the girls/guys, and being able to vacation on their own. More women than men were willing to say that they were definitely interested in skipping parenthood. Only 16% of women ages 35-44 still wanted kids, while 27% of the men still did.

What difference does it make if the “traditional” sex roles no longer apply? Whether the source of the information is the latest research, or discoveries such as Douglas’s based on consciousness and question, the benefit for all of us is that it could create more freedom in choosing and creating a life that will really work for us, rather than one dictated by others’ points of view of what we should be doing.

What more joy and possibility would be possible in relationships then? Wouldn’t it be fun to find out?