Iwas born in 1978 in California. My grandmother was a feminist. She raised my mother. That means that I was born knowing that I could do everything a man can do. Full stop. I knew that I could learn any skill, be admitted to any university, pursue any career path. And, I did. A child of the 70s, I reaped the rewards of feminism’s first and second waves. I found all doors open to me.
I am so lucky.
In college, a professor asked me to write an analysis of a text he had assigned from the woman’s perspective. I couldn’t figure out what he meant. I could tell him my perspective, or critics’ perspectives. As a young 19-year-old, I was pre-postmodern awakening, not yet understanding the contours of my unique gaze.
Nowhere was my confidence that I could do or be anything I dreamed of more present than in my romantic relationships.
I’m heterosexual. As such, negotiating love means negotiating gender roles. When I got married, my ex and I would happily joke that if you added the two of us together and divided by two, you got one man and one woman, biology be damned.
Traditional gender roles were not for me. I was the assertive one between us, the CEO, the one who fixed things. My spatial reasoning skills are stronger than those of my ex. I let him carry luggage to the car as long as he let me organize the bags to maximize space in the trunk.
As my marriage unraveled, I began to understand the price I paid in writing off gender roles completely.
First and foremost, without traditional gender roles, there are no scripts to follow. The early years of marriage are hard. Predefined boxes, though eventually constricting, can make things simpler at first. When the roles are clear, figuring out how to play them successfully can be more obvious than when trying to figure things out without any sort of script.
As the months became years, and as our family grew, the consequences of my “anything you can do, I can do better” attitude began to emerge. Having rejected traditional gender roles writ large, there was simply no softness between us. We had not only tossed out the scripts for who made dinner and who did the dishes, but also for how we could take care of one another in the in-between moments of family life.
Traditional gender roles are patriarchy’s recipe for how a man and a woman can take care of one another.
They are painfully limiting for all parties involved, as captured by Betty Friedan in her revolutionary work The Feminine Mystique. There, Friedan movingly proclaims, “A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.” Men too can find the burdens of acting as sole providers for large families to be a form of slavery, especially when working in settings that do not value their talents and passions. But, these denials of self are not gender roles’ intent. Their intent is care.
In pre-modern patriarchal societies, like those that still fill much of the Middle East, India, and Africa, and also ultra-traditional pockets of the western world, such as among the Amish and Orthodox Jews, she is meant to love and care for him by keeping his home; he is meant to love and care for her by providing for her material needs. Rather than being forms of slavery, the loving exchange between the two is one of mutual subjugation, mutual service. It is meant to be love in action.
Applying the Lessons of My Failed Marriage
Now, my modus operandi in cultivating new love is vulnerability.
As it turns out, “anything you can do, I can do better” is a downright dumb thing to think or say. It is arrogant and it is simply not true. What is much more true is that my job as your mate is to be your biggest fan, to see and support you in cultivating your unique gifts, and to make space for you to live and use them in our shared home and shared life.
That’s what I learned from my failed marriage.
But, as a feminist, it’s really hard to do.
I watch myself now when my love offers me his strength or his help. My knee-jerk reaction is to say “no” almost every time. “No, I can carry the heavy bag, thank you very much!” “No, I can fix that crack, open that can change that tire!”
I was raised to hate the damsel in distress.
I was raised to be her knight in shining armor, and I’m grateful for it. It was only the knight’s bravery that gave me the courage to leave my failed marriage.
But, here’s the thing about the damsel…she is vulnerable.
It is the damsel’s vulnerability that creates the opening for softness, for care.
As researcher Brene´ Brown has eloquently demonstrated, vulnerability is the super-fuel of relationships. It is the posture that makes love spring forth. It is what makes it so easy to love our pets and it is the gushy inside of the love that wells up when you hold a sleeping baby in your arms. Pets and babies just need us so much. Their need offers a wide berth for our love to land.
Offering my love that wide berth is now far more important to me than proclaiming “anything you can do, I can do better.” I need his love. I want him to know that. So, when he offers his help or his strength, now I always try to say yes, even when doing so is contrary to my feminist upbringing. In offering him my vulnerability, I make it easy for him to give of his love. As a result, I merit being loved by him.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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