Relationships are baffling. The baffling part is how we can both love and hate the person we love the most.
I remember when Yael and I started dating I was baffled by the strange reversals of some of our dates. I remember the date would start out full of excitement, curiosity and passion and end with hours at the door arguing and threatening to break up with her. I would try to reconstruct the events, but that was never helpful. I always felt lonely, sad and confused.
I also remember coming home from a training in New York City vowing to be loving and kind to Yael no matter what and then, after being home a few hours, something snapped inside me and I immediately said something critical. Afterwards I felt terrible about what I said and did. Weeks later I did it again.
It’s no accident that so many of us are baffled by love. I grew up bewildered by love and simultaneously believing that, as a female, I just knew how to love. So it never dawned on me that my relationships didn’t last because I didn’t know enough about love.
Prior to marrying, I had a lot of relationships. I had it in my mind that relationships were a laboratory and I was going to study myself in my relationships. When I left those relationships or they left me, I examined my behaviors and the situations that might have contributed to the dissolution of those relationships, but it never occurred to me to question whether or not I had been loving. I always assumed that love was a given-that was my huge mistake. More importantly, my knowledge of love was not deep at all.
Philosophical ways of thinking about love came from books or observing relationships around me. Translating theory into practice and/or doing what worked for someone else in their relationship was much harder than reading about it. It took suffering through lots, I mean … lots of relational failures for me to begin to think critically about the nature of love.
In the 80’s and 90’s I read books by folks claiming to be experts on the subject of love because I wanted to understand how to make my relationships work. All the books I read were just tools for discussions of intimate relationships. They offered strategies and techniques to help improve relationships, but without actually addressing the issue of love.
One of the most illuminating books I read on the subject of love was John’s Bradshaw’s Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth. The book had a visceral impact on me because it deviated from the typical self-help advice about love and dared us to break our denial by examining patriarchy and the impact it has on our understanding of love.
His book went way beyond the traditional verbiage about complementary sex differences. Instead, Bradshaw insisted that men and women recognize that the love modeled for them as children was often intertwined and injected with what we now call abuse; it was also unreliable and incomplete, which gave us this confusing understanding of love.
As children, most of us were not allowed to question the parenting practices, beliefs and behaviors of love that were modeled for us, beliefs that were grounded in the fabric of our patriarchal culture.
On the other hand, patriarchy was not always harmful to societies. It was ideal for marriages and families prior to the 1950’s when life was tougher and everyone was concerned with surviving, security and the fulfillment of basic needs. These families sought the protection of a powerful authoritarian male (King) who demanded their obedience and loyalty. But Feminism came along and turned male and female relationships on it’s head.
Today, in the 21st century, patriarchy is not good for men or women. Fathers who are patriarchal are especially hard on their sons’ personhood … even cruel, and patriarchy violates women in general.
Patriarchal rules like controlling and repression can be dealt out by women, and when boys are raised by such women, it can seriously injure their sense of what it means to be a man and sense of male masculinity. In the end, patriarchy only benefits men at the top echelon of power. Yet, almost all of us were raised in homes that valued and encouraged patriarchal thinking and embracing these assumptions impacts the way we think and behave in our marriages and relationships today.
It never occurs to us that the reason our relationships and marriages are failing is because what we believe is love … is not love at all.
If men and women link the understanding of love that we learned as children, the confusion we felt about that love, the unreliability of that love, the defectiveness of that love, and our experience of abuse and perhaps even violence with our cultural acceptance of, and collusion with patriarchal teachings as our foundational narrative for relationships, it emphatically demonstrates that our understanding of love is rigid, superficial, incomplete and malfunctioning.
In relationships we slavishly act out nothing but our mystification of love, i.e., our parents’ beliefs about love and relationships, our defensive mechanisms used to survive childhood, our shame-based behaviors, our role in our family of origin, and our culture’s notion of romantic love.
Our own concept of love (which we never question) is acutely impoverished by patriarchy and urges us to privilege power over love, leaving our marriages and relational interactions to suffer daily ass-whippings like abuse, violence, infidelity, indifference, corruption, misunderstanding, and a lack of integrity until they eventually die an existential death–divorce.
I want to begin the impeachment process for the practice of Patriarchy in relationships because I believe it slowly strips away the BIG dreams of love and BIG success that men and women have for their marriage and committed relationships today.
It’s the #1 killer of marriages/relationships.
Patriarchy is subtle. It can prevent us from knowing or even questioning whether what we are experiencing is love. It teaches us that love is based on power, control, secrecy, shame, repression of our emotions, abuse … and conformity of one’s will/thought to the will and thought of another.
Socialization creates sex differences in men and women. For example, we are socialized to believe that women just know how to love and men are emotionally withholding. We are encouraged to think that these differences are natural. This kind of thinking simultaneously lays the groundwork for conflict. I can think of nothing that does more damage to human healthy love and marital success than this.
As a Black lesbian Imago couple’s therapist who works predominantly with heterosexual couples, I had to wake up to my own patriarchal thinking and actions. I’m not speaking about patriarchy in the sense of male domination; I am speaking about it in the sense of how it sets up magnificent, intelligent, creative, amazing, good men and women to confuse sadomasochistic intimate terrorism with genuine love. Click to continue reading …
