A lot of heterosexual relationships go off the deep end because partners are engaging in vicious interpersonal battles out of a mystification with love, co-creating a relational atmosphere of sadomasochistic intimate terrorism … instead of real love.
One of the dangers of patriarchy for men and women is blind obedience, i.e., never questioning what is happening, what they think and feel, and whether their perception of each others behaviors, motives, attitudes and actions are accurate.
Patriarchy inhibits men and women’s capacity to know love and prevents them from facing it when there are problems with love and intimacy.
When couples first encounter problems, their mystification with love leads them to believe they will just go away. Some read blogs, Facebook and Instagram posts that vilify marriage and relationships and they end up parting ways. But only a few couples are conscious and seek to evaluate their interactions with one another with the same clarity and discernment that they might use to purchase a new car, iPhone or Laptop. If couples were schooled in the art of loving, this would not happen.
This tragic irony of our social conditioning is what creates the sexist stereotyping and dissatisfaction in a lot of male/female relationships. Simply said, nothing is more of an indictment of love than our cultural allegiance to and complicity with patriarchy and the false belief that “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.”
The time is now for men and women to insist that love be valued in our culture, and our insistence must come from our willingness to acknowledge that historically, in our families and in our culture, love was subordinate to power.
We must also be willing to give up all the male/female stereotypes that continue to reinforce violence and conflict in male/female relationships by having the absolute willingness to do the work of love no matter how difficult … no matter the sacrifice.
Finally, I want to say that it is my experience working with couples for many years that men and women are equally capable of learning how to love … of giving and receiving love which is the only foundation on which to create sustained, meaningful, mutual love.
Still couples must be willing to unlearn their patriarchal and sexist conditioning and approach love with a basic mutual respect for each other’s emotional universe. Only then will they discover the maddening joy that comes from loving and being loved.
This is challenging for all of us because we have to become demystified about love … to leave behind everything that we had expected to be true about love and, more importantly, we have to trust that we are on the right path even if we can’t see where we are going.
I would love to know what you think.
Love in Connection,
Paula M. Smith
Certified Imago Therapist | Scholar
Couples Transformationist | Published Author | Speaker |Human-being
401-782-7899
paulasmith@post.harvard.edu
Sources
Bradshaw, John. (1994) Creating Love: The next stage of growth.
