DESIGNER 1: The investors want us to make extremely small urban apartments more enjoyable. Got any ideas?
DESIGNER 2: Yes. Extremely small balconies.
DESIGNER 1: Thatâs genius. How small are we talking?
DESIGNER 2: Just big enough for one person to stand.
DESIGNER 1: How about half as big?
DESIGNER 2: Thatâs the best idea Iâve ever heard. But is that still too big?
DESIGNER 1: Yes. Letâs make them smaller.
DESIGNER 2: Iâve never lived in the city, but it feels like weâre onto something.
DESIGNER 1: Me neither, and I completely agree.
DESIGNER 3: Hey, I heard youâre working on an extremely small urban apartment project. Do you need more help from someone who has also never lived in a city?
DESIGNER 1: Yes.
DESIGNER 3: Perfect. Letâs put some balconies in complete shade and some in direct sunlight. Never anything in between.
DESIGNER 2: And there should always be something dripping from the balcony above, even when itâs dry outside.
DESIGNER 1: You know what would be great? If the exhaust vent from the neighborâs dryer was positioned at eye level on each balcony so you have to smell your neighborâs clothes.
DESIGNER 2: Outstanding. But which apartments should have a balcony?
DESIGNER 1: Only the ones facing a major highway. It’s my understanding that people who live in cities like seeing, smelling, and hearing traffic at all times.
DESIGNER 3: I couldn’t agree more. I have a cousin who visited a city once, and he said that everyone there does traffic as a hobby. Also, they hate privacy.
DESIGNER 1: Terrific. Weâll put all of the balconies really close to each other.
DESIGNER 2: Wait, we forgot to enclose the balconies with the strongest metal railings ever made. The whole reason people move to cities is because they yearn for strong metal things and hate things that are soft and natural.
DESIGNER 1: Plus, they need something to tie their clotheslines to, which is a thing they all use.
DESIGNER 3: Just make sure there are wide enough gaps between the railings to accidentally drop things through.
DESIGNER 1: Great idea. Whatâs the point of having an extremely small balcony if not for exposing yourself to the possibility of killing a passerby with a small household item?
(All designers nod in agreement.)
DESIGNER 3: Hey, I have a question for another project Iâm on: Do city people like access to parking?
DESIGNER 1: Only if itâs underground, extremely difficult to use. And smells like pee.
GOTHAM CITY â Masked vigilante Batman has reportedly been beside himself after he was informed by a group of teenagers that he smells, Robin laid an egg, and the Joker got away.
âI donât know, I guess I just got so caught up in saving Gotham I just never stopped to think about other important aspects of life, like personal hygiene or Robinâs concerning medical situation,â the Caped Crusader said in a grizzly-voiced statement to reporters. âWho knew that all the physical activity that comes with fighting crime day in and day out could cause you to work up such a sweat? And that maybe when you name a kid Robin and give him a bird-themed costume, itâll sort of go to his head. I’m gonna need some time to take care of all this. Iâll buy some deodorant and take a shower at the very least, maybe take the boy to a doctor. As for the Joker, well, thatâs basically business as usual around here.â
Those close to the famed Justice Leaguer have noted a drastic shift in his overall demeanor since the news was delivered to him.
âI’ve not seen the young Master so down in the dumps since…well, you know what, I wonât say it publicly,â said butler Alfred Pennyworth, who is apparently also one of the Dark Knightâs closest friends and confidantes. âAnd right before Christmas, too. Heâs taken all of this news rather hard, indeed. It’s certainly not feeling very cheery around hereânot that it usually does, of course. He practically lives in that cave down there.â
Even some of Batmanâs enemies have offered their sympathies during this difficult time.
âI was planning a winter-themed heist with Mr. Freeze, but itâs not much fun if the Caped Crusader’s acting all, I donât know, glum,â noted Gotham criminal Oswald Cobblepot, also known as âThe Penguin.â âHell, Iâm a kingpin and even I can find the time for a little holiday spirit. He should get outta Gotham for Christmas, go to Cabo or something. Never seen the guy so stressed out.â
At press time, Batman was spotted pacing back and forth feverishly at his local mechanic after the Batmobile apparently lost a wheel en route to the city.
He’s the psychology professor turned leading marriage expert who can predict whether or not a couple will be divorced in seven years with 91% accuracy.
I first heard about Gottman in graduate school in 2008. His hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and statistically significant findings were the stuff of social science legend.
I first read his book The Seven Principles to Make Marriage Work in 2013 when I had been married for five years. “Eureka!” I thought, “Here at last is the definitive answer to marital bliss!”
The answer? Have a foundation of friendship, avoid the four horsemen (contempt, criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling), make sure positive interactions outweigh negative ones 5:1, and be attuned to each other’s bids for attention.
“More people should know about this equation for marital sunshine and lollipops!” thought I.
So off I popped over to Seattle to be trained to be a certified Gottman educator by the Gottman Institute. I began teaching their Seven Principles course based off the book, which is to this day the second most popular marriage book.
But as I taught more and more classes, something kept eating at my conscience. I kept finding myself wanting to divide the class and speak to the husbands and wives separately.
It was so clear to me that they had different problems that required different messages, but we had to stick to the course curriculum which offered the exact same set of solutions to both men and women.
For instance, the Seven Principles book prescribes gratitude as an antidote to several relationship problems without ever mentioning that gratitude and especially a directive to be more grateful is a very different experience for women than it is for men. (I wrote an entire essay about that here.)
He never mentions the effects of historic and present power differentials between men and women1.
I could see plainly that the messages to compromise, accommodate, be more compassionate and grateful were messages the men needed.
But they were not the messages the women needed.
The women have had these messages pounded into them since they were toddlers. These messages are making them sick. Instead of more kindness and compromise, they needed to learn how to honor their own desires so they could stop drowning in resentment.2
It’s not just Gottman
The most popular marriage book of all time is The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. This book suffers from these exact same omissions and across-the-board solutions as Gottman’s book does.
As does the common cultural directive that to have a better relationship, you just need better communication. As if communication is this magical cure-all elixir for every disagreement, difference in world view, power struggle and gender discrepancy.3
Chapman’s book, Gottman’s book and the communication cure all have the same thing in common: they treat systemic macro-level issues as if they are micro-level problems. They treat relationship problems as individual without acknowledging how history and systems of power have shaped and contributed predictably to those very relationship problems.
Without acknowledging systemic influences, we are stuck blaming ourselves, scratching our heads wondering why all of this is so hard. “I guess I’m just selfish,” she thinks. “I guess I’m just bad at communicating,” he concludes.
Understanding our cultural conditioning under our current systems of power offers some major clues as to why all of this is so hard, as well as how to make it less so.
Once you see it, it becomes mind-boggling that marriage experts so frequently neglect to mention it.
The different invisible scripts for boys and girls
In terms of how to be a good human, the invisible script society handed me as a girl told me I was to be selfless, humble, nice, compassionate and forgiving. In relationships, when problems creep up, the first tool to reach for is always kindness and understanding. The most important rule is to never be selfish. If things get tough, try being more accommodating, more easy-going. Let things go. Don’t be a nag. Keep the peace.
Society bequeathed my husband quite a different invisible script. His emphasized valor, strength, confidence, independence, beneficence and fearlessness.
In terms of how to be a good partner, his put very heavy emphasis on being a good provider. Lots of underlines and exclamation points emphasizing the importance of this.
Because we were raised religious, my husband received the “benevolent patriarch” script. It told him to be the spiritual leader of the home, sit at the head of the table, be the man of the house, the provider, the patriarch. Dominate, but be nice about your dominion.
One thing both of our scripts included: finding your forever partner will be the solution to your problems, your loneliness and your unhappiness. Securing a long-term relationship (especially one that includes wedding rings) is the FINISH line.
Congratulations you’re no longer sad and pathetic, you’ve made it!
Every romantic movie package-wrapped the formula for us: Are you alone? Miserable? Well get yourself down to Relationship-R-Us today! Fall in love, kiss, get married and bada bing, bada boom eternal bliss. And scene. The end. Roll credits.
Enjoy your happily ever after!
Quick side note: if your relationship should happen to end before one of you dies- you are a huge failure4. (must have succumbed to those four horsemen Gottman warned you about, you weak scum).
Our scripts block us from intimacy
Imagine a scale. On the right end is assertion, strength, confidence, power and independence. On the other end is accommodation, compassion, humility, nurturance and community. Our culture calls the right side masculine and the other side feminine5.
Where ever one’s natural personality falls for these traits, throughout their lives, men will be pulled towards the “masculine” side and women pulled towards the “feminine.”
Ideally we would embrace both confidence AND humility, strength AND compassion, independence AND community. But in order to find balance, both men and women must counteract the weight of cultural pressures.
But instead, we often receive the exact opposite message.
Women are told that their problem in their relationship is that they are not MORE “feminine”- Have you tried not complaining and counting your blessings? Have you tried making his life easier? Have you tried just making everybody happy and meeting everybody’s needs all the time?
Which just makes the woman even more imbalanced.
The cover of a 2010 issue of Ladies Home Journal with articles like “Don’t let your family get sick this winter,” “32 ways to spread hope and joy,” “Amazing Christmas ideas,” and “Nicole Kidman on marriage, movies and being a mom.” Source
Lots of advice out there tells men their problem is that they aren’t MORE masculine. Have you tried working longer hours to earn more money? Have you tried manning up by stuffing down and ignoring your feelings? Have you tried stoicism?
Maxim magazine with an adequate summary of advice given to men: “man up.” Source
The marriage advice we all need, but don’t get
The thing no one tells you about marriage is this: in order to form deep bonds of intimacy in heterosexual relationships, in order to truly love and be truly loved- both partners must do the very thing they’ve been taught their entire lives NOT to do. They must learn to disobey the script they were handed at birth called “how to be a man” and “how to be a woman.”
Men must learn to embody “non-manly” things like vulnerability, empathy, compassion, housework and compromise. Women must learn to embody “non-feminine” things like prioritizing her desires, inconveniencing others, tolerating the discomfort of disappointing people, and refusing resentful accommodation.
In her book All About Love, bell hooks describes that the work of both men and women is to heal their inner child. But the inner child of men and women each receive unique patriarchal6 wounding:
“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who when he spoke his truths was silenced by paternal sadism- by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early on that she must become something other than herself and deny her true feelings in order to attract and please others.” - bell hooks
Combine that bell hooks quote with this banger from Dr. Terrence Real and you’ve got a great recipe for doing the real relationship work that needs doing:
“Maturity comes when we tend to our inner children and don’t inflict them on our partners to care for.” - Terrence Real
Let’s zoom in on the mature work of hiking each of these mountains.
Women’s work
“We need to talk about the fact that so many of us love men more than we love ourselves…. we need to look long and hard at the ways that we have sold out… our own dreams and ambitions, our health and our bodies, our safety, our dignity and integrity as a result of our social conditioning… to prioritize asserting our own patriarchal value… There needs to be honesty in what we have done in service to that narrative.” -Jamila Bradley @ brightblackhoney
Oof. These are snippets of this TikTok by appropriately captioned “Abandon the good girl script.”
My grandmother was fond of wearing a shirt that read, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
The shirt speaks the truth. No matter how stringently she tries to obey her patriarchal script of being sweet, demure and selfless without ever inconveniencing anyone, as much as she tries to bottle it up, an unhappy woman’s unhappiness and resentment will inevitably squish out sideways.
And chronically ignoring your own dreams, desires, health and capacities is not a great formula for happiness.
The best marriage books I’ve read understand this and tell a woman not to ignore her own needs in service of everyone else’s, but to prioritize her own happiness. Then watch how joy rather than resentment squishes out sideways.
being honest about your resentment and the costs of people pleasing
Men’s Work
Through his extensive research, psychologist Robert Levant articulates the seven norms of modern masculinity:
Avoiding the feminine
Restrictive emotionality.
Seeking achievement and status.
Self-reliance.
Aggression.
Homophobia.
Non-relational attitudes towards sexuality.
It does not take a great detective to see that non-relational attitudes and restrictive emotionality are rather unproductive in forging deeply intimate bonds. Unfortunately being masculine isn’t just presented to boys as a nice idea, but as an imperative to be safe from ridicule, bullying, ostracization and isolation.
“Just as girls are pressured to yield that half of their human potential consonant with assertive action… so are boys pressured to yield attributes of dependency, expressiveness, affiliation—all the self-concepts and skills that belong to the relational, emotive world… The price for traditional socialization of girls is oppression… “the tyranny of the kind and nice.” The price of traditional socialization for boys is disconnection—from themselves, from those around them.” - Terrence Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression
While a man’s conditioning isn’t his fault, often just talking about it brings up defensiveness and the fight or flight instinct. This is usually because manhood and masculinity have been so forcibly instilled from such a young age that it becomes synonymous with identity.
Fredric Rabinowitz is a clinical psychologist and professor who has been running therapy groups for men for the past three decades. He says that any critique of masculinity is often interpreted as a criticism of all men, even though men have lots of complaints about living with the incessant pressures of modern masculinity themselves.
“Rabinowitz works with men who don't cry in front of others, men who can't connect with their partners, men who refuse to see a doctor until it's too late, and men who deal with frustration by turning to violence. Often, Rabinowitz can trace their suffering back to unfair expectations they've embraced or heard: Only wimps cry. Only weak men are sensitive. Only losers ask for help.
Admitting that men hear, internalize, and act on these "toxic" messages — to their physical, psychological, and spiritual detriment — isn't a condemnation of men as a gender. Instead, it's the start of a personal and cultural reckoning that can liberate men from the pressure to constantly perform someone else's idea of masculinity.” - Ruiz The Masculinity Revolution is a Quiet One
Rabinowitz says that it is foolish to pretend that modern patriarchal masculinity standards don’t hold men back from their full humanity and satisfying relationships. They have and they are.
bell hooks warns that patriarchal masculinity conditions men to find their worth primarily through domination- in sports, business, competition and relationships- but domination is a relationship killer. “Men can return to love only by repudiating the will to dominate.” - bell hooks, All About Love
In sum, a man must hike over these hurdles if he wants to love and be loved:
domination
feeling and expressing emotions
listening instead of fixing
being vulnerable
displaying “feminine” qualities like compassion and tenderness
compromising
seeing women as equals and not just sexual objects
Something to keep in mind
So. In order to come together, men and women must walk against their own cultural conditioning towards the opposite of their conditioning. Women must head towards the healthy components of masculine conditioning and men must head towards the healthy versions of feminine conditioning.
Funny thing about doing the things you’ve always been told not to do… there’s a reason most people do not do them.
Being conditioned from such a young age puts a little voice in our heads that is trained to stomp and yell and sound the alarm when we do the things we were taught not to do. We can count on that little voice to predictably stomp and yell and flail about when we disobey our patriarchal conditioning.
Men- that voice will tell you that you are not being a man, that you are henpecked, weak, soft, pathetic. Kindly tell that voice to shut it. You are doing the work.
Women- that voice will tell you you are being mean and selfish, making everyone upset for no reason. You should be more grateful and keep the peace. Kindly tell that voice to shush. You are doing the work.
No one told me, so I’m telling you
In preparation for marriage, not one person told me that going against my conditioning as a woman would be the work I needed to do for a healthy relationship. Not one.
No one educated me on the system of patriarchy or its unique influence on men or on women. Or on how these unique influences create very predictable relationship problems.
Instead the relationship toolkit I was handed was full of more of my already abundant feminine conditioning tools- sacrifice, accommodation and forgiveness. No one warned me of the long-term costs of chronic accommodation. No one told me there were any costs at all.
Consequently, when those tools filled me with emptiness, resentment, overwhelm and a non-existent sense of self, instead of blaming the tools, I blamed myself for not using them better.
If John Gottman’s work has helped you, I’m thrilled, it’s helped me too. He has great advice. If you haven’t read his work, by all means read it. I just don’t think he should be the only one we read.
Then once you are aware of your own mountain to climb, you can read Gottman.
It was only when I started understanding how patriarchy affects men and women that I saw my conditioning for what it was: a barrier to the relationship I wanted, not a road to it.
Do you enjoy thinking about and discussing all things patriarchy and feminism?? cool me too! Come discuss with me and the Matriarchal Blessing community by becoming a paying subscriber. Our next zoom gathering will be in January when we will be discussing The Chalice and The Blade by Rianne Eisler.
Seven Principles to Make Marriage Work was written in the 90s. A lot has changed for all of us since the 90s, and while he shies away from calling it patriarchy, in his more recent books Gottman makes more of an effort to acknowledge these differences in power. For instance in his book The Man’s Guide to Women, he explains to men how often women feel unsafe and cites safety as a core need of women in relationships.
Seven Principles does mention gender differences- he mentions that compromise, expressing emotions and vulnerability are all more difficult for men, that women are more prone to bring up problems in relationships, that men and women have different grievances and pain points, but he never explores why or the root cause of these differences.
I love Dr. David Schnarch’s reaction to this. He says, “We like to believe that ‘communication problems’ underlie most relationship difficulties because we welcome the idea we can literally ‘understand’ and ‘express’ our way out of our dilemmas.” “There isn’t a problem with communication, you just don’t want to hear the message.” Underlying most ‘communication problems’ isn’t a problem with expressing our feelings, it’s that we just have a fundamental difference or disagreement.
This was actually the reason I quit teaching Gottman’s classes- I could no longer in good conscience dish out the divorce shame that runs rampant in that book. There is no allowance made that often divorce is the best, bravest or most loving decision for all involved. Rather, it says if you are divorced, it is because you or your partner must have violated one of the seven principles.
This is any essay for another day, but I think there is way too much anthropological evidence you would have to ignore to say that our current iterations of what it is to be masculine and what it is to be feminine are fixed biological traits. Rather the evidence points to these things being malleable cultural standards. But even if you are a gender essentialist- the conclusion of this essay would still hold.
I have refrained from using the word “patriarchy” up to this point in this article. Are you proud of me? Those scripts I mentioned above? The ones that say men must adhere to our culture’s current construction of “masculine” and women must be “feminine” and the nuclear family will solve all your problems? Those are patriarchal scripts and they are hard at work behind the scenes directing our behaviors, motivations, desires, and fears.
The root of relationships’ most common problems as well as their solutions lie in understanding and transcending our patriarchal conditioning.
Thanks for reading Matriarchal Blessing! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Log in
