13 Apr A Typical Marriage (WAYNE DYER)
The thread that winds through most marriages is one of dominance and submission. While the roles may shift regularly, different for various marital situation, the thread is nevertheless present. One partner dominates the other as a condition of the alliance. A case history of a typical marriage and its psychological crisis points goes something like that of our fictional couple below.
At the time of marriage, the husband is twenty-three and his wile is twenty. He has slightly more education, and has secured the money-earning prestige position, while the woman works as a secretary, clerk, or perhaps in a profession dominated by women such as teacher or nurse. The woman’s job is a filler until she can become a mother. After four years of marriage! there are two or three children, and the woman is serving as a wife and mother in the home. Her role is that of taking care of the house, her children and her husband. From a job standpoint, her position is that of a domestic, and psycliologically she is in a submissive position. The man’s work is given more significance, largely because he brings in money to support the family. His successes become his wife’s successes, and his social contacts become their friends. He is given more status in the home, and the woman’s role is often one of making his life as comfortable as she can. The woman spends the greater part of her day interacting with children or she talks with neighborhood women who are in the same psychological snare. When her husband has a crisis on the job it becomes her crisis, and generally speaking, any objective observer would see that there is a dominant and a submissive member in this arrangement. The woman has accepted . I perhaps sought out this kind of relationship, because it is all she has ever known. Her marriage is modeled on that of her parents and others she saw as she grew up. And more often than not. her dependence on her husband merely replaced her dependence on her parents. The man similarly sought out a woman who was soil spoken, gentle, and who would reinforce the fact that he was the breadwinner and headwinner in all interactions. Thus, both people got what they were looking for and what they had seen all of their own lives in terms of how a marriage operates.
After several years of marriage perhaps four to seven years, a crisis begins to erupt. The submissive partner begins to feel trapped, unimportant and dissatisfied because she is not making a significant contribution. The man encourages his wife to be more her own person, to be more assertive, and to take charge of her life and stop feeling sorry for herself. These are the first messages that conflict with what he wanted when he got married. “If you want to work, why don’t you look for a job?” or “Go hack to school.” He encourages her to seek new outlets, to stop being so namby-pamby. In short, to be something different than what he married, which was submissive and domestic. The woman, until now. has always felt that any unhappiness in her husband was her fault. “Where did I go wrong?” If he’s unhappy or frustrated. she feels that she has been inadequate, or that she must not be as attractive as she used to be.The submissive partner resorts to her own subservient mind-set and assesses all male problems as being lodged in her own self.
At this time in the marriage the man is very much occupied with job promotions, social contacts and professional striving. He is on his way up. and a sniveling wife is something he cannot tolerate. Because of his many opportunities to deal with a great number of different people (something denied to his submissive partner) he is changing. He has become even more self-assertive. demanding and intolerant of weaknesses in others, including his family. Thus, his admonitions to “get yourself together” to his submissive wife. This is also a time when the husband may look for sexual outlets outside the marriage. He has many opportunities and he seeks the companionship of more exciting women. Sometimes the submissive partner begins some experimentation of her own. She may take on a volunteer job,enroll in school, seek therapy, have an affair of her own, most of which is enthusiastically supported by the husband.
Perhaps the submissive partner will begin to gain new insights into her behavior. She sees her subservience as something that she has chosen all her life, not just in her marriage. Her approval-seeking behavior has now been challenged, and she begins to put herself on the road to greater self-responsibility by eliminating all dependency in her world, including that of her parents, her husband, her friends, and even her children. She begins to gam self-confidence. She may take on a job, and begin to make new friends. She begins to stand up to her dominant husband, and stops taking all of the abuse that has been her lot since the marriage began. She demands equality, no longer satisfied to wait any longer for it to be granted to her. She simply takes it. She insists on a sharing of domestic chores, including care of the children.
This new independence and the shift from the external to internal thinking on the pan of the woman is not easily accepted by her husband. He becomes threatened. Anxiety is entering his life at a time when he cannot afford it. The last thing he needs is an upstart wife, even though he encouraged her to get out more on her own and think, for herself. He didn’t expect to create a monster, least of all one that would challenge his own established supremacy. He may react with a heavy dose of dominance, which has always worked at putting his submissive partner in her place in the past. He argues against the absurdity of working, when she is paying most all of her salary for babysitters. He points to the illogic of her belief that she isn’t equal. In fact, she’s indulged. “You don’t have to work, you have it made, all you have to do is take care of a house and be a mother to your children.” He tries guilt. “The children are going to suffer.” “I can’t have this aggravation.” Perhaps he threatens her with divorce, or as a last resort, suicide. This often works. The wife says to herself, “Wow, I almost blew it,” and reverts to her submissive role. The heavy dose of dominance served to remind her of her place. But if site refuses to regress, the marriage itself may be in jeopardy. At any rate, there is a definite crisis. If the wife persists in replacing her submissive ness with self-reliance, the husband, who needs to dominate someone, might leave for a younger wife who will stand in awe of him and thus put her in the position of looking up to him and becoming a cute little showpiece. On the other hand, the marriage may survive the crisis, and an interesting shift may take place. The thread of dominance and submission Mill winds its way through the tnamage. That is the only kind of marriage both partners recognize. Often the husband will now take on the submissive role out of fear of losing something he cherishes, or at least depends on. Staying home more, getting closer to the children (out of guilt from earlier abandonment), he may say things like. “You don’t need me any more” or “You’re changing, you’re not the girl I married and I’m not sure I like the new you.” He has become more submissive. He may become a heavy drinker, and a self-pitier out of a need to manipulate his wife or to recapture his long-lost superiority. The wife is now in a career, or moving toward one; she has her own circle of friends, and is developing outside interests of her own. Perhaps she is having an affair as an assertive retaliatory gesture, but at the least, she is feeling good about receiving some acclaim and compliments for her accomplishments. However, the thread is still there, and a crisis looms heavy. As long as one partner must be more important than the other or fear-of-divorce is the thing that binds the two together, dependency is still the cornerstone of the alliance. The dominant partner, be it man or woman, is not satisfied with a slave for a spouse. The marriage may continue in a legal sense, but any love or communication between the two partners has been destroyed. Divorce is common here, but if not, two people begin to go their separate ways within the marriage—no sex, separate quarters, a communication pattern based on mutual put-down, in lieu of understanding.
A different conclusion is also possible, if both partners decide to reevaluate themselves and their relationship. If both work at becoming free of erroneous zones, and loving each other in the sense of allowing the other partner to choose his own fulfill-ment, then the marriage can flower and grow. With two self-reliant people, who care enough about each other to foster independence rather than dependence, but at the same time share happiness with a loved person, marriage can be an exciting prospect. But, when two people try to merge into oneness, or one tries to dominate the other in any way, that spark that is within us all fights for one of the greatest human needs, independence.
Longevity is not an indication of success in marriage. Many people stay married out of fear of the unknown, or because of inertia, or simply because it is the thing to do. In a successful marriage, a marriage where both partners feel genuine love, each is willing to let the other person choose for himself rather than to dominate. There is not the constant hassling that involves thinking and speaking for the other partner, and demanding that he does what lie’s supposed to. Dependency is the serpent in the paradise of a happy marriage. It creates patterns of dominance and submission and ultimately destroys relationships. This erroneous zone can be eliminated, but it will never be an easy battle, since power and control are at stake, and few want to give them up without a fight. Most important, dependency should not be confused with love. Putting some spaces in togetherness ironically solidifies marriages.
Your erroneous zones
Wayne Dyer
Image: http://img11.deviantart.net/85e1/i/2015/120/3/0/slave_girl_by_xxenki-d8rocqr.png
