A slightly different version of this post first ran in June 2009.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day; she and her boyfriend of several months are “taking a break” from their relationship. He’s in his early thirties, she’s in her late twenties; in different ways, each carries the “baggage” of family, faith, and previous lovers.
The fella — I’ll call him “Gordy” — is a bit overwhelmed by the gal, “Calliope.” Gordy, apparently, does something that I very much remember doing in relationships when I was younger: retreat in the face of intense emotion, particularly in the face of a woman’s anger. Many young — and not-so-young — men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners. When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling a bit as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got — or he feels he hasn’t got — the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code”. And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.
I’ve been over this ground before in the three posts in the male transformation series. The three posts from the autumn of 2007 explain aspects of the problem — and the solution — in considerably more detail. But what I want to focus on today is Gordy’s need to “take a break” from the relationship, and the reasons that seem to undergird it. It’s entirely possible, of course, that “wanting a break” is code for “I really am tired of this relationship, and want to get out for good, but lack the courage to say so directly.” But from what I can tell, there’s something else at work. Gordy doesn’t want out; he has fallen in love with Calliope and wants to be with her. He also finds her — the complete package of Calliope-ness — to be more than a little overwhelming. He’s not calling an end so much as he seems to be calling for a time-out.
Let me say again (though my MRA critics don’t hear this) that I don’t think women are always blameless when heterosexual relationships go south. Women have their own lessons to learn — and in the case of sexist acculturation, it might be more apt to say that they have their own lessons to unlearn. But I write much more often about what men can and ought to do because, well, I’m a man. I’ve lived nearly 44 years in a male body, and while I don’t pretend to be a professional relationship expert, I’ve lived a bit — and thought a lot — about the ways in which culturally constructed masculinity undermines our collective happiness and our ability to function intimately with other human beings. And so I focus more on what men can do, respecting the reality that women have had plenty of experience being told how to behave by the males in their lives.
Heterosexual men in love often find the intensity of a woman’s emotions to be overwhelming, even terrifying. Many guys have no idea how to fight, in the healthy sense of the verb. They may know what not to do; they don’t turn to rage-infused violence. (Some men do, of course, but I’m not addressing them. Law enforcement can deal with those boys.) But feeling tongue-tied or bewildered, some men will try the “submarine dive.” Viewing their mate’s storminess as a temporary problem to be avoided, they will, like a sub, dive inward, remaining as impassive as possible, waiting patiently (or, more accurately, anxiously but with an outer veneer of tranquility) for the tempest to cease. This is passive-aggressive conflict avoidance; I did a lot of “submarining” in my younger years.
Other men will pull out the infamous pre-emptive apology strategy: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, whatever I did, I’m sorry. Please stop being mad.” (For a heartbreakingly realistic version of this, see the brilliant and under-praised Blue Valentine.) Still others, of course, will retreat to self-deprecation, figuring that if they say truly awful things about themselves, they’ll force their lovers to cease the search for legitimate discussion and turn to the more traditionally feminine role of soothing male anxiety. “I’m such a piece of shit, I don’t know why you stay with me.” (Batterers use that line a lot in the remorse stage, following an episode of abuse.) It often works, particularly on a younger woman who fancies herself capable of showing a man a side of himself he has never seen. And so a lot of women, torn between exasperation and compassion, give in at this point and say, “Oh Theodore, you’re not a bad person. I really do love and admire you.” She breaks off the attempt to push through to him and to create change; the status quo is preserved.
Robert Bly often talks about the difference between “copper” and “iron”. Copper conducts; iron doesn’t. A person (man or woman) who is “copper” can’t set boundaries well; what other people feel or say has the capacity to flow directly to the copper person’s core. (Someone less poetic and metallurgically inclined might just say, “co-dependent”.) Iron, on the other hand, can keep things out. An iron person isn’t necessarily cold and inflexible, but an iron person can allow even those with whom they are most intimately connected to be angry or upset without “taking it personally.” Iron people set good boundaries. They don’t seek to “fix what they cannot fix”, and they don’t run away in fear either. They are receptive in the way someone standing in a doorway is receptive — with the capacity both to invite someone in and, if needed, to close the door, firmly and politely.
When men are raised with little sense of how to “fight fair”, particularly with romantic partners, they may — like Gordy, apparently — often lack the discernment to determine a legitimate criticism that ought to be taken to heart from an unfair attack. So many make the classic mistake that women know men better than the men know themselves; for different reasons, men and women alike are attached to that sexist conceit. This assumption that men are a mystery to themselves can function, for some men, to legitimize anything a woman says in anger. And sometimes in anger, we — men and women alike — say unfair things to our romantic partners. We speak from a place of pain and frustration and rage, and we say what we know will wound. Women do this, men do this. The difference is that in many cases (certainly not all) men, thanks to their “learned obtuseness”, are particularly unlikely to be able to differentiate between the legitimate criticism uttered in a healthy fight and the unjust accusation blurted out in a moment of wrath.
As I said to Calliope: “Men run when they don’t have the vocabulary to set the boundaries they need to stay.” Gordy needs a break because he finds Calliope overwhelming — but what’s so overwhelming has less to do with who she is and more to do with his inability, so common to so many men in our culture, to be iron (in the best way) rather than copper. Calliope isn’t perfect; she’s gonna say some things that are hurtful and unfair. She’s also gonna say some things that are hurtful but fair — and Gordy, like most men, needs to do the hard work of learning how to discern between the two. And on top of that, do the hard work of learning how to take to heart the legitimate criticisms he needs to hear and to repudiate verbally and clearly those criticisms that are unwarranted. Until he can do that, he will “submarine” or he will run.
I suppose saying to an angry partner, “That’s unreasonable. It’s not true. You’re out of line.” or variations would be okay? Presuming it’s true.
Of course, it’s all men’s fault. The men’s rules. The patriarchy.
It is impossible, of course, that Calliope might actually be unreasonable, got her facts wrong, be reacting to something minor as a displacement for something else.
You don’t know, or didn’t tell us, whether Calliope can actually hear words telling her she’s wrong. If she got her facts wrong, is angry about a trifle which, in other circumstances, never bothered her, or is far angrier than the situation would seem to justify, does Gordy know from history that she will double down and become angrier, even getting personal, instead of hearing him? If so, what’s his next step?
Men aren’t supposed to pick on women. I know. Men’s rules. That means in an argument, many men “take it” for some time before they react. By that time, things are pretty sweaty and disagreeable. Why take a chance that even pointing out that the situation isn’t as she thinks, for example, will result in an even angrier personal attack?
If women don’t like men submarining, they can look at their own style of argumentation.
Pre-emptive, general-pupose apologies are designed to get the thing over. The man may think later about the issue, possibly to some benefit, but discussing it at that point is a sure loser. Why take the chance? Or, to put it another way, why bother?
If the woman has a different, calmer discussion style, there’d be no reason to pre-emptively apologize or submarine.
I know neither of those worthies, but a single argument isn’t likely to spark a time-out. Sounds like Gordy hasn’t figured out how to deal with Calliope and Calliope has more complaints than Gordy thinks are justified.
There is not much difference between legitimate criticism and unjust accusations blurted out in a fight. Both tend to occur in moments of wrath. In many cases, people wait until a heated exchange to bring up legitimate complaints. In many instances, the criticisms are stated not out of a desire to “create change”, but to wound. More so, men are taught and constantly told that their positions, feelings, and thoughts do not matter in arguments with their girlfriends and wives. Men hear the constant refrain that women are right, men are wrong. So in the face of a volatile argument where a girlfriend cuts loose with all her anger, it is not surprising that many men give up, give in, or shut down rather than argue. Many men may ask themselves, “Is this worth losing a relationship over?” If not, then it makes sense for them to bow out or just agree with whatever the woman says.
I do not think anyone can have a legitimate discussion in anger, and I cannot think of many instances where shouting criticism at a person in a moment of wrath changed things for the better. No one should have to learn how to discern the difference between a person’s anger and their valid criticism.
Great post, Hugo. Developing good communication in a relationship is hard. On the female side, it can be exasperating when your partner doesn’t naturally “get it” and you have to spell it out over and over again in simplistic terms while he deflects the argument instead of engaging in a discussion. This can lead to simmering, long term frustration or at worst, cruelty, as we attack that point of weakness. In a way it’s also submarining as we give up on communication or self exploration and react in anger or annoyance.
Thanks for the thoughtful post!
While I certainly don’t buy into gender essentialism, I do think it’s worth pointing out that differences in verbal ability do seem to have some foundation in biology, or at least hormones. According to this study, when transsexual men took testosterone, spatial ability improved and verbal fluency deteriorated. That fits the experiences of many of the transgender men I’ve known.
That doesn’t mean that men can’t learn verbal skills- obviously plenty of us do. And it doesn’t change the fact that boys are rarely taught how to use their words, which is the point you’re making here. It simply suggests that there’s more to this than you address.
Charlie, transitioning FTMs don’t take testosterone in a cultural vacuum. They are also acquiring other aspects of masculinity, learning to perform differently to meet a particular standard. There’s a pretty damn high chance that whether they took T or not, trying to take on masculine qualities would lead to that reduction in verbal ability.
An anecdote that relates to this: when my current boyfriend and I were considering dating, we had an intense conversation about faith and whether or not Jesus represented the same thing to both of us. Somehow, I assumed that he was saying that I wasn’t a Christian. My ego is, wrongfully, tied into my faith, and I ripped into him. I asked him to leave my property and left tons of angry voicemails on his cell. I deleted him on Facebook and was furious for a day or so. This is where I take ownership of the unfair things I said to him – because he was trying to see if we were on the same page in terms of our faith, which is crucial for a healthy relationship. I regret what I said to him in anger, and I didn’t fight fair.
My boyfriend talked to his mom, and when he told her the story about our first fight, she said, “Welcome to a relationship.” (This is his first relationship). He called me back – calmly – and I invited him to come back over. I apologized for overreacting and he clarified what he was trying to say. It was a good point in our budding relationship, because he wasn’t intimidated by my fury. I was, however, extremely sorry for making incorrect assumptions. We learned from it and then began officially dating after a few serious conversations and a few weeks later. As someone with a huge temper, I need to work on waiting three seconds before speaking when I am angry as to not say something I will regret. And my boyfriend, an INTJ, is working on his emotional vocabulary. We’re growing, we’re learning, and we’re taking things slow. Healthy stuff.
Great post. I love the analogy to being a first-year French student.
As a culture, I think we have done much to insist that girls be competent, assertive and self-supporting – in addition to their traditional relational skills. We now need to insist that boys learn relational skills as well – in addition to their traditional competence, assertiveness and self-supporting skills. It will make their lives much easier, I suspect.
“high chance that whether they took T or not, trying to take on masculine qualities would lead to that reduction in verbal ability.”
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I’ve been pondering what those “masculine qualities” might be and nothing is springing to mind. I’ve always imagined that it was masculinity preventing men from engaging in emotionally charged talk that is responsible for a lack in conversational skills, not a masculine mental stigma. I’m not disagreeing with you but, it would be nice to have an example of how these qualities add up to poor conversational skills instead of just a simple lack of “emotional practice.”
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Charlie, the that study seem to say subjects tested suffered verbal fluency deterioration.
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“Fluency is a speech language pathology term that means the smoothness or flow with which sounds, syllables, words and phrases are joined together when speaking quickly.” -wikipedia
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Not sure that has much to do with emotional reasoning or emotional speech ability. Perhaps, with the voice deepening some sounds become harder to make so it results in difficulties.
Oh, and one other thing that I’d meant to mention.
A strategy I’ve done and seen other men do in situations when we feel like we can’t handle someone else’s emotion is to try to fix it right away. The tendency of men to jump to problem-solving is sometimes an attempt to make the scary emotions go away. And of course, that tends to infuriate the other person if they’re in a place of strong feelings that simply need some space.
It looks to me like an attempt to make the feelings go away, rather than trying to distance oneself from the difficult emotions, but both strategies are attempts to reduce the intensity of the moment. Of course, it’s not only men who do this, but in my experience, it’s more common.
Charlie.
If the problem generates strong feelings, wouldn’t fixing the problem ameliorate the strong feelings?
Not to be too interested in reality or anything, but some problems are actually, you know, PROBLEMS. As in, the disposal’s broken.
Agreed, strong negative emotions directed toward one’s partner are generally a matter of the partner seen as having done something wrong.
Let’s have an example: Female partner X has the habit, when she doesn’t understand what’s going on–perhaps she just arrived–of presuming something is wrong and her partner is the one who screwed up. The social dance is, everything is explained to her and she agrees her partner didn’t screw up. Fixing the problem is explaining to her that there really isn’t anything wrong and nobody screwed up. What happens after that? What, under Hugo’s rules, is the man allowed to do or say? He explains how he sees the situation in general and….
Really, here’s how I see it: If someone is so frustrated with a relationship that they feel like they need some breathing room, then it’s something that they desperately need. Moreover, we have to remember that some people are probably not a good fit for each other, and people’s fear of being alone drives them to be in bad and malformed relationships.
I completely agree that learning to discern, and most importantly accept, legitimate criticism is key to anyone’s emotional development.
But I’m not clear (and this is solely from personal experience) on what aspect on our culture results in the behaviors described here.
On the one hand, the point about men being taught they are a “mystery to themselves” is well taken, and a good point.
Yet men are also taught to large extent that women are overly emotional (with the implicitly dark overtone that this leads to irrationality). I know that when I dated my first girlfriend, I often resorted to the pre-emptive “I’m sorry about whatever I did,” but not because I lacked any sort of vocabulary to describe myself – I did it because I had been taught that women were prone to irrational emotional outbursts and if you truly a woman you accepted it the same way she accepted your bad habits. From this terrible viewpoint, there’s no getting angry at a woman’s wrathful outburst OR accepting legitimate criticism uttered in anger – the outbursts themselves are overlooked as “beyond her control”.
Perhaps I am in a minority of men, but from personal experience I believe that unlearning women as “overly (irrationally) emotional” improved my life at least as much as learning to accept criticism.
Mike.
After you unlearned it, what did you do? What difference in your relating?
@Richard
I’m not suggesting that there’s no place for problem solving. What I am suggesting is that, unless it’s an actual moment of crisis, attending to the emotions before looking for a solution is almost always a more effective path. Making room for them first helps in a few ways.
First, it lets the other person know that their experience and their feelings matter. Jumping to problem solving often feels invalidating to the person whose emotions are being set aside, which easily leads to resentment. And it has a tendency to make people feel as if they’re being controlled, which can make them resist by escalation. Making space for the emotions, if done with compassion and care, usually calms things down better. If it’s a genuine crisis, of course it’s better to deal with it first and then deal with the emotions, but most relationship conflicts aren’t crises of that sort.
It also gives the other person a chance to come back to their baseline (or at least, to let their emotions cool), which makes it easier for them to participate in the process of looking for solutions. That increases their buy-in and helps ensure that they’re a participant instead of a passenger. Collaboration often opens up more possible steps forward.
It’s also important to be honest with oneself about motivation. If the desire to jump to fixing things is coming from a desire to make the emotions go away or to control the other person’s actions, that’s also likely to lead to more resentment and friction.
Emotional skills take practice and they’re skills that most people can learn. I agree with Hugo’s notion that cultural models of masculinity keep us from teaching them to boys. And at the same time, I’m not convinced that it’s only due to social constructions. I don’t think it’s entirely biology, either. Based on my experience as a sexuality educator with over 20 years experience, I think it’s likely to be a recursive interplay of the two.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no hope, but rather, that I think we need to acknowledge that perhaps there are some aspects of gender that are influenced by biology and to work with that rather than expecting everyone to be the same.
Charlie,
As you may know, I disagree about Hugo’s penchant for blaming practically everything on the evil patriarchy’s wrongful teaching of masculinity.
On this subject, I do agree. Men are taught not to be mean to women, not to annoy them, not to be the cause of aggravation. Thus, when the woman is annoyed or aggravated, it seems axiomatic that it’s our fault. Except, of course, when it’s clearly, obviously not.
In either case, it’s not a matter of not knowing what to say. It’s a matter of being in a really screwy place.
The cure for that would be to free men to tell women to just flat knock it off. As I said wrt another idea, it would probably be a good idea, but who’d want to write that grant?
If the problem generates strong feelings, wouldn’t fixing the problem ameliorate the strong feelings?
Not necessarily no. Not to mention that I can fix my own problems, garbage disposal or jerk at work, but I can’t comfort myself nearly as effectively and while I’m always on my own side it’s nice for someone else to be too. Anyone who is melting down over the garbage disposal isn’t melting down over the garbage disposal.
But if part of the problem is that Calliope says unfair and cruel things when she’s mad I hope she’s working on that. None of us are perfect and maybe a lot of people have this particular flaw but IMO not everyone says untrue things when in a fight and no one should.
I am constantly surprised and annoyed however by the way my husband categorizes a brief snarl or comment as me being “angry”. ??? Being annoyed for about two minutes is just not the same thing as being truly angry. But having your partner treat you as if you’re angry when you aren’t is enough to drive anyone batty.
Victoria
I think Hugo’s point is what Gordy is supposed to do if Calliope is being unfair and deliberately hurtful.
A book by, I think, Townsend called “What Women Want; What Men Want” is about a survey of dating behavior and attitudes at a college. Interesting methodology. Questionaires about what happened at….a party, etc. Followed by discussions. Townsend says a good portion of the women admitted to giving shit tests. Some didn’t know until afterwards in the discussions analyzing the activity, some knew all along. One example would be to start an argument over nothing on which she was probably wrong and get nasty. See if he had spine, apparently.
So we have the possibility that Calliope has had it with something, that she’s being unjustifiably hurtful, or that she’s giving him the quarterly macho check.
What words the guy uses depends on what he figures the problem is. So, before we give the guy the capacity to respond correctly, we need to help him figure out which is going on.
How is your husband supposed to feel about a brief snarl or comment? Is it supposed to be a freebie? What’s the cumulative effect?
Hmmm. This analysis is really good, and yet I wonder how much it has to do with men and women, per se, rather than a certain anglo construction of men and women.
Pretty much everyone in Brazil is “emotionally intense” from the U.S. American point of view. There are, of course, individual exceptions, but that’s been my experience in 20 some years of life here. And the stuff I learned in the U.S. regarding conflict resolution in relationships, listening, speaking and etc. simply doesn’t work that well down here.
Most interpersonal, intra-relationship conflicts down here simply can’t be resolved until there’s a blow up which involves both partners screaming at each other. If you try to do the typical “take a deep breath, count to ten before speaking, sit down so you don’t intimidate your partner, always couch your comments in terms along the lines of ‘When you say that, you make me feel…’” stuff my feminist conflict resolution classes taught me, you’ll just be bowled over by your partner. Backing off is a sign for your partner to advance!
It took me a long time to learn how to fight constructively without being bowled over by my partners. I had to learn how to stand my ground and show anger – even lots of anger – without feeling that this was necessarily a prelude to violence or being ashamed of causing a nasty scene.
If you try to “close the door, firmly and politely” to a Brazilian partner – male or female – be prepared to have them start banging on it with a battering ram and dynamite.
Thaddeus, just for background, I may be as WASPy as they come (half Jewish on Dad’s side, but an English uncircumcised Jew), but my students are 75-80% nonwhite. I’ve been teaching since 1993 at a campus that is 40% Latino and 30% Asian/Pacific Islander, and when this topic comes up in my men and masculinity class, the sons of Mexican immigrants resonate with this even more than the white kids!
I still wouldn’t assume that means it’s inherent rather than cultural.
Seriously, what? There’s no difference between a relatively calm “Honey, I’m upset at what you said at the party, it felt to me as though you were baiting me” vs. “You asshole, you’re always putting me down in front of other people to make yourself look better”?
I will tell you a story that may explain why I disagree so deeply with the values implied by this post. A few years ago, while working with a poor and deeply abused community in Canada, I and the team I worked suffered through an extremely stressful situation: an al Qaeda cell had kidnapped our team coordinator (I should explain that the organization I work with has projects all over the world) and threatened to behead him. I struggled to make sense of our struggles with my best friend, and mentioned her that some of the blame might lie with the way emotional attunement does not (to put it mildly) come naturally to me. I will never forget what she said to me: she told me it didn’t matter how precisely I discerned emotions as long as I responded to people in pain with compassion.
I insist that the degree of discernment you have for another person’s emotions has no particular virtue associated with it. Only the compassion with which you respond to the emotions you discern matters. Or to put it another way, once I and a team I worked with encountered a profoundly tragic situation in a First Nations community, and we asked the Chief if it would be appropriate to pay our respects. He told us that no gesture of respect can ever be inappropriate.
Nor will I accept this as a male/female divide. Men and women fall along a spectrum of ability and interest in emotional attunement. If you ascribe a lack of easy emotional connection to the male gender, Temple Grandin could ask, and in a sense has asked, “ain’t I a woman?”.
Mythago: I think it was pretty clear that Jacobtk meant that there is not much difference between legitimate criticism and unjust accusations when both are blurted out in a fight. What you are setting up against eachother is a discussion/disagreement vs. a fight.
I trust you don’t disagree with the assertion that legitime criticism is best to be brought up outside a fight.
It is counterproductive to try to assert fair criticism in a fight as it will be perceived as attacks (that’s basically the definition of a fight – people attacking eachother), the hurtfulness of the attacks is what matters. No one calmly (even relatively so, although your relatively may be radically different than mine) states justified grienvances in a fight in hope of the partner understanding them and to change – they are usually hurling both just and unjust grievances at eachother in a NOT calm at all manner to hurt and to “score points”. In fact just grievances has the bonus of having the potential to hurt more than unjust which is easier dismissed.
I avoid fights as much as I can. Some people thrive on fights – I don’t – I generally feel awful afterwards.
So I guess I would last exacly 5 minutes in Thaddeus’ Brazil.
I would be incompatible with a person like Calliope and I think I am more open to the possibility than Hugo is that Gordy simply is incompatible with Calliope. I mean, how often does “pause” and “time-out” NOT end up being code words for I don’t want this relationship.
Richard,
The ‘testing’ does not ring true to me at all. If you look at human interactions through the lens of testing then sure in a sense humans are always testing each other but IMO 99% of the time it isn’t deliberate or if deliberate it isn’t to see if someone is ‘macho’ but things like ‘will he still love me when…?’ ‘will she still be nice to me when…’ We all push boundaries. It’s part of trying to get to know each other and figuring out the contours of a particular relationship. Anyone who is testing you deliberatly IMO you should stay far away from. I don’t think most human beings are that shitty.
And er, he’s supposed to react the same way I react to his breif comments or snarls, assume that he is momentarily annoyed by something or wishes I didn’t do X not that he is angry at me and that it is a big deal. To me it doesn’t seem very complicated to tell the difference between his brief annoyance and real anger which is why I’m utterly confused when this doesn’t seem true in reverse.
IMO he, like many men are a lot less comfortable with female annoyance, even when it’s not at him and has nothing to do with him, than vice versa. Actual anger on my part, against third parties, makes him uncomfortable and defensive. Which generally upsets me because I’m allowed to have the full range of emotions no? I don’t love it when he’s angry about something either, because I like to see him happy, but I don’t feel threatened in some way by him being angry at someone/something else.
Dear Hugo,
“Latino” – as a descriptive adjective – makes about as much sense as “European”. Do you mean Russian, French, Portuguese, Italian, or Norwegian? Surely you don’t believe that the sexual and affective cultures of all those countries can be glossed with one word?
Mexico’s cultures – and it’s sexual and affective cultures in particular – have huge differences from Brazil’s. We don’t even speak the same language as the Mexicans! Ethnically, Africa contributed much more to Brazil than Native America and the European and Native American components of Brazilian cultures are quite different from those forming Mexican cultures.
So I’m wondering to what degree you think the adjectives “non-white” and “latino” have on the point I made, Hugo?
Again, I interview a lot of gring@s in my work and North American females – of all ethnicites – have repeatedly reported to me that they have a hard time dealing with male Brazilian emotional intensity.
Tamen, I don’t think Brazilians “thrive on fights”, precisely. But they are not exactly an “I’m OK, you’re OK” kind of people when it comes to emotional conflict. This is a huge generalization, of course, but generally it seems to me that in an interpersonal conflict, Brazilians go nuclear quite quickly.
We have what sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda calls a “cordial” culture that is deeply rooted in kyriarchic assumptions re: the “natural order” of class, race, gender and etc. When a confrontation finally occurs, there’s no cultural “shock absorber” in place, no conflict resolution protocol that people recognize other than full-out confrontation.
If you try to apply the north american feminist conflict strategies I was taught in the 1980s, you’ll be seen as a passive-aggressive, conflict-avoiding, manipulative bastard and your interlocutor will probably INCREASE and not decrease the anger level of the argument.
Here’s a great example: feminist conflict resolution theory taught me to sit down and lower my voice when I was fighting with someone. Every single time I’ve done that in Brazil, the person I’m fighting with has gotten more upset and not less upset. This sort of tactic can often lead to you being targeted by violent behavior: it does not protect you from it.
It’s a fairly well-established fact in the U.S., for example, that domestic violence tends to be divided 50/50 with regards to the gender that initiates it. In my own experience in Brazil, it’s been more like 100% to the feminine side of that equation. I have never directed violence against a woman unless it was needed to keep her from harming herself or some other person. And yet over the last twenty years, this has happened to me at the hands of female partners and housemates:
1) I had the contents of an entire china cabinet thrown at me.
2) I was bitten on the arm to the point where it left a scar.
3) I have had at least three pairs of glasses struck off my face and broken.
4) I’ve had my room totally trashed on three different occasions.
5) I had a partner fake a robbery to steal my ID and credit cards to “get back” at me.
6) I’ve had two partners threaten me with knives.
7) I’ve been hit on the head with a frying pan.
It should be said that these women were pretty damned diverse. Most had college educations. Two had PhDs or were studying for them. They were of all colors and classes, ranging from “living in the shanty town” poor to “daddy gave me this beach front apartment” rich. I guess one could argue that they were all from southeastern Brazil (though a couple were the daughters of northeastern immigrants), but that’s really about their only commonality.
Secondly, so many men I know – both Brazilians and gringos – have reported stories that are as bad or worse, so there’s no logical reason to presume that this happens to me because I’m a particularly “bad man”. Recently, for example, one guy I know came home to find that his girlfriend had set fire to his entire warddrobe. Why? She believed he was cheating on her during a business trip. Ironically, I happen to know that she herself had been cheating on him during the same trip! This is a small example of the kind of story I hear every day.
And don’t think I’m picking on the women here! The men are just as bad. Here’s how one friend of mine found out her husband wanted a divorce: he waited until the day of her doctorate qualification exams and called her right before she went in to let her know that he was locking her out of the house and to tell her to get a lawyer. While my anecdotal experience shows women to be the agressors, most of the time, stats and studies show that Brazilian men are the aggressors at leats half of the time.
Seriously: Brazilians tend to play for keeps when it comes to interpersonal conflicts, domestic or otherwise. I have my doubts about how adding even more emotionality into this already volatile mix would help settle things.
In my personal life, I’ve found that sticking to reason and calmness as much as possible helps, but only if I’m really ready to roar when my boundaries get crossed. But this is where American feminist conflict resolution training has indeed helped me: I never get emotionally invested in the fight to the point where I can’t take the emotionality down a notch or to as needed or called for. So if I yell and establish my boundaries, then I can work at lowering the level of aggression from there. But if I try to not be aggressive at all, nine out of ten times, my partner ratches the aggression up themselves.
Interesting post. Not sure I’m in complete agreement though.
“Gordy needs a break because he finds Calliope overwhelming — but what’s so overwhelming has less to do with who she is and more to do with his inability, so common to so many men in our culture, to be iron (in the best way) rather than copper.”
Why is the problem his and not hers? Maybe she is “overwhelming”? Some people like drama, some people like low key interaction. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. I don’t know how you conclude her relational approach is better than his.
“Calliope isn’t perfect; she’s gonna say some things that are hurtful and unfair. She’s also gonna say some things that are hurtful but fair — and Gordy, like most men, needs to do the hard work of learning how to discern between the two.”
This is just vague. What specifically was Calliope saying? Perhaps it wasn’t actually fair? Whas should Gordy do when she does say things that are hurtful btw? And why is she saying them? Why do you assume it’s men who need to to the *hard work* and not women?
Ed. Wrt yr last question. Do you know which blog this is?
Victoria. Ref tests. Take it up with Townsend’s survey subjects who said they were doing it. Not the generalized testing, but a subset known colloquially as a shit test, and for a partioular reason. They also acknowledged flirting with men other than their date/SO, usually to gauge his interest and backbone. Quoth the women in question.
Really, here’s how I see it: If someone is so frustrated with a relationship that they feel like they need some breathing room, then it’s something that they desperately need.
I think the question when someone says they need space isn’t so much whether to allow them breathing room – obviously if they need breathing room, they get it – as whether to wait around for an indefinite break to end. My general bias is, unless there’s both some explanation of why the break, and some definite end in sight to it, to say, sure, go ahead and take a break from the relationship, but I’ll feel free to date other people during the break, and make up my own mind, should you decide to end the break, as to whether I want you back. And that, if the person needing the break neither says what was wrong when requesting the break, nor when coming back, probably just picking up where you left off will just mean heading for a permanent break not long in the future.
If, on the other hand, “Gordy” can say plainly what’s wrong on his side, but just needs a modest amount of time to himself, maybe the break isn’t just a slow motion break up.
There’s a big difference between the sort of “sit there and take it” helpless impassivity, apologizing, or self-deprecation that may come from an inability to deal with or express feelings and a conscious decision to break away, put distance, or, if need be, refusing to deal with someone at all. The former is reactive and comes from a place of helplessness. The latter can be a very decisive and well-considered response to dealing with difficult emotions on the part of both parties concerned. It’s simplistic if one were to sweep both into the same category. I suspect that when men do the latter, and consciously disengage from or refuse to openly acknowledge a woman’s emotions, or, dare I say it, to refuse to credit them with much seriousness at all, he’s often shifting the frame of the interaction onto territory in which he has the advantage and this tends to leave women more often the ones who are at a loss for how to respond.
It bears mentioning too that in a committed relationship, when the participants start to personally criticize each other as people, that’s usually a very bad sign and should be treated as such. Love, or even infatuation, tends to put a gauzy, hormone and neurotransmitter beer-goggle soft-focus on one’s partner, such that we tend to minimize each others’ faults and focus on each others’ strengths. When people start regularly harping on the faults and failings of their partner, especially when it’s over things that have always been present since the beginning, that’s a sign that the love beer-goggles are starting to slip. (There’s also the psychological phenomenon of projection. Someone who’s lost that loving feeling or caught the wandering eye will very often start to accuse their partner of those things). Anyone who is starting to get regularly harped on by a significant other over trivialities, long-standing characteristics, or questionable faults would be wise to consider carefully if the problem isn’t with them at all.
or, dare I say it, to refuse to credit them with much seriousness at all
There’s also a difference between making it clear from the start that friends with benefits is what you’re good for, and wanting your own emotions to be treated with great seriousness while you don’t credit your partner’s emotions with much seriousness at all.
One may, man or woman, refuse to respond at all, with the possible exception of leaving the room.
I consider that reasonable when the Other Party is being unjust, or deliberately hurtful.
However, one must be careful when leaving the room. If a man leaves the room slamming the door, he has committed a DV outrage according to several DV resources I’ve seen.m A woman…. No problem.
John – incredibly good points.
What is the difference? That is to say, I don’t really follow ‘blurting out legitimate criticism’. Presumably if you’re throwing around accusations (“you asshole”) you’re having a fight, and if you’re offering legitimate criticism, you’re having a disagreement. Is the only difference the level of emotion?
Because the problem I’m seeing is calling something a ‘fight’ merely because one doesn’t like what the other person is saying.
mythago
Kids call any kind of correction “yelling” which is supposed to make the parents switch to explaining they’re not yelling, which explanation is also yelling.
No criticism is going anywhere good if it starts with “You always….”
Mythago, the difference lies in the purpose behind the comment and the ability of the person on the receiving end to discern what is meant to wound and what is meant to help. However, that is difficult to discern when in the heat of an argument because many people use valid criticisms to “win” the fight. If a man and woman start arguing over the man’s mother being too involved in their relationship, it might be a valid criticism to tell the man that his mother is too involved, but when stated as “We wouldn’t have this problem if you weren’t such a Momma’s boy” it is not just meant as criticism. The intent is to hurt, which tends to be the case in most arguments.
I do not think it is a matter of people calling something a “fight” because they disagree with what another person says. The incidents Hugo recounted were not of one person calmly telling another about some relationship problem. Rather, the woman essentially vented on her boyfriend and took offense when he bowed out. No one should put up with that (and if we reversed the genders I am sure Hugo would agree). It is unreasonable to ask anyone to try to discern which comments made in anger are intended to hurt or are valid criticisms. To put it another way: if valid criticism looks like an unjust accusation, perhaps the problem lies with the person delivering it and not the person on the receiving end of it.
Rather, the woman essentially vented on her boyfriend and took offense when he bowed out.
Of course she took offense when he bowed out. “I need a break from this relationship” is pretty much an inherently offense giving level of bowing out. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, if you need to, or that Gordy was more in the wrong than Calliope. Just that a relationship from which someone needs a break is a relationship in trouble, and it wouldn’t be normal to be calm and collected about someone asking to have a break from seeing you. Or at least, if you hold yourself together enough to be calm to the break-taking person’s face, that doesn’t mean you’re calm and accepting inside.
Lynn.
I have a timing problem here. I thought Calliope was not calm and collected BEFORE Gordy said he was bowing out. That was why he made the move. The bowing out was the issue here, not what Calliope did afterwards. Right?
Jacob, you’re all over the place. You agree with me that there is a difference between a valid criticism said during a fight, and a hurtful remark (calling somebody “Momma’s boy” would, I think we agree, be nasty and out of place in the middle of a CALM discussion). But now you’re saying that in “most arguments” the intent of criticism is to hurt?
“The difference is that in many cases (certainly not all) men, thanks to their “learned obtuseness”, are particularly unlikely to be able to differentiate between the legitimate criticism uttered in a healthy fight and the unjust accusation blurted out in a moment of wrath.”
What exactly constitutes legitimate or constructive criticism anyway? Quiet frankly I’ve come to believe that most criticism is gratuitous unless it is asked for, and as well highly toxic in relationships.
And on that note how many people here would appreciate being on the receiving end of criticism, if one is being truthful and honest?
Is the intent of criticism to hurt? Well, I tend to feel it has more to do with CONTROL!
It’s interesting that you use the word “overwhelmed” and also the desire to run and that stands out. It’s a very clear indication to me that his boundaries are more than likely being trampled.
Feeling “overwhelmed” with a desire to flee or to run has been an issue in my life. I did not lack a vocabulary to tell people NO. The problem was entirely with their “learned obtuseness”, or in my case their lack of awareness, insensitivity and aggressive natures and in trying to get their needs met–their IGNORING boundaries. Like it or not, there are people who do IGNORE boundaries!
I don’t have a desire to flee from people with healthy boundaries. I will add that in my experience, while I have issues with men, the aggressive boundary violaters have almost always been consistently women.
Why does Hugo use the term “run” when the actual event was more in the nature of, “I don’t need this stuff right now. I may be back.”?
Doesn’t seem like “running” to me, although the negative connotation unnecessarily applied to men fits in with the local tone.
Lynn.
I have a timing problem here. I thought Calliope was not calm and collected BEFORE Gordy said he was bowing out. That was why he made the move. The bowing out was the issue here, not what Calliope did afterwards. Right?
It’s hard to tell, from Hugo’s description. If Calliope was venting unreasonably BEFORE Gordy said he was bowing out, Gordy was absolutely right to bow out, but might have been wiser to make the bowing out permanent, rather than “a break.” Calliope’s not going to get LESS offended because he just bowed out. If he bowed out WITHOUT Calliope having vented on him unreasonably (which does happen, and did happen once to me, with a guy I had not even so much as criticized once, and who had not even so much as given me any indication anything was wrong before the “need a break” speech), then Calliope has even more reason to be offended.
Probably it’s the former, and he really does have something to bow out from. Either way, bowing out may greatly improve Gordy’s peace of mind, but should he COME BACK after bowing out, he’s not likely to come back to an improved relationship.
In other words, I don’t necessarily have a problem with his distancing himself, but do have a problem with any expectation that she’d see the distance as anything other than a grave threat to the relationship. If a guy says both that he loves you and wants to make a life with you, and that he desperately needs a break, you’re wiser to put your faith in the “needs a break” part of his message than in the “wants to be with you” part.
Also, to be clear, I don’t think that my own ex should have stayed and tried to talk about whatever upset him so, simply because I myself wasn’t verbally abusive in any way to him. I think that the mere fact that he was so upset about something that he absolutely had to have a break, and that it was something he absolutely couldn’t talk to me about, whatever it was, was itself the sign that we had irreconcilable differences and were simply incompatible. It doesn’t matter whether he needed the break because I was seeing another man or because I chew in my sleep; he needed out, and his mistake wasn’t failing to try harder to talk it out, but failing to get out faster and more decisively.
I gather Hugo’s mileage varies, and he feels he did submarine in situations where he could have developed the words to work on the problem. Either way, the point for me isn’t whether Calliope deserves the distancing, or whether Gordy’s wrong in not talking out his feelings more, it’s that the relationship will fail unless both of them, not just one or the other, are able to constructively talk out whatever their problems are with the actual person they’re with.
Lynn.
So if Calliope was unreasonable before Gordy booked, Gordy needs to know how to tell her…whatever it is he’s supposed to tell her. And then things will be just dan and finedy.
Got it.
So if Calliope was unreasonable before Gordy booked
No, wrong. If Calliope is so unreasonable that Gordy can’t tell her whatever he needs to tell her, he should book for good.
You keep seeing this as me blaming Gordy; I’m saying that the break probably means they’re not compatible, not that it means Gordy’s the source of the incompatibility.
Lynn,
I wasn’t referring to you, but to the implicit point of the thread, as usual, that men are too dumb or otherwise deficient to manage such things. All we need to do is straighten their concrete brains out.
That Gordy ought to have picked up his toothbrush on the way out wasn’t part of the original scenario.
Well, that’s certainly an approach which is useful to make sure that your SO walks on eggshells around you.
“Well, that’s certainly an approach which is useful to make sure that your SO walks on eggshells around you.”
———————-
That is a statement I find that misses the mark relative to what Karen has said.
I have also found much criticism to be toxic and destructive as well, presupposed on what I see as insecurities in the criticizer. I have always said that he who does something gets criticized and I ALWAYS refuse to accept any critique of how I do anything UNLESS the criticizer can suggest a better way to do things, or supply evidential proof that he/she is qualified to tell me what I did wrong.
Thus criticism is utilized many times as a way to hurt innocent people and pound on them, by belittling them and/or their efforts.
It might be a good thing in this world if more people learned to put their brain in gear before putting their mouth in motion in their ad hominem attacks on others who are just trying to make an honest effort at whatever they are doing. As to SO walking on eggshells, might be a good thing if he/she learns there is a distinct difference between coarse cold criticism from the peanut gallery and a kind, gentle suggestion. I doubt Karen would mind the latter.
I think it best said by Lord Byron when he quipped, ” A man must serve his time to every trade, save censure-critics are all ready made.
I think he and Karen would have gotten along fabulously. Nuff said.