Tag Archives: Relationships

Learning to be a Husband, Not a Son

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My first post with this brand-new blog format is a link to this morning’s column at The Good Men Project:  Learning to be a Husband, Not a Son.  Excerpt:

In three previous marriages and a handful of other long-term relationships (I haven’t been single for long since I was 16), I found myself—like so many men—taking on the parts of the “naughty boy” and the “helpless child.”  Time and again, I turned wives and girlfriends into mother-figures, and the result was inevitably disastrous.

I know that I’m not the only man who found “courtship” easier than “relationship.”  Over and over again, I devoted time and energy to “getting the girl”, and when I succeeded, soon felt vaguely let down and confused about my role. Like so many men, I was good at the chase, and lousy at maintaining the relationship I’d worked so hard to get started. After I’d been dating someone new for a few months, I invariably began to become increasingly childlike. I figured out that most of my partners were students of my emotions (it’s what we raise women to do), and most of them were eager to make the relationship work.  So they were the ones who took over the “feeling work” of the relationship while I settled into amiable uxoriousness.

Love, Venn Diagrams, and the Private/Secret Distinction

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It’s not as complicated as the title suggests.

In a reversal of how it usually works, I wrote a piece for the Frisky that then got picked up at the Good Men Project: What’s the Difference Between Privacy and Secrecy? (Here’s the identical piece, but with a different formatting and comments section, at GMP). Excerpt:

Guarding the other’s solitude is about allowing your partner the right to a private, not a secret life. It’s a recognition that even the most sexually exclusive relationship functions a bit like a Venn diagram, in which the largest portion is a shared intimacy, but in which each partner is left with something that is theirs alone. It means having the trust to expect the truth, but also the respect not to ask questions that invite dishonest responses.

I’ve never asked my wife how many people she slept with before me. I don’t know how often she masturbates, or what she thinks about when she does. I trust her to manage her private sexual life in such a way that it doesn’t rob our shared intimacy of passion and power. And I trust her to be faithful as she trusts me.

We don’t have the right to a hidden life that contradicts our public commitments. But we have the right to a private world – and a private sexuality – that is ours alone.

Read the whole thing.

Note: Obviously, this is not a distinction I invented, though it’s one that doesn’t get discussed often enough. My cousin Tom Bishop gets credit for reminding me to write about it, and Charlie Glickman gets the hat-tip for reminding me that Marty Klein does a nice job of distinguishing privacy and secrecy in his now out-of-print 1989 classic, Your Sexual Secrets.

White Knight Syndrome, Amy Winehouse, and Damsels in Distress

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This week’s column at the Good Men Project looks at Amy Winehouse, Damsels in Distress, and the under-discussed prevalence of White Knight Syndrome. Excerpt:

Guys with WKS have a variety of motivations. Some grew up in families with self-destructive mothers, aunts, or sisters whom they were unable to save from addiction. Now that they themselves are adults, White Knights hope that romantic devotion will be the “missing piece” that will turn them from ineffectual, heartbroken bystanders into heroes.

Other White Knights are guys who adopt rescuing as a kind of competition strategy. As one of my students once told me, “I knew I’d never be the best-looking or the most athletic. But I figured I could love harder and stronger than any other man out there.” This becomes less about the rescue of a flesh-and-blood woman and more about proving that the White Knight is “not like the other guys.” Men with WKS like to think of themselves as rare exceptions in a world filled with abusive or emotionally toxic men.

But the biggest emotional payoff of WKS isn’t the fantasy of being the one to rescue the self-destructive damsel. Rather, by devoting single-minded attention to those whom they imagine to be so much worse off than themselves, White Knights get to avoid taking a hard look inwards. Whether it’s focusing on a drunk and addicted pop star or a suicidal girlfriend, rescuers dodge the often painful and challenging inner work that they need to do so badly.

Many men tried to rescue Amy Winehouse from her disease; in the end, they failed. These guys – and the millions of men who imagine they would have done better in their place – need reminding that chemical dependency is often stronger than love. Without losing all compassion for the victims of addictions, White Knights need to stop falling in love with vulnerability and weakness. And they need to start falling in love with strength, stability, and the will to live.

Read the whole thing.

Love is never about wanting to be first

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One of the perennial subjects in sex and relationship writing is jealousy of a partner’s past. At the Good Men Project this week, we had 10 Ways to Deal With Your Partner’s Sexual Past (Because You Have To). It’s not the most detailed discussion of the subject you’ll see, and I have some quibbles with bits of it, but it’s a healthy and helpful reminder of the utter bootlessness of longing to be the “first.”

I’ve written a bit on this topic before. In early 2009, I wrote to challenge the obsession so many have with a partner’s past. That piece is reprinted below.

Below this January 14 post on experience and numbers, bmmg39 writes:

…my view is that, often, people with little or no experience in a certain thing (it CAN be sex but it could also mean romantic love, or kissing, or slow-dancing, or whatever) often seek others with the same low level or non-level of experience. Someone who’s never soul-kissed someone else might not feel comfortable with someone who’s done that with a hundred people already. That doesn’t mean the first person thinks that there’s something wrong with the second; it means that the first person would like to be remembered fondly as someone else’s first experience in that department with all the wonderful awkwardness and nervousness that is said to come with it.

The bold emphasis is mine. What bmmg writes sounds innocent and sweet enough. But the problem is clear: when one of our chief longings is “to be remembered fondly”, to be “someone else’s first”, we’re placing our own desires ahead of our partner’s. We’re using sex as a way of leaving a mark on another person’s body or heart, hoping — as humans tend to hope — that we won’t be forgotten. There’s no question that most of us would like to leave an impression on other people; perhaps it’s the historian in me, but there are few worse fears I have, to be honest, than that I will be completely forgotten! But bmmg makes the mistake of assuming that “first” equals “most memorable.” Ask around. Legions of people, particularly women, would rather forget their first experience of heterosexual intercourse. There’s not infrequently a world of difference between, say, the first partner with whom you had intercourse and the first partner with whom you truly felt close and safe.

When my wife and I were planning our wedding, she was hardly unaware that this was to be my fourth marriage — and her first. (Indeed, I have been the first husband to four different women.) A friend of ours did ask her, on one occasion, if it bothered her that she was doing something for the first time that I had done several times before. My fiancee, sensible as ever, said, “No, because this is the first time he’s doing it with me.” She was focused, bless her, on the marriage we were building together. She didn’t deny the reality of what had come before, but she rightly saw no reason to believe that prior experience on my part would diminish the unique intensity of what we were creating as a team. She knew better than to see me as a three-time loser and a has-been. So when we talked about rings and dresses and bands and caterers, she was aware — on some level — that I had had all those conversations before. But she was also clear that passion is not automatically killed by repetition; she knew enough to know that past behavior isn’t always the best indicator of future action. Above all, she believed that most of the time, the axiom of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” holds true: my ability to be a great husband in my fourth marriage was in no small degree a consequence of all the mistakes I had made in the previous three. Some folks hit a home run on their first at bat. Others… need to be sent down to the minors a time or three. Continue reading →

Who Pays?

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On the Good Men Project this morning, my GMP colleague Emily Heist Moss and I have an exchange about first dates and who pays for them. Excerpt:

Hugo: Add in the reality that women pay more for haircuts and drycleaning (often substantially more), and there’s little doubt that the average young American woman has probably spent a lot more money getting ready than has her prospective beau. In that light, expecting him to pay for the date is less unreasonable than it first appears.

Emily: I think it’s fair to assume that we all are constantly trying to impress our desired partners, but we go about that in different ways. Having a higher income is and of itself a “burden” that men have to bear in order to make themselves more desirable to women. I’m not advocating that that’s right or fair (it isn’t), only that financial expectations are placed on both genders, they just manifest differently. Given that framework, I’d prefer that both of us approach a first date as individuals. I don’t expect him to pay because I don’t want him to think that his money is part of his appeal, and I don’t want him to treat me because he thinks that I can’t make as much as he can or because I spend my income on beauty maintenance.

Emily and I reach consensus by the end. Read the whole thing.

Some laughter with the lovemaking, please: on porn, performance, and deadly seriousness

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In the past two weeks, I’ve heard from three friends of mine all struggling with the same issue. Each is a woman in a monogamous relationship with a guy who uses internet pornography. None of these women are reflexively anti-porn. But each has noticed how her partner’s porn use impacts their sex life. Cassie wrote:

There are SO many more things I’ve noticed that he does during sex that are straight out of a porn. He’s asked me about threesomes before, saying he “thought it was just a normal thing that everyone does.” Hello?! Only in the porn world does everyone have a threesome everyday! In trying to explain why I was opposed to it, I asked him how he’d feel if I asked him if we could bring another man into our sex. He said I was being mean and that it was gross. =) He’s also asked me if he can pull my hair. I let him, because I knew he liked it, but it’s so . . . porn-like. Also, he thinks body hair is gross. Even on him. I personally think that body hair is normal and it should be kept nice and trimmed, but I am a woman and he is a man. We are not little kids that are supposed to have hairless genitals. I know this is a HUGE trend right now, but I just hate it and I think it’s directly linked to porn.

Part of the problem in discussing porn is that most people reflexively fall into one of two camps. Either all porn is unhealthy, invariably addictive, and exploitative of women or its harmless, healthy, and almost invariably liberating. There’s an almost deliberate refusal to make distinctions. My anti-porn friends often cannot envision a “healthy place” for visual masturbation aids; my pro-porn friends are often too dismissive of the damage that compulsive porn use can (but will not inevitably) bring.

The reality is that different kinds of porn exist, and that the conditions under which porn is produced differ. These distinctions matter. And of course, another key distinction is that not everyone will “use” porn in the same way. As with beer or chocolate, what one person can delight in without harm can become an obsession for another. Whether or not “sex addiction” exists in the same biochemical fashion that alcoholism does is beside the point — the evidence is clear that some people do use porn compulsively in a way that damages their relationships.

Both sides need to recognize two truths about how porn impacts people’s lives. One, some people genuinely find healthy pleasure in porn. Their experiences are real and valid. Two, some people develop an unhealthy relationship with porn that can wreak havoc in their sexual and romantic lives. If all of us concede these realities, we’d be a lot better off.

Cassie’s concern was echoed in Amanda Marcotte’s excellent piece at Good Men Project yesterday: What Women Don’t Tell You. Amanda is hardly in the “sex-negative” camp. But she offers this timely admonition:

Most sex in porn is about what’s good for the camera, not what’s good for the participants in it, especially the women. In fact, many things that look good in porn can keep us from having fun in real-life sex. For instance, in porn the only parts of their bodies the actors often touch are their genitals, so that the camera can get a full view of the action. But in real life, sex is more of a whole-body experience, and the genital-only thing can feel cold and masturbatory.

Of course, we know that men know this, and most would deny that they’re doing stuff because it looked good in a porn and not because it felt good in the moment. So we’d rather not bring it up when you do stuff that looks better in porn than it feels in life. We don’t want to argue over whether or not that’s what you’re doing. But when you do something you picked up in a porn that doesn’t add to the real-life pleasure, we take notice and we’re often hoping you get it out of your system so we can move on to activities that are actually fun.

Bold emphasis mine. . Continue reading →

“Too Much to Expect, Not Too Much to Ask”: on fairness and monogamy

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My Facebook friend Jennifer sends me a link to this blog post by Greta Christine: Is Monogamy Fair? The post deals with whether it’s reasonable to ask your partner in a monogamous relationship to avoid masturbating, to avoid porn, or to avoid strip clubs and sex workers.

I pick those three examples because for many people, they fall on an escalating scale of “violation” of the basic principle of monogamy. While many folks are comfortable with the idea that their partners masturbate, many of those same men and women might prefer their partners not do so to porn. And many of those who are fine with a lover’s private porn use would draw the line at accepting their decision to have sex with a prostitute.

I’ve written about porn and masturbation before, and you can find my (often evolving) thoughts on those subjects under the categories on the right. What struck me about Greta’s post was the underlying premise: is it fair to ask a partner to only be sexual with you?

The simple answer, of course, is yes. Monogamy in 21st century Western culture isn’t coerced (though it is still elevated,often wrongly, above other options). People in committed relationships enter those relationships by choice, presumably motivated by desire. And it’s not unreasonable, in a relationship, to ask for what you want.

Years ago, Mary Chapin-Carpenter sang “It’s too much to expect, but it’s not too much to ask.” It’s an important distinction. Harry gets to ask Mabel to not masturbate alone because it’s his wish that both he and Mabel are only sexual when they are together. He’s allowed to want what he wants. But he doesn’t get to expect Mabel to agree. Even in marriage, one partner’s desire is not automatically the other’s obligation. To use Greta’s language, it’s fair for Harry to ask… and equally fair for Mabel to refuse the request.

Monogamy isn’t one-size fits all. Monogamy isn’t about the limitations you place on your sexuality so much as it is about the degree to which you prioritize a sexual relationship. So one monogamous relationship could be “open” to other partners while another was “closed”. What would determine the health and the strength of the relationship would be not the choices made, but the openness, clarity, respect, mutuality and honesty with which the ground rules of the relationship were negotiated.

Monogamy is, sooner or later, sacrificial. It calls for something maddeningly delicate — the merging of interests and the practice of constant compromise without the complete loss of individual identity. It is an endlessly shifting Venn Diagram in which there must always be three distinct entities: You, Me, and Us. The $64,000 question is the obvious one: how much of “Me” do I give up for the “Us”? To pretend that the answer is “nothing” is absurd. But to insist that the answer is “everything” is a recipe for romantic disaster.

What we want sexually (and in other areas) fluctuates over the course of our lives, and certainly over the course of a long-term relationship. Successful couples tend to renegotiate agreements and compromises. “You’ve changed!” should be less of an accusation than a compliment; who wants to be the exact same person at 45 that they were at 23? We’re here to help each other grow.

Part of that growth involves developing the courage to ask for what we want. Part of that growth also involves developing the courage to say “no” to a request we cannot grant without a loss of something very precious. We have the right to ask, but our asking never entitles us to a “yes”. In that spirit of balancing sacrifice with self-love, of valuing the Us while not letting go of the Me, a monogamous relationship can indeed find its way to fair.

So it is eminently “fair” to ask a partner to be sexual only with you. And it’s equally fair for them to say “no”. And fighting fairly through the conflict that follows will either allow the relationship to grow — or to end, gracefully and kindly.

Gripping the sword, embracing the lover: SNL spoofs the masculine double bind and the myth of male inflexibility

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Chloe sends me a link to this Saturday Night Live skit that ran last weekend. With Helen Mirren as special guest star, the cast cleverly spoofs our cultural confusion about masculinity. Two comedians take on the roles of Hugh Jackman and Gerard Butler — actors who have shown a penchant to oscillate between playing romantic, sensitive leading men and hyper-macho heroes. They pound their chests and sing Broadway numbers before welcoming Mirren, who plays Jule Andrews — and promptly becomes genuinely homicidal.

I don’t watch Saturday Night Live often, but this was one of the funnier and more pointed skits I’ve seen in a long time.

The SNL short points at two key problems in our contemporary representations of masculinity. Popular culture is deeply ambivalent about men who break free of traditional gender roles: romantic comedies celebrate men who can be sensitive and insightful, witty and artistic while action films feature cartoonish exaggerations of swaggering manliness. In the case of actors like Jackman and Butler, the two genres in which they are most famous for working grow ever further apart: the action movies feature greater savagery (and less depth) than ever; the romantic comedies show us heterosexual male protagonists who are increasingly comfortable with their “feminine” side. The SNL skit riffs on the absurdity of that ever-widening gap, lampooning our own confusion about what it is that we expect men to be.

At the same time, the skit plays on a darker myth, the one that says that men can’t emotionally multi-task. Men can either be violent, protective, macho brutes — or they can be intuitive, kind, and charming. But to expect them to integrate aspects of both traditional masculinity and traditional femininity is a massive overask, or so the myth of male inflexibility has us believe. Of course, in real life, not many people expect a man to be both a Spartan general and a tender aficionado of musical theater. All that most of us would like to see is men who are capable of both compassion and decisiveness. What we’re missing are images of men whose emotional dexterity and flexibility is as great as women’s. Those men do exist, of course. We just see them so rarely.

Chloe asked me for my thoughts on the skit at almost exactly the same moment that I got an email from a student of mine who wanted to share a line from a Japanese anime comic (or film, I’m not sure; one of my readers can fill me in.). One character says to another:

“Unless I grip the sword, I can not protect you. While gripping the sword I can not embrace you.” Isn’t that another perfect encapsulation of the double bind of masculinity, my student wondered. Continue reading →

“But he’s supposed to want it more”: the damaging expectation of higher male desire

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After so many years of blogging, teaching, mentoring, and writing, you find yourself getting the same questions over and over again. (Questions about the wisdom of age-disparate and long-distance relationships, for example, are evergreen.) But there are other topics that come up often as well, like incompatible sexual desire. (See here, for example.) And as is often the case, I get multiple queries on the same topic at the same time from different sources; call it kismet or synchronicity, the topic of what happens when a woman has a stronger libido than her male partner has come up four times this week.

Our myths about sex drive tell us that men are supposed to peak in horniness in their late teens, while women only reach their full libidinousness on the high side of thirty. A lot of us suspect that to the extent there’s any truth to this at all, it has a good deal less to do with biology, and more to do with the long and difficult road so many women have to travel to discover and accept their own sexuality. Slut-shaming and sexualization work together to make girls acutely conscious of others’ wants and expectations while shutting them off from their own desires. It’s hard to hear one’s own “still, small voice” of longing if you’ve been raised to be a people pleaser!

But of course, so many young women don’t fit this model, just as the guys they date often don’t fit the male stereotype of constant randiness. And for many young women, finding themselves in a sexual relationship where they are the higher desire partner can be deeply confusing. One FB email this week from a former student of mine:

Before I had sex, my fantasy was always that a beautiful man would want me so much that he would lose all control, overpowering me. Not a rape fantasy exactly, just the idea of driving some hot guy crazy with lust. I guess you’d say my arousal was tied into how aroused the guy was by me. That was my number one fantasy for years and years. But Tom (name changed, of course) doesn’t seem to want sex nearly as often as I do. I’d like it almost every day, and he’d like it a few times a week. We don’t get much time together as it is, and this is driving me nuts.

I hear variations on that quite often (though rarely several times in one week.) And of course, my former student is hurt and confused. She knows enough to know how much of her own sexuality was shaped by cultural messages about uncontrollable male desire. She’s done a great job of leaving behind the message that “good girls don’t really want sex”. But while she’s given herself permission to want and to have, she’s still got the old tape playing that says that in heterosexual relationships, particularly among young people, the man should always be hornier than the woman. Continue reading →

“Men Run When They Lack the Words to Stay”

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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. Continue reading →