This post touches some on my thoughts about gender, feminism and relationships, so I’d especially like to hear from Lynn Gazis-Sax about her thoughts. Lynn, you seem to be unusual in the feminist blogosphere for your tolerant and charitable approach to cultural conservatives, and I’d particularly appreciate your thoughts and opinions.
In the last incarnation of Alexandria, I spent a fair amount of time talking about the woes of my love life, largely involving girls at the field station who I fell in love with each summer. (The Baptist girl from Texas just recently got engaged, interestingly enough, and hopefully I’ll be going to her wedding sometime this year). A couple of Alexandria regulars, Lynn Gazis-Sax and Turmarion in particular, were quite nice with offering helpful advice. I think the real cause of my failures was deeper, having to do with my untreated social anxiety problems, and now that I know my issues I should be better able to deal with them in future. But I think that your advice was all very helpful, and I do appreciate it.
Last summer was no exception, and I had my heart broken yet again. In this case it was a girl I’d actually met the summer before, “Katherine”. After my abortive events to hook her up with a friend of mine that she liked (who turned out to be gay, which was quite a surprise to me given that he was one of the most hardcore Roman Catholics I know), I started getting interested in her myself, and thought she might be equally interested in me (especially given that she called me on St. Patrick’s day, invited me over to a party, and told me I had a ‘beautiful f*cking face.’) We didn’t actually see each other again till the summer, though we made a few abortive attempts to hang out, but during the month of May we hung out a few times every week. I took her out to dinner & drinks a few times, we went canoeing, hung out drinking in her room and mine several evenings, did laundry together, and generally spent a lot of time hanging out and talking. I was too anxious and worried about harming the friendship to try actually hooking up with her, though, so nothing physical really happened. Eventually things didn’t work out: she said I was too ‘clingy’, and that was the end of that. I think now that my clingyness was one of the effects of social anxiety- it’s often a result of the extreme insecurity and nervousness around other people, especially ones you like, that accompanies social anxiety. Understanding my problems and their causes is the key to avoiding them in future, and now that I know my own faults and flaws a little better, I think this is a mistake I won’t make again- and in retrospect, it’s good that she called me out for it. We are still friends, and I was reminded of this whole summer drama today when I saw on Facebook that she’d just started a relationship with someone. I hope she’s happy, and I hope it goes well.
The drama of last summer was different though, because of what it taught me about myself, and about what I’m looking for in a partner. I learned, first of all, that I need to work on my anxiety issues; Katherine had commented a few times that I was a nervous, twitchy person, and I think that contributed to the ‘clingyness’ that eventually turned her off. She was right to criticize me for it, and I’m working on fixing it, maybe through medication and maybe through therapy. I think I learned, too, though, about the kind of thing that makes me happy. One of the things that I really enjoyed about hanging around with K, was the fact that I felt like I was a kind of source of stability and comfort in her life. Not that I’m a particularly happy or self-confident person myself, but I was a lot older than her (I was 31, she was 20) and had more life experience (not really relationship experience though, I have very little of that). She had had some terrible relationship experiences in the past, and had low self esteem about a number of other things, and I loved the experience of making her feel better about herself, and realizing that she was a really cool, beautiful, smart, and awesome person. One of the things I’m really looking for in a relationship, I think, is the sense that I’m genuinely *needed*, that my presence is making someone much more tangibly happy than they would be without me, and that I’m bringing something into their life -whether it be self-esteem, emotional comfort, financial or social status, good advice, or just care and sympathy- that makes it better. Because I like the sense that I’m making someone happy. One of my other female friends put it to me this way, later in the summer, when I was pouring out my heart to her at the bar. “Hector, the type of person you are is a Fixer, and you’ll eventually be happy when you find someone who wants to be fixed.” Clearly, Katherine and I weren’t right for each other, but I think I did learn something about what I would value in a relationship.
I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, in some ways I suppose it’s a bad thing. But it is what is, and it’s what I think will make me happy. I think there is lots of room in the world for different kinds of relationships, and I think there should be, as long as both parties are entering into them with their eyes open. The kind of situation I would be happiest in, I think, is one in which I’m a source of strength, stability, and protection for my partner, in which I take a large role in providing and taking care of her, and in which I get happiness more from what I can give to her than from what she can give to me. I think I’d be happiest in a situation where we both complete and depend on the other, and in which we bring different things and fill different roles in the relationship. I think this is what the notorious Hugo Schwyzer and his feminist allies derisively refer to as the ‘complementarian’ model of gender relations, and which they compare unfavourably to the ‘egalitarian’ model, which idealizes a sort of genderless pairing of independent, self-contained individuals, each of which could be just as happy without the other, and who apparently come together to have sexual encounters and occasionally share a dinner. By contrast I increasingly believe that the complementarian model is the best ideal, at least for me. I believe this on the basis of what we know about evolution, behavioural ecology, and the natural physical and psychological differences between the sexes, and I also believe it on the basis of Christian tradition, which calls on men to “love their wives, as Christ loved the church, and gave himself up for her.” I don’t believe in the stuff that some people who call themselves complementarians seem to believe in, like wives having to submit to their partners, and such; that’s silly and dangerous stuff. While some people are scertainly happy submitting to the leadership of their partners, I don’t think that it necessarily has to be one gender or the other who does that, and I don’t think that’s necessary to the complementarian ideal. Chaucer, in his “Franklin’s Tale”, idealizes a very different sort of relationship, in which the knight accedes to every demand that his wife makes, because he trusts in her that the decisions she makes will ultimately be for the best. The model of courtly love that Chaucer gives us is not the one that some evangelical churches would subscribe to, but it’s no less complementarian (and, arguably, no less compatible with the spirit of St. Paul’s letters) for all that. It’s certainly not a genderless marriage of the kind that you see touted in some feminist blogs, and which seems like it would be better suited for some ethereal species that reproduces by cloning, than for embodied human beings who have real and essential gender differences. I’m a complementarian (of sorts), in other words, and I’m not hesitant to deny it.
“… girls at the field station who I fell in love with each summer. (The Baptist girl from Texas just recently got engaged, interestingly enough, and hopefully I’ll be going to her wedding sometime this year).”
Hector, by any chance do you play Cricket? You do? Excellent. Take your cricket bat and hit yourself on the skull until it breaks. Either one. You will have much more fun than attending the wedding.
“I took her out to dinner & drinks a few times, we went canoeing, hung out drinking in her room and mine several evenings, did laundry together, and generally spent a lot of time hanging out and talking.”
And you didn’t go all Kama Sutra on her? Did she have to draw you a goddam picture? Gimme that cricket bat. I’ll beat your skull in myself. Hector, your tales of woe are like watching a bad episode of “Big Bang Theory” Go to my Facebook page and look at my picture. If I can find someone, what is your major malfunction?
All snark aside. If this is so important to you, I STRONGLY suggest you seek professional assistance.
Following Kim’s example of “we snark on you because we care about you and want you to be happy” I’m going to put this out there:
For someone with a PhD in the Biological Sciences, you have demonstrated an astoundingly poor grasp of the practical fundamentals of primate mating rituals.
May I share with you my Dear Wife’s recollection of the moment she knew she was going to marry me? It was on our second date when I took her in my arms and slapped her on the butt.
Now, gosh darn it, that might not be your style, but I know you must have studied Primate Evolutionary Biology at some point and you as a scientifically minded fellow are aware that a primate female is descended from a long line of other primate females who were wired to look for certain sorts of behavior in a potential mate.
You dance around that subject with the following:
And that’s a good place to start – but you are not going to engage her mammalian brain by simply hanging out, talking, and doing laundry with her because those are the sorts of social behaviors which female primates engage in amongst themselves.
I also encourage you to seek professional advice on this.
The kind of situation I would be happiest in, I think, is one in which I’m a source of strength, stability, and protection for my partner, in which I take a large role in providing and taking care of her…
Let us see if we can expose additional perspective by tacking in a slightly different direction, that is, backwards from the provisional conclusions.
What would be the case should Hector succeed in achieving the happiness he has so far identified as his goal, above, by bonding to himself a woman, ideally to him much junior than himself, in which the dynamics between them are that he is “a source of strength, stability, and protection for my partner, in which I take a large role in providing and taking care of her…”
- the more junior the woman, the less threatening she will ostensibly be to Hector as a human peer, particularly as a sexual human peer
- she will provide him with, with or without any other mutual or sexual human intercourse, herself as objective evidence that Hector is “a source of strength, stability, and protection” capable of “providing and taking care of”
As structured, the current enterprise would appear to be cast to produce a result in which Hector stars as a successful pseudo-father-hero, not peer or lover, to the female object in question, in so doing successfully demonstrating that many of the anxieties Hector has claimed to have about himself are obviously unfounded: clearly one who successfully proves to be “a source of strength, stability, and protection for my partner, in which [he takes] a large role in providing and taking care of her…” can no longer be the current, anxiety-ridden predecessor.
If this is so, it is perhaps the entire enterprise as currently structured – much younger woman as object of successful hero – which should be perused by the recommended professional advice, particularly should it appear to be a hermeneutic construction of the anxieties already to be addressed themselves.
If this is so, in the meantime, those women not desiring to be such corresponding pseudo-daughter-objects will, by definition, continue to prove to be heart-breakers, a consequence which can hardly ameliorate the anxieties already to be addressed.
Most simply put: why is the object of love already pre-defined rather than something yet to be serendipitously discovered? Because the perceptual pursuit of love has yet to penetrate beyond an internally mirrored sphere of subjectivity to a truly external human object?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I agree that this would be a useful avenue of exploration in a professional setting.
And I’ll grasp the low hanging nettle, to mix some metaphors, and raise the question of whether Hector just might possibly be taking the New Testament example of Joseph as his model of husbandly behavior.
I believe that Hector has written of the Traditional teachings that Joseph’s betrothal to Mary was said not to be based on the sort of desire that is commonly found between a man and a woman, but more of a protector and guardian along the lines described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_of_the_Virgin
If such is the case, it would be much better to address such attitudes in a professional counseling relationship as a theoretical construct with an objective professional rather than in a marriage with a woman who might not want to take on Mary’s role.
H. M. Stuart,
I think you may be onto something with your amateur psychoanalysis. But, you know, we are what we are, and our dreams and desires are what they are.
Re: If this is so, in the meantime, those women not desiring to be such corresponding pseudo-daughter-objects will, by definition, continue to prove to be heart-breakers, a consequence which can hardly ameliorate the anxieties already to be addressed
Well, yes. But I think there are enough women out there who *are* interested in traditional complementarian gender relationships, that I don’t think it’s a hopeless quest for me to find someone who wants the same things that I want.
My good Hector,
My amateur psychoanalysis was not concerned so much with your ultimate dreams and desires as it was with the problematically futile manner in which you might be pursuing them, which is to say that it can be all too easy to miss that woman who actually does want the same traditional complementarian gender relationship one does if one is in fact passively trapped within one’s own subjective self-reflections. Merely finding someone to fulfill a predetermined role, at least for a time, even for a lifetime, is not all that difficult; in extremis, cash can be an excellent facilitator. Finding true lifetime love, however, requires that rarest clarity of vision of truly seeing the subject of love most of all as a fully objectless subject in her own right and least of all as an object of perception, desire, need fulfillment or otherwise. Most simply and ironically put, you are least apt to find what you are seeking as you yourself have defined it by seeking it and most apt to find it by doing anything but.
All that said, the best of luck to you in your quest.
Let me also point out to any and all the sort of balls it takes for a man to make the sort of self-expository posts our good Hector has offered in these series, an objective factor that itself would argue against the sorts of self-perceptions driving any anxieties mentioned.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
My good H. M. Stuart,
Thanks for your suggestions and concern!
I actually went to a “Speed Dating” event on Saturday, which was rather amusing. You don’t find out who expressed interest in you for another week or so, so we’ll see what happens.
True and well said.
Dunno, there were times when I would have flung my maidenly virtue at the feet of any man who did laundry!
Joel, it turns out, brought more laundry expertise into our marriage than I did (and also more cooking expertise).
Kim and John give solid advice (minus the head busting). If you want to be a “source of strength, stability, and protection”, you need to deal with your anxiety problems. Anxiety is based on fear, which opposes strength, stability and protection.
You mentioned your female friend at the bar. Just remember, such friends, while valuable, are often kinder, gentler and less truthful than what you need. I think you over analyze the situations, too. Follow the old Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”
Kim and John give solid advice
Who are you and what did you do to DADvocate?
I tend to give people better relationship advice than I give myself. I have nothing against you and John. Both of you make good, insightful points quite often, I just get pissed when you get too snarky. Peace, brother.
Thanks DADvocate – brofist at ya
Also: the problem with complmentarianism (never saw it called that before) is that it may not last. People often get divorced for the same reasons they got married in the first place. But what starts out as a charming ditziness may age into utter stupdity, and what begins as a certain caveman allure may mature into abuse.
“(never saw it called that before)”
The term is common within certain segments of Christianity (and pretty much unknown in my own segment, liberal Quakerism).