Today I turn the pencil over to J. Fisher, who had a shattering revelation about what he was doing in his marriage that sabotaged his very happiness. You can see by how he breaks down in tears towards the end and begs other men to pay attention to him just how painful it is to finally come to terms with your bad behavior after years of damage have already been done.
You want to know what’s causing a whole heap of sexless marriages? This:
Here's a huge lie of the patriarchy that I fell for for a long time. It's the idea that men just inherently need respect, and so therefore, if your partner, your wife, anybody, brings a message to you and it's not delivered with respect and decorum and politeness, that therefore the message can be disregarded.
What a joke. You probably heard the quote from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” I wonder why that is. Right? It's because men will not hear anything that has delivered with politeness in a culture that reinforces constantly the power dynamic that we are in charge, right?
So everything else that's delivered with decorum is able to be easily dismissed, right? Because now we're just chatting, we're just having a night, we're just having a friendly debate, and whatever your idea is, is not my idea. We can agree to disagree, and because I am the one in power, I get to do what I want to do.
If you come at me with any level of intensity or passion, then, oh my gosh, you're just an emotional creature and need to be under control and put in check.
How sad.
In fact, we did put women literally in mental institutions for decades because they were speaking up and we called them insane. There's insanity here, but it was never the women. Never, never.
This played out so, so sadly in my own like life because I have an incredible partner who was a badass and so talented, but I couldn't see her because she had been told that she couldn't speak up for her needs necessarily. She also assumed rightly that somebody who really loves her would be leaning in with curiosity and would want to know what she was thinking.
So when she would bring up an idea that was uncomfortable to my own FRAGILITY, I would debate it. If she did get passionate, I would say, “you need to calm down. We're just talking here.”
No surprise, Eventually she stopped telling me the things that were important to her. When I finally discovered that years… [breaks down with emotion] when I discovered that years later…
There's some things you can't undo.
I don't know. I don't know if we'll be able to repair our communications. I think we're on the path to do that. I don't know if we'll be able to repair our intimacy. That may be irreparable. So I just hope that somebody else can hear that somebody else can see this and do better.
You can catch the original here:
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