Episode #35: Partnership Building: How Rigid Gender Norms Negatively Impacts Appreciation
We are continuing our series on Partnership building by comparing the messaging from a classic relationship book in Evangelical/Mormon/Pentecostal (EMPish) circles, Love and Respect, by Emerson Eggerichs, alongside the work of couples researchers John and Julie Gottman, and their principle of nurturing fondness and admiration.
As we talked about last week, practicing this principle can be challenging when you've grown up learning that admiration and fondness exist along problematic gendered norms of the Love and Respect model.
Julia explains, “Admiration roughly translates to respect, which women show through deference to male authority and obligatory sex based on socially conditioned standards for male pleasure, love roughly translates to affection and emotional intimacy. Which is good, but in manifestation, often coddles women dismissing their intelligence and erasing their sexuality. All under the guise of love.”
We also talk about
Earning Respect (12:50): Jeremiah reads: “When he fails to be the man she wants, she can give her husband unconditional respect and tone and expression while confronting his unloving behavior and without endorsing his unloving reactions, he may deserve contempt. But that doesn't win him any more than harshness and anger wins the heart of a woman.”
Jeremiah responds to this, “Respect is earned by making agreements between two people and keeping them. And when you don't keep those agreements, making sure that you hold yourself accountable and talk about the things that prevented you from keeping those agreements and talking about how you wanted to do better next time.”
Eggerichs argues that respect should be unconditionally given by women to their husbands, while Jeremiah makes the distinction that not only respects very much conditional but it is achieved through sticking to your agreements and holding yourself accountable when you fail to. The idea that men deserve unconditional respect plays into the patriarchy, that no matter what a man does, he is to be respected regardless of the consequences of his actions.
God Made You This Way (18:00 / 26:00): Jeremiah reads: “Then I realized that in stressing unconditional love, I was teaching the truth, but only half the truth. Paul's advice in Ephesians five is sound. Husbands love your wives. […] What was missing was a very short phrase in verse 33. The wife must respect her husband”
Jeremiah reacts, “The intense amounts of systems that reinforce these rigid gender stereotypes in education systems, in church systems, in the media, that is ultimately why women gather the narratives around relational success that they do. And this is why men also gather relational success narratives that they do because they're taught them by all these different sources. It's not God.”
Julia adds: “I hear so often from my clients, the distress that occurs when they don't meet those gendered norms and when those norms do not apply to them.” Eggerichs’ message is incredibly distressing because people will be upset that they do not meet these rigid binaries that were never meant to fit into.
Gendered Lines (28:40): Jeremiah observes, “There's actually some good advice here that gets completely missed because of the gender binary. So he says the end of the paragraph, if the pattern is like most, she will spend her energy seeking to help change him by her loving criticism and complaints, which will eventually will feel like contempt to him. Because loving criticism is not a thing. Criticism is criticism and the impact of something has way more value in talking about relationship interaction patterns than the intent does. And that's true regardless of gender.”
Julia adds, “If I am to give him the benefit of the doubt, I would say that he is trying to help couples celebrate their differences, which is a huge theme in relational health. However, this is totally lost within the patriarchal, sometimes abusive standards that he is enforcing. Rather than saying, we all deserve love. We all deserve respect, and those don't exist along gendered lines. You need to be curious about your partner, about how they give and receive needs within the relationship.”
Surviving a Gendered World (35:24): Julia describes, “I'm thinking about many of my clients if they receive acceptance and appreciation based on doing and performing things that are going to garner respect, then it makes sense that they would do that. For my many male clients who actually far more deeply crave the emotional intimacy that Dr. Eggerichs claims is more wired in women, they then have to make the choice to potentially receive less acceptance to potentially receive rejection if they don't fit within. And when we are just trying to survive in this world, we are sometimes going to do the easier thing we are going to perform according to what is going to be to our best advantage. I have had to make that choice.”
She continues, “For example, if I'm in a setting and someone is hitting on me and I'm not interested, I have to make the choice of just like sweetly deferring that advance, knowing that ultimately I'm the only one who's going to deal with the consequences of being sexually paid attention to for an hour when I don't want that, versus I could be assertive.” This example perfectly encapsulates the double bind: either be sweet and nice to avoid the unwanted sexual advance, but conform to the idea that women are always supposed to be nice, or be assertive and possibly get into dangerous situations. A lot of times our conforming to gender norms ensures our survival, which is most important, however unfair and painful to experience.
Power Dynamics (53:00): Jeremiah says, “Ultimately when he's talking about respect, he's talking about power. And every relationship, whether you like it or not, has some sort of a power dynamic. Now, one of the things that we talked about last time and also setting up this book is that when the church refuses to talk about healthy communication and negotiation strategies around consent around, as we talked about in a previous series, how to talk about how to talk about shared values, how to talk about honesty when the church refuses to provide that information, you are only left to rely on performing gender roles.”
For those of you who have read Love and Respect, what are some parts of the book that stood out to you? What are you trying to unlearn.
For those of you who haven’t read Love and Respect, we highly encourage you not to.
Let’s heal together!