I'm in this Facebook group for academic moms and it is a wild place. I mean, those women are intense. I started to call them "those ladies" but they would not like that one bit.
There is a lot of talk in the group about marriage struggles, and there are a lot of women who are divorced or divorcing. The good news, I guess, is that there's support available for women who are thinking about ending a marriage. Sometimes, though, it feels like people are jumping the gun.
Just yesterday a woman posted anonymously about some friction with her husband. New baby, plummeting libido for mom, ongoing frustration for dad. Normal normal normal, yeah? Except! You wouldn't believe the responses! Get thee to marriage counseling, they said. Your husband needs individual counseling, they said. I'd throw him out, they said.
Dang, I said.
Back when Alex was a little tiny thing, I read Harriet Lerner's Dance of Anger and it blew my mind. I realized that I was overfunctioning in some important areas, and inadvertently fueling conflict. I realized that we had a pursuer-distancer dynamic going, and I was responding in an extremely unhelpful way. Lerner writes a lot, across all of the books I've read, about how easy it can be to propagate an unhealthy pattern. You get entrenched in your identity as The Responsible One and you never notice that you're cementing your spouse's role as The Irresponsible One. You get stuck on how he never responds to your bids for intimacy, and you don't notice how you're pushing past his requests for space.
Lerner is a secular Jew who taught me a ton about Catholic marriage.
The dad in question was initiating some physical contact that the mom didn't want, and that's what caused the freakouts. Your body belongs to YOU, they said. Which is true, absolutely, but also that's not the only thing going on here. I felt a little pang of sympathy for that dad, who was asking with his words, and asking with his touch, and hearing no again and again. I would bet you a bunch of money that they're in pursuer-distancer mode. It's a painful place to be; it's also temporary, if you're willing to work at it. So if you happen to know anyone in that situation, I recommend Harriet Lerner. You can buy a used copy of Marriage Rules for a dollar. That's a whole lot cheaper than a divorce attorney.
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