New Project: Chapter 18
Anne Marie Slaughter wrote, “Work and family will be framed as a women’s issue, never as a mainstream issue.” She goes on to say that critical issues about work culture, gender bias, and family policy are defined through the lens of the harried, working mother. She suggests that a better lens would be of the harried caregiver, and best of all would be, “Recognizing the failure of modern American companies to adapt to the realities of modern American life.”
But it is not just companies that have failed to adapt. We have failed to adapt. We continue to act according to a script written generations ago about what love means and how it should be shown. As a result, toxic love is everywhere from intimate, sexual relations to parenting to job performance expectations. Rewriting the narrative takes exceptional courage and a great deal of compassion for ourselves and the people we love. Once the first steps have been taken and someone has been generous enough to say, “Stop, enough!” they have laid the foundation for trust. Until that happens, trust is often confused with loyalty and that creates problems of significant scope.
Companies, kings, and countries demand loyalty and a swearing of oaths. Lovers don’t. This goes against the grain, I know, but swearing fealty is one way we are manipulated to behave according to the norm. Loyalty is demanded, trust is given. Sometimes they go hand in hand, but loyalty without trust is merely obedience and that is a key ingredient in the recipe for toxic love.
Oaths and contracts do not build trust, guarantee a desired outcome or prevent people from being irresponsible, careless, or cruel. They merely ensure the possibility of financial recompense should an agreement dissolve. One can sign a contract with an employer and commit to a particular job, but the contract doesn’t prevent that person from quitting if the boss is a sexist slob. A vow cannot stop the apathy that tears a marriage apart. An oath doesn’t mean a soldier will follow an order when the shit storm is happening and everything’s gone wrong.
When Steve offered me liberty all those years ago, he understood something I had failed to grasp. Safety is something we pursue to evade a frightening reality: Security is an illusion, control a fabrication, and love, like fire, is something we can nourish, appreciate, and never hold. We can stoke it, keep the embers warm, but if we stop paying attention it will go cold.
Steve and I wrote our marriage vows. One of things we promised was to kiss constantly. This seemed simple and natural to us. We’re passionate, deeply in love, and love to touch, but when stress overtook us, Steve didn’t want to kiss as much. Then I accused him of breaking his promise. The broken promise threatened my trust because that’s what a contract does. Our marriage became about the vows, not the daily interaction of people in love.
Because my focus was on the promise, I believed the creep of marriage had worn thin his desire for me, that he was falling out of love, and that I would soon be abandoned. The story I told myself was the story of movies, books, and songs. I was tradable, not enough to keep my man involved. I got so caught up in this narrative, and was so convinced of its truth, that I forgot to ask Steve what he felt.
To credit Brené Brown, the stories we tell ourselves are often wrong. They are the walls we lean on when we feel our world falling apart, but they are seldom what’s going on. Until we dig for truth, empathy is impossible. Without empathy, trust is impossible. In the absence of trust, most contracts dissolve.
He loves me. He’s trying. Maybe you’re the one who’s wrong.
Steve breaks promises. He doesn’t do it on purpose. He just gets distracted, busy, consumed with life. I used to think that meant he didn’t care and that belief ate me alive. Every broken promise was a fist in my heart. Trust was elusive as smoke.
At first, I excused him and took on the traditional role. I picked up his slack at work, around the house, and in our romance, but eventually that made the hurt worse. I came to resent him, came to believe that nothing I did would ever be enough.
Then I fought him. Tears and fury and words I regret. Hours of turmoil, heartache and exhaustion. The slamming of doors, the hurling of want, the knot in my stomach as big as the earth. An onslaught.
We wore each other out, reached across the table and tenuously clasped hands. I crawled into his lap, cried in his arms, apologized, forgave, and moved on until it happened again.
What I failed to see, what almost cost me the love of my life, was how I held him to a false standard and wasn’t honest with myself. I bought the bullshit. I swallowed it whole. I consumed what society fed me without examining it at all.
The promise was supposed to be mine. It was all I had. My whole value was determined by it. Those vows, the vows we wrote together over drinks in a bar, the vows we meant from the bottom of our hearts were my due, my reward for being a woman. When he broke them he shattered the illusion. Cinderella returned in tatters from the ball.
Eventually, sitting by a fire on a late May night, I learned that contract and vows are not marriage. They are entities unto themselves, separate things that often push people apart because they are static and we are not. Love is fluid. Like us, it evolves. It must be tended, and protected from elements until it is raging. Then it must be fed to stay strong. It will flicker and threaten to go out in a storm, but underneath the ashes it is warm.
